124: Why a Connected Insights Team Can Propel Your Business to Success - a chat with Ryan Jenkins

Speaker A: This is Real Talk, the Customer Insight show with Christophe Trapp, a top rated livestream and podcast in the market research and insights industry. We stream live on LinkedIn, Twitter, uh, and YouTube, and you can listen on all major podcast channels and watch on DBTV tv. Join Christophe and his guests for a weekly discussion around topics that will help you understand your customers better. Real Talk is presented to you by Vox Pop Me, the leader in video research for over a decade. Here's today's conversation.

Speaker B: Hello, insights professionals, marketers, and everyone who wants to understand their customers better. I'm Christophe Trapp, your host. Today we want to talk about how do we have connected teams? And you know what? At the end of the day, as they say, dream work, teamwork makes the dream work. If I'm going to throw out some cliches, I better get them right. But seriously, it's so easy to get disconnected anymore. So how do we actually stay connected as an insights team? Whether it's through technology or just mindset or, um, just the effort to actually reach out to each other. Ryan Jenkins, he is the author of Connectable and he recently spoke at the Insights Association Annual Conference in Hilton Head. Um, so I'm really excited to have him on the show today. And by the way, I have to say, Hilton Head, what a place to have a conference, right? That's where people go on vacation. Beautiful hotel, um, and fantastic speakers, including Ryan. Ryan, welcome to Real Talk.

Speaker C: Thanks, Christoph. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: Nice to see you and thanks for making the time. Really appreciate it. Um, one question we currently ask everyone, whether you know, whether we're talking about that topic or not, is what is your favorite strategy to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction?

Speaker C: Yeah. Someone that's outside of the insights industry. I'll answer this question as a business owner, and in my mind, the one word that comes to mind is referability. So how eager or willing are your customers to refer your product or service? So anyone can, you know, rate your service or fill out a feedback survey, but to have someone put their own reputation on the line to refer your product or service, in my mind is the true testament to that individual or that customer client satisfaction.

Speaker B: I, uh, mean, it's very true. And I. That's actually a really good answer because when I think about that, right, if I am recommending a product that's not so good, and then my friends or, you know, um, co workers or whatever, right, acquaintances see, uh, that product and they think, what is Kristoff thinking? That's crazy. So that's. That's a really good answer. Um, your, your reputation is on the line. So you wrote connectable. And certainly, you know, we talk about building insights teams. We've had a, ah, whole show on that. There's an entire blog post on our market research, um, blog on Vox Pop Media. Com. But Telus, why have teammates become isolated? Anyways?

Speaker C: Yeah, before I tell you some of the reasons why we're becoming more isolated, I think it's important to take a step back and give the audience a little bit of context on just how disconnected and isolated we all are. And so thanks for showing the picture of the book. And in that book we did a, uh, global survey of over 2,000 global workers. And what we found was 72% of those workers said they experienced social disconnection at least monthly, with 55% saying at least weekly. And then on top of that, 69% of employees are not satisfied with their opportunities for connection at work. So we're the more most disconnected we've ever been and we're looking towards work to find more connection. And in my mind that's a great place to look because that's where we spend the most of our waking hours, is at work. Um, so that's kind of the context and the backdrop. And a couple reasons why you and I and workers around the globe are experiencing more disconnection is because three things that we identified through our research. Number one was busyness, um, that's probably the biggest contributor according to research that we found, and busyness. So time constraints severely limit our willingness to engage with others. And I'm willing to bet most, if not all of the folks that are listening, uh, and tuning into this stream, um, are probably have more on their plate than ever before and that is uh, really hindering our connections with others. The second thing that came up was no surprise here, technology and social media. And I think a good um, data point to keep in mind here as we think about technology and social media. And I have the pleasure of speaking all around the world on this topic. And I always ask audiences what contributed to the mysterious serious plunge of sales of chewing gum. And folks come up with all kinds of wonderful responses and answers, but actually it correlates with the introduction of smartphones. And what happens is of course where we normally buy, make uh, an impulse buy of chewing gum in the groceries checkout line, uh, pre phones, we would just stand there and you know, gaze at other things we could buy and we would purchase gum. But now with every, any small amount of time that we are idle, we bury ourselves into our devices, don't we? And so technology, social media are slowly pulling us apart if we're not careful. And then the last, um, reason I'll give Christoph is this idea of dependency shift. I'm sure many folks can relate to this as well. And I'll kind of describe this with a quick story. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and recently we were celebrating my youngest child's first birthday. And as you do, you go, go big with those, uh, those little ones birthdays. And we were there preparing a bunch of dishes for our, our guests that were coming over in a few hours. And we invited over our college age friend Cassidy to help us prepare some of these dishes. And she came over and my wife handed her a can of olives and said, hey, could you put some of these olives on that dish? She said, sure thing. My wife and I turned and began preparing some other dishes. Few minutes went by and then we noticed nothing was happening with Cassidy's dish. So I investigated a little bit further and saw that she was on her device. And I thought, oh no, she's already distracted. I'll need to encourage her to get back on track because we've got guests coming over pretty soon. And so I investigated a little bit further and Christoph, wouldn't you believe it, she actually wasn't distracted. She was actually being very resourceful. And she was actually on YouTube watching a video on how to use a manual can opener. She never used one of those before. And it was, it dawned on me in that moment, gosh, we're doing this all the time now, aren't we? In subtle, small ways. Something breaks in your home, you're not, you're way less likely to go knock on a neighbor's door, call mom or dad or a sibling to get help or to get the necessary tools, we turn to YouTube or other, some other online resource. So these are subtle ways. We do that at work too. Instead of swiveling your chair and connecting with a colleague about how to do XYZ and in Excel, we'll go on YouTube. That's a wonderful thing. But, but we also have to be aware that that is a, uh, way of subtly pulling us apart. So to recap your conversation, we are more isolated and disconnected than ever before. And a big three that are contributing is busyness, technology and social media and this idea of dependency shift.

