26% of U.S. employees now work remotely, four times the number who worked remotely before. By 2025, there could be as many as 36.2 million Americans working remotely.
No one has thought hard enough about the massive disruption that remote work presents to everything people-related.
Work is a relationship, and relationships thrive on intimate and frequent connections. When we all worked in offices some of that intimacy was built by the serendipity of conversations that you had while going about your day’s work. There was always the potential to catch someone from outside of your team share an idea, and solicit a different perspective.
There was an ease of connections and interactions, that can be hard to replicate in a remote work context. Being remote is a little bit like trying to establish a long-distance relationship, which all of us know, have the chances of success stacked against them.
Ongoing remote work presents very practical challenges for organizations, particularly around company culture and organizational HR.
How do you assess performance when you can’t see people at work? How do you look out for people, mentor them, and develop them when your interactions are all booked in, bounded within a strict working day? How do you acknowledge someone for something you heard they did well in another meeting like you might as you jump in a lift together?
Investing in “connections” is now crucial in a distributed world and with a growing percentage of the workforce having grown up sleeping with their phones.
Connections will define organizational culture, and how we collaborate and manage performance. Creating a connected, inclusive environment where employees feel valued and heard will foster a sense of belonging, leading to increased job satisfaction, engagement, and productivity.
Banish the old way of thinking held by a different generation that connection comes from being in the room together. That’s an illusion or maybe even a delusion if you ask yourself how common it is to see teams, families, lovers, and friends sitting together and all on their phones.
Meaningful connections happen every day in our world without being in the room together. Parents connect with their kids via text throughout the day, people search for their life partners via dating apps, and teammates share snaps of their pets, and their holidays via Slack or Teams.
Daily, we rely on the ubiquity of instant messaging tools like these that respect employee agency through asynchronous conversations.
Now, with advances in AI, especially Natural Language Processing (NLP), we can codify the uniquely human ability of language to empower us, using AI “Conversations”.
AI “Conversations” extend and scale from human-to-human to human-to-machines. Sapia.ai’s smart chat (not a chatbot) accelerates self-awareness, helping anyone who engages with it to self-determine and self-actualize their career choices.
Why suffer through an average manager when smart chat via a simple conversation can teach you what you need to know in a language and tone that works for you? Unlike a human, AI can simultaneously provide this experience to any number of people without bias.
You can learn more about how the world of HR is evolving rapidly in our paper HR For the World of Tomorrow.
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