It was a great pleasure to be among the more than 1,000 HR professionals in San Francisco at the Culture First conference and learn the latest cutting-edge trends on diversity and inclusion, engagement and performance and employee experience trends from industry leaders.
One theme I took away from several sessions is the importance of empathy in the workplace — acknowledging that everyone comes to work with different perspectives and experiences.
For example, the session “Remote Work 2.0: Revolutionizing How Distributed Teams Work Together” focused on creating more inclusiveness for remote workers. The session’s leader, Robleh Kirce of LifeLabs Learning, discussed the top five issues faced by remote workers — communication, belonging, trust, fairness and growth — and some ways to address each of these concerns:
Weekly check-ins.
Mandatory demos where remote workers have a chance to share what they’ve been working on
Purpose statements/agendas for meetings.
Ritualizing facetime.
Creating a team document on how you will communicate with the team (for example, text messages for emergencies and Slack for celebrations).
Kirce also shared this formula:
Cultivating trust in the workplace = Credibility x Reliability x Intimacy / Self-Orientation
Another key takeaway — how we can work more collaboratively as the workforce becomes more age-diverse. There are now five generations in the workplace, including a significant number of baby boomers who are 60 and older.
One key is an emphasis on being curious rather than judging. Chip Conley, founder of Modern Elder Academy, outlined four ideas for addressing this topic:
Mutual mentorship.
Track and cultivate wisdom.
Employee resource groups (ERGs).
Longevity strategy.
Other ideas included encouraging speed-networking opportunities, onboarding with buddies/mentors and promoting the use of “wisdom workers” who have institutional knowledge that can help younger workers.
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