By Dan Hammond, Chief Disruption Officer, LIW

These are challenging times for teams. Personal contact is limited, remote working is hard for some and the intensity of back-to-back Zoom meetings can take its toll. Stress-related absence is on the rise.

Having a friend at work can improve mental health and productivity and yet data from Squadify tells us that team members rate ‘strong personal connections’ as having the lowest importance of all the factors in a team.

What does this mean for leadership?

Connections require emotions so create spaces where people can show them.

Here’s an exercise called “What Three Words” to try with your team. Everyone gets three Post-It notes (real or virtual) and on each piece writes one word:

• how they’ve experienced COVID so far
• how they feel right now
• how they feel about the future

Then, talk about it.

The post Does your team undervalue connection? appeared first on LIW.