Carly Ackerman, the director of customer experience for VIP accounts at Eightfold.ai, a talent-intelligence platform, works closely with talent leaders across many different fields. The most common question she fields from them: “How do I break a longstanding culture of talent hoarding? That’s one of the big challenges that I’m hearing today.”

Even though employees in distributed workforces have a variety of resources at their disposal, many of them face obstacles to collaboration and talent-sharing. These obstacles–which can include caregiving responsibilities, disabilities, and other situations–risk disempowering employees by stifling chances for growth and advancement, as opportunities to take on larger projects or lead teams are largely collaborative in nature.

So how can leaders respect the privacy of their employees, while also providing resources and expertise to create equity when it comes to internal mobility, collaboration, and talent distribution? These questions were tackled in panel discussion titled “Removing Individual Obstacles to Improve the Employee Experience,” part of From Day One’s virtual conference on Strategies for Communication & Collaboration in the Hybrid Workforce.

Moderator Lydia Dishman, a senior editor at Fast Company, kicked off discussion with the question, “What really influences the quality of collaboration?” Communication emerged as a priority. “There needs to be a culture of communication–communication is the foundation of trust that we establish as peers,” said Peter Sursi, head of finance modernization for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Opening up communication can be as simple as showing up to Zoom meetings a few minutes early to ask incoming employees how they’re doing, to checking the weather in their location and following up on it. “It’s a cheap trick, but it really does work,” Sursi said.

Alicia Cafarelli, VP of client experience for Blueboard, a platform for employee rewards and recognition, stressed intentionality. “We did an assessment of all our meetings, whether they were team meetings or one-on-one meetings or leadership communicating to the company, and it allowed us to come up with a better schedule to understand the different layers of communication,” she said. “It was also to make sure of that intentionality–that we had agendas.”

Ackerman, with Eightfold.ai, provided a new definition of engagement that resonated with her. “Engagement is a measure of the energy, involvement and focus that is exhibited in work attitudes and behaviors,” she said. Ackerman recommended measurements of energy and focus among employees, as well as conducting regular pulse surveys and identifying helpful measures that can be done with minimal effort, like canceling a meeting that employees find unnecessary.

The topic of psychological safety came up too. Erica Reynolds, VP of enterprise learning and talent development for the health care center City of Hope, stressed “compassion and collaboration.” She said, “Compassion is important because it is empathy in action. Not only do I recognize what you’re going through, I’m going to take action.”

Rapti Khurana, VP and head of talent engagement and development for the National Football League, added: “It’s about giving people grace. When we give people grace, how do we give people grace? That’s a key element of physiological safety, but it is easy for leaders to forget this new language when dealing with people.”

Cafarelli said companies shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge issues outside work, including political issues. “When something happens, we will literally just acknowledge it in Slack or a company-wide meeting, and let people take care of themselves,” she said. Yet managers can go a step further. “I think for the positive, what Covid has done for us is it broke down the fourth wall. Like, you know, business and work don’t mix. But in reality, of course they do. We’re all human. I think it gave us the opportunity to acknowledge that.”

Ackerman suggested that companies help employees build agency over time to establish their own goals, which can be supported through proactive wellness check-ins at team meetings. “It’s collaborative and is shifting away from talking about a crisis you’re currently having,” she said.

The conversation turned to focus how individual and team goals can translate to larger company goals. Reynolds suggested setting metrics around engagement, collaboration, and compassion. Sursi emphasized clear communication from leadership on how the day-to-day work of employees translates to company goals. “Employees are not always in a place where they’re seeing the same things we’re seeing, so we have to make that happen for them,” he said.

Khurana echoed the sentiment. “We’ve taken enterprise-level, strategic priorities of the organization and really sat with each department head to say you have to create your own department goals, and that has to be cascaded with no exceptions,” she said.

Cafarelli pointed out that in her company’s 2022 workplace state-of-connection survey, 77% of people surveyed said they want to feel connected to their workplace through purpose. “Something we’ve done is tie back to your values as a way to do some measurements,” she said. “As long as your values are clearly defined, and people understand how they exhibit behaviors within those values, it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle with beautiful synergy.”

Emily Nonko is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to writing for From Day One, her work has been published in Next City, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and other publications.