Relational Crafting – “The need of the hour”
By | Anub Kurian | Senior Associate2 – L&D at PwC AC Kolkata | Pursuing PhD
“Nowadays, I don’t feel that connect / belongingness at work”
-the remote employee
As per the latest workplace research – people at work are not experiencing belongingness at work. It says, companies would start to witness large-scale abscondings, managers will need to tackle reasonless resignations, job-hopping may pop up as a frequent business-as-usual leading to attrition. All this is happening, more among the new joiners who may have joined in the last 1.5 years with the pandemic in action. Literally, they haven’t had many chances to interact in person with their peers and colleagues building the so-called relational social capital.
Pre-covid itself for organizations – establishing and sustaining belongingness was a nightmare, and now it has further deteriorated with covid nullifying the in-person interactions. The relationships which could’ve got established, given we were in that physical office would’ve been a different experience altogether. The factor of – ‘belongingness’ and ‘time’ has taken an inverse proportionality rule now; as these newbies are working in the remote setup, day by day – their belongingness is decreasing.
So the organizations need to be cautious and conscious about this phenomenon. Here is high time for organizations and managers to take a pause, reflect and plan a humane strategy to help people breathe, talk and thrive at work. Humans as a species need society and relationships to be productive and hence flourish, the solution may be to craft it.