Trust is a vital element in the virtual and hybrid workplace and has been linked to the root cause of the Great Resignation. In this episode, Geraldine Woloch-Addamine, Founder and CEO of Good4Work talks with Dr. Kathy Richie, Associate Professor in the School of Business and Economics at National University, about indicators of relationship deterioration, work-life balance, and trust building strategies to create a people-first culture.
Trust is a vital element in the virtual and hybrid workplace and has been linked to the root cause of the Great Resignation. In this episode, Geraldine Woloch-Addamine, Founder and CEO of Good4Work talks with Dr. Kathy Richie, Associate Professor in the School of Business and Economics at National University, about indicators of relationship deterioration, work-life balance, and trust building strategies to create a people-first culture.
Dr. Kathy Richie
0:01
Welcome to the Center for Advancement of virtual organizations podcast, trust in the great resignation. I'm Kathy Richie, Associate Professor of National University School of Business and Economics. And today I'm joined by Geraldine Woloch-Addamine, who is the founder and CEO of good for work. We have a lot to talk about related to the great resignation in our post pandemic workplace world. But I also want to share that Geraldine has a blog published on the cavo website for all of you to access and take a look at as well. And I enjoyed reading it myself, so that we could lead into a lot more discussion. Geraldine, it's very nice for you to be here. And I'm glad that you've come to chat with us today to talk talk about some of the best practices and leading indicators for the great resignation. Could you start and let us know what you think some of those examples of common feelings are of not being valued for contributions for example?
Geraldine Woloch-Addamine
1:17
Yes, absolutely. I'm so happy to be here with you. Catchy. Thank you. Thank you so much. So to answer your question, you know, to have a little bit of context here. So it's probably the last statistic 40% of US workers are considering quitting their jobs. On average, it means that 4 million Americans are quitting their jobs each month in 2022, which is very high. And we hit record numbers in the last month. So the official reason was commonly mentioned, in 2021, was working too many long hours.
So it was, you know, the years before, but now, there's a consensus in cooks answers in 2022, about the number one reason for quitting, which is not having flexible schedules. So we know that heavy workload and exhaustion are the best official reasons to quit a job right. And there are socially accepted after the pandemic as well. And we all know, I bet that that friend would need to come back to the office every day, and would dream of remote or IB job. But as we had more and more research in 2022, from corporations, so for example, Microsoft sponsored a survey of over 30,000 employees across 31 markets in January 2021. For its work, trend index, and other companies did the same.
And many researcher as well. It can be from Stanford and MIT, everyone has contributed. And the interesting finding is that we started indentifying, the roots of exhaustion. And the interesting finding even more is that companies in the same industry would have very different rates of attrition. Some companies with a reputation of a healthy culture would have a lower turnover. And among them, sell Southwest Airlines, Johnson and Johnson or Trader Joe's. So that's the point you know, we start figuring out that healthy culture makes a difference. And in the midst of the Great resignation, they basically emphasized that the top predictor of attrition was a toxic, toxic corporate culture.
So, of course, there are other factors, we know that and we especially you know, in the the economic context, we know that other factors for attrition can can be job insecurity and we organization, especially at the moment, but it also can be high level of innovation, because stress is I when you have the pressure of a new project delivery, especially for example, in the IT industry. Another factor can be as well a failure to recognize performance or a poor response to COVID-19. But overall, people leave their companies because they do not experience a supportive atmosphere and culture. So they don't feel valued enough by their managers or organizations for their work sacrifice.
Or they don't feel that sense of belonging At work, which is so, so important. So I would say to answer your question, that in a nutshell, people want to feel respected for who they are and for their professional sacrifice, and they want to better work life balance. And it's very much a question of motivating culture versus US versus poor work environment.
Dr. Kathy Richie
5:25
So thank you. You mentioned a lot of obvious factors such as heavy workload and exhaustion. How do you suggest for those employees that maybe choose to stay? And and for leaders to work on retention of those employees? How would you suggest that employees should deal with burnout to adapt and thrive?
Geraldine Woloch-Addamine
5:51
Yes, so on the employees side, for sure, we are all in different situations, with different experiences, and privilege. We are not all equipped equally to navigate the new hybrid world. So for instance, we know that minorities prefer working from home to avoid office politics or tensions, or we have categories of people who simply want to take care of their loved ones. Millennials, for for that category, don't want to feel easily treated.
Disabled people prefer working from home young parents, but also majority of women. But there's a long teaser. But in the end, it means that we enjoy the benefits of freedom and flexibility. But I would say, to enjoy that benefits of location, meaning working from home, and time, it means also as well that we have individual responsibility to make it work. And this is how I want to reframe your question about taking care of ourselves. When walking, you know, hey, hybrid environment. So I would when I'm talking about individual accountability, so I'm talking about there's kind of a professional maturity, maturity to have when working from home. And it's about self awareness. And we can call it you know, with different names. So we can, we can talk about self awareness, we can talk about self leadership, we can talk about boundaries. But at the end of the day, it's, it's, it's, it's all about the same, it's about protecting our mental health, and protecting the mental health of ourselves. Well, I want to tell you a story. So I was at the Atlassian event.
