In a Harvard Business Review article originally published in 1999 and republished in 2010, Edward M. Hallowell wrote about what he termed the "human moment." In 1999 Hallowell was concerned about the problems he was seeing and hearing about from business executives he was counseling in his psychiatric practice. If he was concerned with the impact of the technologies of a decade ago - stop for a moment and consider how much greater the impact of current technologies are on this issue today!
Rather than hold face-to-face meetings with teams, suppliers or clients, it's much more cost effective today to conduct a web-based meeting. Instead of holding monthly staff meetings in the conference room, it has become quicker, easier, and less costly to communicate through conference calls. Training workshops which offered opportunities for colleagues to network and get to know each other while they learned new skills together have been replaced by cost effective and time saving webinars. And the need for office space to centrally locate employees and work teams has given way to new work designs like teleworking and flex offices. There's no doubt about it, technology advancements are providing great opportunities for faster, cheaper work alternatives, but what's the cost of the significant lack of human connections?
The Human Moment
Dr. Hallowell defined the human moment as an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space. The prerequisites for the human moment to occur include people's physical presence, as well as their emotional and intellectual attention to the moment. Yes, the opportunity to create human moments does require energy and an investment in time and travel. However, what we're learning about the brain continues to support the idea that a deficiency of human contact leads to workers feeling lonely, isolated and confused about work assignments, direction and mission.
Emails, text messaging, instant messages, and voice messages are all opportunities for us to communicate with each other. However these communication channels don't provide for the key essential of communications - body language. We've always heard that we hear more though our eyes than through our ears and that is demonstrated time and again as we rely less on face-to-face engagements and more on the convenience of technologies.
What Hallowell's research found was that the lack of human moments results in worry. He wrote about "good worry" that leads to constructive planning and creativity and "toxic worry," which is anxiety. Hallowell found that anxiety immobilizes workers and leads to indecision or destructive actions. He concluded that toxic worry is among the most debilitating consequences of vanishing human moments, and the source of the misunderstandings that result from misconstruing communications.
So What's Next?
Thinking about this dilemma, which I'm assuming will only get more intense if we don't start paying more attention to it, my memory replayed a TV commercial from many years ago. The scene is a corporate conference room. The meeting participants are concerned and worried about why the meeting has been called, especially in light of the downturn in their business. The camera focuses on the boss, who is standing at the head of the table. The boss begins to speak and announces that the decision has been made to get back to valuing their customers. He holds up a hand full of airline tickets and announces they're returning to their roots to improve business: face-to-face customer meetings. He was selling more than United Airlines services - he was selling the power of human connections. Today, not only do we need to be careful not to be too virtual with our customers, we also have to be attentive to adequately connecting our employees.
Many organizations that promote teleworking also require their employees to come into the office on a frequent basis to attend staff and/or team meetings so teambuilding and relationships can be forged. These organizations know that workers are more productive and efficient when employees know each other personally and can tap into that relationship, trust and familiarity to avoid misunderstandings.
With the increasing advancement of technologies encouraging less need for working face-to-face, organizations need to be mindful to craft opportunities for personal interactions into their processes. Perhaps the idea of "open" meetings with pizza and snacks once a month to discuss business and project issues that members are interested in could spark connections. Or promote lunch and learns to share skill building or project updates to offer another forum for individuals working together to meet each other face-to-face. Ideas for gathering employees together for the specific purpose of getting to know each other and building relationships they can tap into in the future are more important now than ever. We need to encourage and plan for events focused on human interactions
The Human Resource and academic professions are hearing loud and clear from businesses complaining that entry level candidates are coming into the workplace without strong interpersonal and communication skills. The cause of this may be their personal interaction with technologies, as well as habits learned while at school. I fear this lack of abilities to interact with others will only complicate the struggle organizations are already confronting resulting from the lack of human moments available in each work day. As leaders within our organizations, we have a responsibility to improve productivity and profitability. Could improving opportunities for building human moments at work be a key to meeting those business goals?
What do you think - is the human moment important? If yes, what are some of the techniques your organization supports for making personal interactions happen?
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