Remember life pre-COVID? Even if you were a remote-first culture, you still built in time to visit your clients in person. Meet with your team regularly. Travel to conferences.
Now, don’t get us wrong: remote work and being able to connect virtually is a beautiful thing. It saves time. It certainly makes us more productive. But doesn’t it also seem it’s also gotten so much easier to just…not have those in-person connections? Connections that could make our businesses—and relationships—stronger?
That’s the thought we had as we attended the “Bridging the Gap” conference in Chicago, an event for accounting and financial services firms. Not only did we meet a ton of people IRL we had previously only connected with via Zoom, but we also started to build relationships with people we had never met.
We forgot how electric these in-person meetings can be. There’s a biological exchange that we get from being in the same room with people that we don’t get virtually—almost like a second language that we all speak.
The conference got us thinking: as businesses, we need to retrain our connection muscles again. To be more intentional in gathering with the people who are closest to us in our businesses. We’ve got a few ideas to do just that:
Plan with purpose. We’ve talked before about the book The Art of Gathering: Why We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker. In the book, Parker talks about getting crystal clear about why you’re meeting. You may think you know the answer to that question—We’re getting the team together for a strategy session! We’re checking in on customers!—but as Parker says, “A category is not a purpose.” Instead, she urges those planning events—both large and impromptu—to be specific about what they want to accomplish and achieve.
Build in time to connect. Often, we look at our calendars and try to squeeze in those in-person meetings and get-togethers. After all, your work has to get done, and that’s the most important thing, right? In reality, connecting with people in person is part of the work. So, flip the script and schedule those networking events, team breakfasts, and in-person client meetings into your calendar just as you usually block off time for deep work or Zoom calls. When you’re intentional about making the time to connect, it’ll feel less stressful to actually do it. Think about this as its own habit to build. Maybe you start with the goal of one in-person event a week, or three per month, and build from there.
Truly get to know people. It’s one thing to see people in person, and it’s another to really see them. In his book How to Know a Person, David Brooks poses the kind of questions that are essential for all of us as we’re rebuilding this part of human connection: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to? It’s not just about connecting with your clients, vendors, and employees face-to-face—it’s about getting to know them better as people, so you can anticipate their needs.