So Atlassian is a big software company, they created some, some tools for teams like Jira, or Trello, the most famous one, and they invited are there at their event, the champions basketball champion Magic Johnson, he was invited to talk about high performing chants, and at some point, he was invited to share his wisdom regarding mental health as well. And what she emphasized was, was amazing and related to that protecting our energy and predicting the energy of a user as well. So basically, what he said is that it was okay to choose to not to interact, when you are stressed out to avoid stress contagion, or for to others. So it's, it's okay, you know, then it's called boundaries and it's, it's, it's called protecting ourselves and protecting others. You also give another tip that I really loved.
He said that it was important to create our own support system when our personal energy is low. So and he said that for him what worked is to share with his team that is his energy is is energy today for example is low and that you needed the energy of its team by it was with a simple ask her asking them you know, some help because is energy was always at that particular there. So I think it's a great story to to understand that you It's a it's a two way street, right? So if we want to, we can take care of ourselves with our without taking care of others. And basically, it's the ability to create trust. It's a two way street. And it's creating trust between, among coworkers, but it's also creating trust with, with, with your manager, for example. And it's very important, you know, talking about the relationship with with the manager, is very important to as an employee to be proactive as well and to over communicate on progress, because it limits the stress of managers, and it prevents them to fall into the trap of micromanaging errs. Right.
So I did a lot before being an entrepreneur, I did a lot of managing up through my career into corporate world. And I stopped considering that it was unfair to have a not so good manager, when I found some purpose in growing together and helping them as well to be a good manager. So, you know, I will talk more about trust after but I think individual accountability is very important. And being aware and self aware of our impact is very important.
Dr. Kathy Richie
11:29
I agree. I think self awareness and transparency in particular are important values for people to be focused on. And could you share a little bit more about your thoughts there on what that core value of transparency may be defined as?
Geraldine Woloch-Addamine
11:49
So basically, my, it's very, it's as simple as that you can't have trust without having transparency. So what happens in the hybrid world or remote Ward, is that the default communication is no talk. You don't know. You don't know what happens with your other person in their home, you never know what what what could happen. And our chronic cognitive biases always make us imagine the worst case scenario. So it's very critical most of the time to establish the truth. Because it's how you engage people. Of course, you need you always need to work on communication and your skills for crisis communication, for example, of course.
But it all starts with transparency. And when we think that in a hybrid environment, it can be very costly to organize social gathering, or simply complicated. It should start with greater digital transparency as a core value through through the organization. Why? Because without having a sense of what was the teams are doing, we can lose motivation by not understanding the big picture, or the impact of teamwork. We talk a lot a lot about purpose at work today. And it's very important to know what can be the impact of, of your coworkers?
Dr. Kathy Richie
13:46
So related to that? You just mentioned teams, and we're talking about working remote. And so are we really looking at kind of a relationship deterioration within teams in that remote environment? Or are there other factors such as work life balance involved?
Geraldine Woloch-Addamine
14:09
So great question. So I would start with, I recently learned that only 17% of teams were LC, which is totally crazy and scary. So it means that any team building initiative should be sure is very, very, very important. But regarding relationships, deterioration, users things that I learned recently is that it takes 200 hours to build a relationship. You imagine how much effort it takes in the hybrid world to communicate enough to build the relationships, but the deterioration of relationship deterioration? I would say that there are multiple factors here.
So, today, around 50% of the workforce is hybrid, and more than 70% of companies are using or plan to implement a hybrid model. And again, based on this personal situations of NP, there is a huge diversity of situations that makes it complicated to walk on, on belonging at the organizational level. But there are so many challenges to overcome, the organization is more siloed. And we can only offer a limited number of in person interactions as your fees, especially if their meetings are uncoordinated. And if people choose to come to the office, when they want, bumping to into a college is just a matter of luck. So this is why we we fail, we are facing different phenomenon at the moment that can explain that relationship deteriorations.
So if your first one is, for example, social capital, we talk a lot about the degradation of social capital at the moment, which is pretty pretty much so quick reminder, social capital is basically or the relationship that you have within the company, and the ability to leverage your own knowledge and skills to achieve the company propose by building relationships, and we need social. So it's all about the power of relationships. So and we need social capital, for example, to get promoted or for innovation. And this social capital, we have three ways to understand it better, we have social capital, which is about belonging, which is at the team level, and how we build relationship at the team level. But we have also bridging which is about relationships between teams. And we are we have also that approach, which is linking which is having relationships at different level, you're actually level of the organization.
