At least three corporate parties a year, our crazy chats, team building meetings… Make yourself comfortable and get ready to listen to some scientific facts. After all, we love science, read a lot, and we do criticize a lot. Therefore, non-work communication in the company, which has grown by almost 100 people in two years, is a different type of entertainment.
Let’s begin with a sad truth about corporate culture.
Traditional top leadership is afraid of employee communication.
We have four simple reasons and two simple effects for it.
Objective reasons.
- People engaged in big projects with high responsibility are afraid of their emotions since they mistakenly consider them as something weak.
- Around 20% of specialists do not care about informal chats. They have other areas of attention (personal, creative).
Subjective reasons.
- Authoritarian leadership. This is a typical problem even for prominent democratic “ethical environment preachers.” How many stories do we hear about tracking work chats, the total loneliness of teams, or encouraging snitching on each other?
- Some psychologists believe that transparency also creates a harsh environment in work communication. In some way, they are right because employees no longer respect boundaries.
And here are two effects.
First, the company stops caring about the employees’ needs, starting degrading, since professionals aren’t interested in their emotional needs; they dissociate and turn inward.
All of this leads to a loss of rational profit.
How to motivate people to communicate without invading their boundaries and disturbing their comfort? It turns out that the problem is challenging.
Neuroscientists have already examined our brains and found an issue.One cunning and ambitious brain’s area provokes a person to communicate. To… find out the other person’s weaknesses and program a prosperous future for the «brain owner».
But there is another brain area that is strongly against such aggressiveness.
Ratio/emotion. Ego and ethics. Ugh! It took us 1.5 years for such intraspecies communications to become organic.
So how could we do this, overtaking hundreds of exhausted HR departments in this mission?
BRAZY ensures complete transparency in professional processes. First, we are trying to eliminate the WORKING disconnect.
You need to just (it’s not easy at all!) teach people how to communicate at work. Ask questions, no matter how uncomfortable they are, and get high-quality answers, even if the other person isn’t open to communicating.
The ability to teach employees how to make friends with their colleagues is the most underestimated process in HR. And this is our main life hack, or BRAZY hard skill if you like.
By the way, we have already started to investigate how productive informal communication in % positively affects the productivity of working communication.
