As generative AI takes over many day-to-day tasks, getting ahead at work will increasingly mean excelling in a range of social skills we have struggled to explain, much less to develop. In the Forbes Future of Work Summit, LinkedIn economist Aneesh Raman boldly asserted that we are poised to enter the new “relationship economy, where social ability is at the center of work.” This means so-called soft skills are the new hard skills and the ones that matter most. To meet this future head-on, organizations must strengthen divergent thinking, collaboration and social agility. And it all starts with workplace relationships.
How do you build effective relationships when the current state of the workplace feels dire? It’s open season on workers these days. Layoffs are back with a vengeance. Recruiters are posting “ghost” jobs with no intention to fill them. Workplace loneliness is still an epidemic and employee engagement is at a ten-year low. It’s far more tempting to run for cover than to put yourself out there.
But–and we've known this for years–relationships matter. The assertion alone is no longer enough. It's time to design a human-centric future of work, a socially networked ecosystem of new ideas and diverse expertise that uses technology to boost productivity and innovation rather than to replace human capital. Imagine a workplace that puts healthy workplace relationships at the center of its business. What would it take? How might it feel? Here are seven serious things leaders can do to foster and support a productive relationship economy (hint: no ping pong tables involved).
Champion Your Principles
It’s a rare organization that hasn’t articulated a set of values, posted them on the walls, and even made some laminated wallet cards. These values represent a company’s aspirations, but so many are simply a list of disembodied words or short phrases (like “trust” or “customer service”). Extending these values into a set of actionable principles enables workers (even the most junior) to bring these values to life, shaping behavior and guiding decisions in the face of conflicting priorities and competing pressures. Take Tableau Software for example: “product excellence” is a value while “We won’t release a product until we would use it ourselves” is a principle.
Reframe Flexibility
In the heated space of return-to-work mandates, flexibility has taken a nearly mortal hit. But it means more than letting someone decide where they want to clock their days. Flexibility is about empowering your people to do their best work and giving them the freedom to be effective at their own jobs in their own way. This means accessing training and learning resources as needed to support and strengthen their skills, even skills adjacent to their current work. To build nimble teams that are adept at flexible thinking, creating the spaces for colleagues to share ideas, tackle challenges together and learn from each other–regardless of where they sit. By getting to know what each person brings to the table and being flexible about how they support the collective mission, you can neutralize proximity bias and better leverage the skills of your entire team.
Design Collaborative Spaces
Despite the noisy RTO coverage, the vast majority of companies still have hybrid teams. This is a golden opportunity to fundamentally rethink how the physical office looks and feels. It’s not about infantilizing younger workers by making work more Instagrammable (yes, that’s happening) or building the playgrounds of the early tech era. It’s about designing spaces where people can work together - more meeting rooms, better technology, and flexible layouts that foster the proximity people need to build the trust-based relationships that power their work. Scientists have known for over 50 years that increasing distance between teammates decreases communication; once people are more than 8 meters apart, they have only a 5% probability of communicating once a week. If you take the trouble of bringing your teams into the office several days a week, it’s critical to design your space to be sure they interact.
Make Space For Interpersonal Connection
Part of ensuring that your teams interact requires you to create intentional spaces for people to connect–not just face to face but brain to brain. Intentionally and regularly create time for conversation–lunch and learn sessions, community service projects or even coffee breaks can make a meaningful difference. Consider what happened to Bank of America when it partnered with MIT scientist Sandy Pentland to explore the effect of meaningful socializing on call center productivity. Using body-worn sociometers to measure the length and depth of interactions among colleagues, the research team found that coworkers who interacted more had faster calls, less stress and and the same approval ratings as their colleagues who stayed glued to their phones. When the company synchronized employee breaks within multiple call centers, they saw a 20% drop in call handling time–even for lower performing teams–a $15 million improvement in productivity and increased customer satisfaction. Giving people time to interact with each other, at all levels of the organization, deepens the relationships that drive productivity, creativity and innovation.
Develop Communities Of Practice
The world is too complex for any one person to have all the answers. But a network of colleagues within the same domain with a broad array of experiences and expertise can deepen learning and unlock solutions to thorny problems. Communities of practice are self formed groups of colleagues who come together to share ideas and support each other’s work. They can be informal networks like the photocopier repair teams who used lunch and coffee breaks to share war stories with less experienced colleagues. But they can be more formal structures, like Chrysler’s tech clubs. The automaker, now known as Stellantis, sponsored cross-functional networks of engineers to support new car development and to share expertise across platforms. And professional service firms with broad client bases routinely share their knowledge through internal practice networks dedicated to industry and functional expertise. These groups leverage an entire organization’s knowledge to support a variety of different individual challenges.
Align Your Incentives
It’s a broadly understood maxim that you can’t incent A and hope for B. And yet so few companies use incentives to encourage the behaviors they really want, especially when it comes to culture. Fostering a relationship culture requires incentives that move beyond the individual, rewards that honor team-based collaboration, effective mentorship, and knowledge sharing. This also means incentivizing the development of relationship skills (like active listening or healthy disagreement) in addition to focusing on commercial performance metrics and technical accomplishments. IBM has incorporated this both-and thinking in its performance evaluations: business results drive past-year bonus while skills development shapes the next year’s salary. How can you use your compensation structures to reward the forward-looking efforts you want to see?
Celebrate Success
Trumpet the wins, champion the attempts (even if they fall short). When you recognize and celebrate the behaviors you want to see, you bring them to life and encourage your teams. Make time for (and build the habits of) celebration–especially honoring collective work instead of a single individual’s feat. Highlighting great work in a company newsletter or giving an award to a team or a group that has gone above and beyond is a good start. But celebration needs to move from once in a while to every day and it needs to honor failures as well as successes. One CEO I work with regularly reminds his teams to be loud and proud–to show the entire organization what really matters by broadly sharing their successes and their efforts. As work gets harder, every incremental step counts. Highlighting these steps goes the distance to inspire the next leap.
The future is yet to be written on where we work and what tools we use. But we can–and should–be vehement about the how. AI offers boundless opportunities to reframe work, inviting us to delegate the drudgery and retain the innovation and creativity. To do that well, we need to boost workplace social skills. The choice is ours–do we succumb to exhaustion and check out, or double down on the social skills we need to shape the relationship economy? If we de-prioritize these relationships because we’re all too busy, we are cutting off the blood supply to human ingenuity and the oxygen we need to breathe life into the future of work. AI can’t build this for us. We must build it ourselves - together.
First published in Forbes.com.
