As the pandemic keeps many co-workers physically separated, one thing can help bind them together: good communication. New digital tools have come along at just the right time, but the human factor is crucial. “Build the trust before you need it,” said Robyn Henderson, the director of internal communications at General Motors, who asserts that better communication between workers and managers starts with personal rapport.

Managers can’t expect employees to approach them with problems or ask for help if workers don’t know them on some personal level, Henderson said. This is difficult in a distributed workforce, since many direct reports have never met their manager face to face.

In a recent panel discussion titled “Promoting a Better Dialogue Between Workers and Bosses,” part of From Day One's December virtual conference on the future of work, four expert panelists talked about why the issue is especially urgent at a time of employee restlessness and potential alienation.

“As everyone is deep into remote and hybrid virtual work, communication is ever-more important,” said Dave Landa, CEO of Kintone, a company that builds team communication software. “If we don't make communication happen very intentionally using the digital tools that are out there, I think we run the risk of falling into silos and feeling alone.”

Rach SebellShavit, VP of coaching impact at the virtual coaching platform AceUp, said better communication is a way to prevent the malaise of the moment: burnout. “We need to better support individuals at all levels of organizations in 2022,” she said.

Building Personal Bonds of Trust

Establishing rapport can begin with simple, non-work-related discussions. In a recent one-on-one meeting at GM, Henderson said, she chatted about family holiday traditions with a colleague who comes from a different background than her own. “It just gives that opportunity to get to know someone on a more personal level. So if there is a difficult conversation in the future, there's a little bit more of a relationship there.”

Continue opening the door by asking employees to give feedback at the close of a meeting, Henderson said, recommending questions like: What did you like about this meeting? What did you not like? What did you expect that you didn't see? Was there anything that caught you off guard? “Doing those things in the regular day-to-day can prove that you're ready to hear something that somebody might think,” Henderson said.

In the chain of command at a company, who needs to ask employees to give feedback? It’s fine if the request for open communication comes from the C-suite, said Cindy Alisesky, VP of HR transformation at the global health care company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), but it has to be reinforced by managers. “It has to come from the individual's direct manager or leader, hands down,” she said. “It's about opening up that dialogue, opening up that trust and allowing people to enter into the conversation. And if they're not, you have to invite them in. You need to keep inviting them in until they feel that level of comfort.”

At GSK, Alisesky reintroduced a standard ingredient of in-office workplace culture: the casual conversation at the coffee maker. Hers is an optional, virtual meeting where attendees are free to discuss anything not related to work. “What that did was just create that sense of trust, so when those individuals needed something from me, they felt comfortable coming and saying, ‘I need to take time off for this,’ or ‘I'm having difficulty with that,’ or ‘Can you help me prioritize this?’ or ‘Oh, my gosh, we have a big issue.’ You really want them to be able to come with issues. A lot of times employees are afraid to do that.”

Establishing Psychological Safety

For managers to facilitate open conversations in a responsible way, they should understand the need to lower the perception of risk about speaking up. As SebellShavit defined the concept: “Psychological safety is enabling everyone to show up and bring themselves, their best selves, to work every day, feeling confident that they're going to be respected, feeling confident that they're going to feel included, and that when they speak up, they won't be retaliated against.”

SebellShavit said managers should be coached to ask good and appropriate questions and help workers remove their own obstacles. This can be part of a corporate culture with a “growth mindset,” one that makes plenty of room for mistakes. “If everything is a zero-sum, then there isn't a lot of psychological safety around failure. How do you help people understand that failure is real and it's going to happen? How do you learn from it? How do you celebrate it?”

Sharing a common workplace language also helps, Landa said. If people have the words to express themselves about tricky situations, they’ll do so more freely. “The more you have different department leads run their own problem-solving sessions, using our standardized verbiage or standardized nomenclature, people have a common language to raise issues in a more psychologically safe way, in a more respectful way. The more you train folks early in those processes, the more comfortable they are to deploy them.”

The Benefits of a Better Dialogue 

The opportunities for improvement are extraordinary, said the panelists, providing plenty of examples of how better communication has changed their companies.

Kintone’s parent company, based in Japan, radically transformed the makeup of its board from three middle-aged founders to 17 seats filled by people age 23 to 52. Landa said that overnight, it became the company with the largest female board representation among companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

SebellShavit has seen product releases happen more smoothly and with more agility, thanks to steps toward better communication at AceUp. Similarly, at GSK, Alisesky’s team was able to quickly identify a problem, develop a list of possible solutions, and apply the best one. “Creating that environment where people feel comfortable coming and saying, ‘This isn't working, we need to change it, and by the way, we don't know what to change it to,’ is fantastic. That's what you want to hear as a leader,” Alisesky said. “You want to make sure that you can provide them with the support. They needed to come up with the right decision quickly, which they did.”

And at GM, employees are now talking about their personal experiences as part of work conversations, Henderson observed. One employee made a presentation on disability awareness, another talked about their experience with anxiety. Both were unsolicited, but welcome. “Even though we didn't plan all those things, we didn't ask for each one of them, it really did open the door to have somebody start that conversation,” Henderson said. “It's come up in other topics as well. That to me feels like a movement that got started.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.