Anyway, it means that social capital, is in a very bad shape today. And it's very important to create more opportunities and to be more intentional, to create networking opportunities or events to allow people and Tim's to, to, to to be able to have that, that communication and to protect that social capital. And there's another phenomenon about that could explain as well, their relationship deterioration. So this, this, this one is quite new, you know, we have like, we keep having new trends at the moment. And we we have heard about quiet, quitting, quiet firing, we have a bunch of trends that basically are not new, but it's only new words, took this engagement, for example. But what I want to tell you about that new trends is the one which is called productivity paranoia, so productivity, barren area that can explain why we had this relationship deterioration. So basically, there's a disconnect between the employees perceptions of being extremely productive. So and there are because all the all the statistics shows that employees are very productive at the moment.
But there's a disconnect with the perception of users who still don't trust their team to be fully productive, even if all the productivity indicators are green. So I don't say that from for from any leaders, you know, from all the leaders, of course, but that's that's this phenomenon is at the moment, because I guess we are also during this period where people are being asked to come back to the office in, in some companies. So there's still that disconnect between leaders and employees about about productivity. And I think there's a huge stake there. So or under huge take for leaders. Because, of course, and my, my, my, my take on this is that, of course, it's much harder to be a leader in the hybrid world than being a leader at the office. Because you don't have any social cues. Choose and you don't know, you don't know about your team morale, you can check at the watercooler. So it first it's forcing you to to be very good at communicating with your people.
And it's a skill set. It's a new skill set. And it's it's it's it's it's it's a learning process. And this is where that other phenomenon, which is I think supporting leaders are to learn that new skill set is also very, very, very important. So yeah, that's relationship deterioration for sure. We know social capital degradation, we know that there's still this productivity burden. Yeah, we know that we need to upskill users. So is there's a lot to do. There's a lot to do there.
Dr. Kathy Richie
21:15
Thank you. I appreciate all your insights there. And I would also be interested in you asking you to share your insights for a cultural shift with the people centric priority.
Geraldine Woloch-Addamine
21:30
Yes, so basically, is a branded MC as accelerated the future of walk by five or 10 years. So as your environment is not the same. So society on the workplace, the workplace have changed, right. But hybrid is here to stay, and the leadership as to change as well to build that culture of trust, that works with the hybrid environment. And it comes with what we call people first culture that people first cultures, values more humanity and connections at work. And it comes with the simple idea that people need to be happy at work to sustain high performance.
So why, because trust is good for performance, and it's proven a good job of trust is our best way to to create high performing teams. So research shows that high trust organizations can increase employee engagement by up to 76%. Research shows as well, that trust can really help to erase burnout, because people aren't high trust organizations, we brought 40%, less burnout, which is which is huge. So of course, high performing organizations promote a culture, a culture of trust, of trust, and it means for people being in a supportive work environment, where they feel safe and valued. And in this environment, it means that inclusion is key as well for for more because we have a more and more diverse workforce.
And it also means that we need to create more more purpose at work to do more meaningful work. And it comes with a recent finding from from Microsoft, actually, people can be productive. But you know, that's the point people can be productive, but not thriving. So they can be engaged, but not happy. And this is not the best way to sustain performance and high high performance. So. So it's all about how to make people energized and per word to do meaningful work. And I would just end by telling you, what are the behaviors, you don't divide by research to to be trust. And there's a very, it's a very shortened list. But this demonstrated behaviors can really help leaders to be trust, and it's all about giving recognition, sharing achievable challenges, fostering autonomy, encouraging job crafting or stretching or fostering a positive ongoing communication and, and having that openness and that growth mindset. So basically there we know how To be trusted, it's well known now. And I'm very excited to see that more and more companies understood that trust is really good for for high performing teams.
Dr. Kathy Richie
25:14
Thank you, Geraldine. I think that is an excellent summary of some of the attributes or what we are looking forward to better understand trust in the workplace and to recognize maybe how to accept this great resignation and where it's going. I read an article this morning that is entitled Americans are still quitting fast enough to keep the fed on an aggressive path. And it basically said that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is estimating that what they call the quit rate for the private sector alone is still around 3%, which is considered high. And most of the it says here in the article that most of those workers are switching jobs, to be rewarded by higher salaries, which is generally an increase of around 7.1% per person.
So I thought that was some interesting statistics to go along with a lot of the interesting insights that you shared with us today. So, Geraldine, it's been a pleasure to chat with you. And thank you for joining us and supporting the Center for Advancement of virtual organizations. Again, we have your blog, published strong, macabre website, and we really appreciate your insights, and your listeners will benefit from your experience as well. Thank you.
Geraldine Woloch-Addamine
26:46
Thank you so much, Kathy.