The world of work looks a lot different these days. These experts and thought leaders are here to help you navigate the change, offering insights and tips for how you can better connect with colleagues and motivate teams.
These days, many of us are working from a mix of in-office and home environments. Digital interactions are now commonplace, with workers occasionally meeting in person under certain circumstances.
While this new, hybrid approach enables greater flexibility and autonomy for workers, there’s not exactly a rulebook for how to manage a team in this new environment, leaving leaders with more questions than answers:
While there may not be just one right answer to these questions, there is a guiding principle: understand what makes your employees tick. At least, that’s what the experts say.
In this guide, we’ve gathered essential tips and insights from thought leaders, who all employ different methodologies around business culture, management, and communication in the workplace. By understanding who we are as humans and how to tap into our inner workings, these experts say, we can help enable effective collaboration, create positive habits, foster trust, and more. Here are their pointers:
Create team cohesion
Jay Van Bavel is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University.
Broader connection isn’t as easily nurtured in this new hybrid environment, tasking leaders with finding new ways to bind us all together and build trust.
According to Jay Van Bavel, there’s a new mandate for leaders of a flexible workforce: create a sense of “us.” If we want to future-proof flexible work, we need to help workers transcend the individual identity that comes with working from home and plug into a group identity. This fosters collaboration and innovation.
Great organizations have healthy norms, so you need to think carefully about what these norms are, communicate them, and reward them.
Tessa West is an associate professor of psychology at New York University.
According to Tessa West, there are several ways to use video meetings to help everyone gain the contextual information that accompanies physical interaction, bridging the gap between at-home workers and in-office workers.
You have to create structures for remote workers to have those informal interactions and not just assume they’re going to reach out to people. There are just no water cooler conversations going on for people who work remotely.
Charlene Li is an expert on digital transformation, leadership, and customer experience. Li was named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company, and she is the author of six books, including her New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership.
These days, disruption is the norm. Learning how to survive — and even thrive — in the face of disruption is essential. To support both employees and customers during this time, Charlene Li claims today’s leaders must shift their organization’s culture to embrace disruption.
The key thing here for you to realize is that to be a leader, you have to be creating change. Because if you’re not creating change, then you’re not a leader, you’re a manager — you’re managing to the status quo.
Gretchen Rubin is an award-winning podcast host and New York Times bestselling author.
Your employees aren’t in one place anymore, which means it’s more important than ever to understand what motivates them. According to Gretchen Rubin, you can better understand yourself and others around you with a personality framework known as the “Four Tendencies.” Rubin’s framework is based on one question: how do you respond to expectations? How you react reflects one of four tendencies:
Just because a tool worked really well for your [co-worker] doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for you, and vice versa. We just have to understand those differences and respect them.
David Horsager is the CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute, a business strategist, keynote speaker, and author.
According to David Horsager, trust is the linchpin for a successful business strategy — leaders need to foster it before they can expect workers to embrace new processes and changes. In fact, research from The 2021 Trust Outlook reveals that the No. 1 reason people want to work somewhere is because they trust leadership. So how do you actually become trustworthy?
You think you have an innovation issue? The only way to increase innovation on a team is to increase trust so people will share ideas and get more creative.
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler is an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
According to Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, the secret to success isn’t talent or skill — it’s grit. Eskreis-Winkler has studied grit over the years, determining its connection to success and what people can do to cultivate it. She outlined three key ways you can become — or help others become — a grittier person:
People think success looks like a straight arrow, and I think this is because often people who succeed overshare their successes. Success really looks like a squiggly line, no one really knows where they’re going and it’s rife with failure.
Lindsay McGregor is the co-founder of Vega Factor and co-author of the bestselling book, Primed to Perform.
Motivation is a tricky topic, one that has leaders scratching their heads on how to master. According to Lindsay McGregor, motivation can be boiled down to a framework that leaders can apply to effectively inspire employees’ best work. Called “The Motive Spectrum,” this framework can be organized into two categories of motives: direct and indirect.
Certain parts of this motive spectrum can result in either one of the two performance types that McGregor identified: tactical and adaptive.
You can get tactical performance through both indirect and direct motives, but you only get adaptive performance from direct motives.
Take a moment to think about what’s the ‘play’ or ‘purpose’ reason for doing something. ‘Play,’ meaning what’s going to be interesting to learn in the process of doing this, and ‘purpose,’ meaning what’s the impact of doing this. Once that becomes second nature, it becomes hugely transformative.
Mark Bowden is a world-renowned body language expert, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. He is the founder and president of TRUTHPLANE.
