social connectedness

How to Stay Calm and Connected When Self-Distancing Yourself From Others

By in Living Well No Comments Tags: , ,

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A couple weeks ago, when most of us were still working at the office, I wrote an article about how to prevent yourself from feeling sad and lonely when working from home. Hopefully it provided a few good tips! But now that we’re self-distancing ourselves from others and staying home pretty much all of the time, I think it makes sense to delve a little deeper into this topic.

It’s hard to be home, avoiding other people. It’s lonely. And unsettling. But there are things that you can do to make your situation a little bit better.

  • Embrace the use of technology – If you’re able, try using FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, Facebook, or Twitter to connect to your friends and family.
  • Call people on the phone – Don’t have access to technology? Or maybe you’re not very tech-savvy? Call a friend or family member on the phone. Just talking to someone for a while, and having a conversation can make you feel more supported and connected.
  • Limit how much you watch the news – It’s important to stay informed. But watching the news all day will only cause you to feel more panicked. Check for updates in the morning and the evening. That will give you the information you need, without making you feel inundated by anxiety-provoking news stories.
  • Indulge – Read that trashy book that you’ve had lying around the house for weeks. Watch that goofy TV show that you find weirdly compelling. Rediscover an old hobby. Get crafty. Do whatever you need to do to distract yourself and feel a little bit better.

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Archbald-Pannone, L. (2020, March 10). A geriatrician offers 4 tips for seniors to stay connected during coronavirus outbreak. The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/a-geriatrician-offers-4-tips-for-seniors-to-stay-connected-during-coronavirus-outbreak-133233

Why It’s Time to Forget the Pecking Order at Work

By in Communication, Learning 1 Comment Tags: ,

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imagesOrganizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,” where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan argues that it is social cohesion – built during every coffee break and every time one team member asks another for help – that leads over time to great results. It’s a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out, “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.”

So what is it that makes some groups more successful and more productive than others? A team at MIT researched that very question by bringing in hundreds of volunteers, putting them into groups, and giving them very hard problems to solve. What happened was exactly what you’d expect – some groups were more successful than others. But what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those that had one or two people with a spectacularly high I.Q. Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q.

Instead, the high-achieving groups had three characteristics:

  1. They showed high degrees of social sensitivity to one another.
  2. They gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated.
  3. They had more women in them.

The striking thing about this experiment is that the key to a group’s success lies in their social connectedness to each other. What do you think about this research? Do you believe that your team has the social connectedness it needs to succeed? What can you do to help create a culture of helpfulness in your organization?

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