Work happens everywhere: home, the office, airports, coffee shops — you name it. To stay connected with colleagues and customers, regardless of location, you need to master the art of hybrid collaboration. Mark Bowden provided 12 tips and tricks on how you can make the most of your hybrid meetings:
Don’t fear the silence [in a meeting]. It takes time for people to compute and come back with an answer. By taking the time to let your audience respond, you can find out what’s really going on with people across the planet in real-time — it’s a modern miracle.
Dan Roam is the author of five international bestselling books on business visualization and communication clarity.
According to Dan Roam, using visuals to tell stories is one of the most powerful ways to get a message across. By infusing your presentations with drawings and images, you can clarify what’s in your own mind and confirm if someone sees it the same way, fostering mutual understanding and better connections.
Think of your presentation as a story you’re trying to tell — one that visuals bring to life. As Roam displayed via a mechanism he calls the “visual decoder,” simpler is usually better. A visual decoder is a four-part structure for presenting visual information that’s designed to easily display a story. These are the four components:
The simple power of drawing helps us all become our most dynamic thinkers and presenters, especially as we continue to live in this world where so many of our presentations and meetings take place remotely.
Jeremy Utley is the director of executive education at Stanford University’s d.school.
Our brains don’t create new material from scratch. An idea comes from stitching together pieces of existing knowledge in an unexpected way, from building new bonds.
One of the key tasks of an innovator is being deliberate about seeking unexpected inputs.
Jonathan Fader is a former director of mental conditioning for the New York Football Giants and the New York Mets.
According to Jonathan Fader, routines are our own personal masterpieces — we just need the right tools in place to create them.
A positive habit needs structure in order to become sustainable, which is why Fader developed an approach organized by “what,” “why,” and “how,” which leaders can apply when they want to encourage the development of positive behaviors.
For me, leading a team means creating more psychological safety — how do we create experiences where people can really be themselves?
Lewis Howes is a lifestyle entrepreneur, high-performance business coach, author, and former athlete.
Good habits lead to growth, while bad ones result in frustration. A good habit doesn’t have to mean an entire overhaul of our existing routines, but rather small, achievable, consistent wins that help improve our perspective and change our mindset. Consistency is what matters most for positivity, and, according to Lewis Howes, leaders can focus on these five areas to drive growth — both within their team and themselves:
If you’re not 100% clear on ‘this is my purpose for my life,’ find a way to be useful. How can I show up to be of service to a mission, a purpose, a company, a team, a partner, a family, whatever it might be? That is vision in itself.
Jamil Zaki is a Stanford professor and author of “The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.”
According to studies by Google, empathy fosters effective collaboration, more inclusive attitudes, and happier employees. Workers who view their organizations as empathetic often have increased morale and less stress, reducing turnover as a result.
Empathy also helps create better leaders. With an empathetic mindset informing their management style, leaders can provide constructive feedback while addressing employees’ needs in a way that helps people grow.
While a common concept, empathy still faces quite a few misunderstandings. Some feel like the skill is unattainable or difficult to hone — which has sparked a few myths around empathy.
Here are three myths Jamil Zaki debunked:
Myth #1: Empathy is a trait
Fact: Empathy is a mindset, not a personality trait. And empathy is something we can continue to hone — similar to working out and growing a muscle, you can grow your capacity for caring and understanding.
Myth #2: We can tell what our colleagues are going through
Fact: In the workplace in particular, our empathy muscles can atrophy when people rise to power. Leaders often attain the positions they have because they can understand and connect with people, yet by being in that position they can also lose a sense of empathy. To solve this paradox, leaders need to not only imagine someone else’s reality, they also need to learn about someone else’s reality.
Myth #3: Empathy is a solo sport
Fact: People tend to copy the positive behaviors of those around them. Empathy is no exception, which means it lives on through an organization’s culture rather than a single person. When empathy becomes a social norm, people are that much more motivated to be empathetic, generating noticeable, widespread kind behavior.
I hope that we can think about the future of work in a deeper way — think about centering social connection at the heart of our workplaces, even more than we have. I think that can make us more successful, but maybe even more importantly, it can help us be more human at work.
Whether they’re advising on meeting best practices or motivation, there’s a throughline from all these experts’ insights: make work more human.
This all starts with putting your employees first — let workers’ needs inform decision-making, especially when the answer doesn’t always seem clear. An employee-first approach will be the key success factor in making a working environment sustainable.
It’s also important to support this approach with solutions optimized for employee experience, like those included in the Zoom platform. At Zoom, we build experience-first solutions optimized for this new flexible future. Just take Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery for example, which is designed to create an inclusive experience that promotes equality for both in-person and remote workers through the strategic application of AI technology. Couple this with our real-time language transcription to truly bring people together, enabling employees to work globally while feeling heard, connected, included, and equal.
Meaningful work starts with thoughtful leadership — bring in the right processes and products that make you the best leader you can be.