Speaker B: You know what's so interesting? I'm just thinking, I'm trying to, um, kind of think that through all those different points you just made. And so I, about even the voxpod me platform, right? Back in the day, I would have to maybe have a brainstorming session. What questions should we ask people? And now I just go in there and I basically say, here's the topic. And the platform gives me some ideas for questions, right? AI I, uh, do the same with headlines for articles. In fact, this headline for our live stream, I'm sure, was written partially, at least, by AI Right? Because I put it in there. I say, here's what we're talking about. Uh, what ideas do you have? Um, there's no meetings, there's no brainstorming. There's nothing like that. So I'm wondering, though, where's that line? Because so when I have AI write my survey questions for me, that's super helpful, especially if they are good questions. But at what point? Or same with the headlines, right? Um, as long as they're good headlines, it works. But at what point do I need to connect to people once again to brainstorm? Uh, I mean, the technology can help us, right? To brainstorm and, and connect more efficiently. Or maybe not.

Speaker C: Great question, Valid question. I'll, um, start by answering that question by stating that the single greatest predictor of human health and happiness is the quality of our social connections. I'll say that one more time. The single greatest predictor of human health and happiness is the quality of our social connections. And that is, uh, correlated with the longest study of human adult development ever conducted by Homage Harvard University. It's been going on over 80 years. It's still going on today. They've studied in depth the lives over 2,000 people. So we need to start there and understand that connection is critical. And too often what's happening is we're misconstruing communication and connection. We think that using all these tools is keeping us connected. Right? We jump on a zoom call, or we're texting with a significant other, or we're slacking. Our teammates, we feel like we're connected to them, but really what we're doing there is communicating, and that's still important. And we should be using these wonderful tools to effectively communicate, because that's something we need to do, uh, in business and in life is clearly communicate. But let's not make the mistake. And in misconstruing connection and communication, because they're very different. Communication is exchanging of information, and we process that in the front part of our brains and connection is the ease of communication. It's the sense of being seen and heard in an exchange. And that's processed in the back part of Our brain. So folks can relate to this example to where you've probably texted I love you to a significant other and that's just communication. You can text them that all day. That's just communication. It's not connection until they hear the tone in your voice when you express I love you, or they're in person and they can feel your embrace or see your body language when you express that sentiment. So there's two very, very different. So how I like to sum it up is communication is dealt, but connection is felt. So we need to strive for more connection and we need to find ways where we trade communication for connection. We still should be using all these tools. We should be digging into AI to figure out how, uh, how it makes sense and how to leverage it in our businesses. But then also make sure that we're carving out time for connection because that's why we use all these tools, right, Is to be more effective, be more efficient. And so we should be, um, marrying high tech with high touch. We need to have both of those channels. The last example I'll give here was pre pandemic. I was speaking at a conference and a gentleman before me was a healthcare conference, and he was talking about telemedicine. If he only knew how important that topic was going to be in a few short months. And he was talking about having AI in a doctor's ear. And that ear can actually diagnose a patient's cough with greater accuracy than a human doctor. And so that's extraordinary. We would be reckless not to leverage that technology and have AI do the heavy lifting that humans aren't as good at. Um, but I asked them afterwards, backstage, I said, what's going to happen to the role of the doctor is AI is able to do so much more. And he said, doctors will revert back to what they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. And he said, we'll leverage the AI to do the heavy lifting and that's going to give us more margin to actually deliver compassion and empathy to the patient. And so I think if we're good stewards with this Christoph, we're going to leverage the technology. You know, we're going to go high tech, but find ways to deliver more high touch. Because at the end of the day, humans, we crave connection. We crave connection. It's our most significant need. And we've got to find ways to marry this in this high tech world that you and I operate in.

Speaker B: You know what's interesting about the doctor example too is, I mean, I've been to doctors in the past. And they were just on their computer the whole time. They're typing and typing and typing and typing and they're like writing everything down, right? Communication, I guess, but they're not connecting. So what you just described is that could actually make um, the connection piece maybe easier again down the road. Um, so we're, we're maybe in this transitional period. Um, talk about. We have some, certainly especially in large companies, we have remote teams or even if we don't have remote teams, we got teams in this office and teams in this office and they still work together. Uh, how does connectivity work when people are not in the same place? Uh, have you seen any trends there? Anything you can share for insights, teams to learn from?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think the best way to think about remote work or hybrid work, um, again, it's not bad. It's a tool. And the research we unpacked in our book, when we looked at technology, we looked at social media and how the pros and cons of social media and social media can be highly beneficial when we're using it to supplement existing connections, existing relationships. It becomes detrimental when we're using it in replace of having relationships in, in real life or true connections with others. And so I think there's a lot of correlations to be had as it relates to remote work. We should be using these wonderful tech tools at our, disposable, at our disposal to um, supplement the culture that we have as a team, the connections we have as a team. So we need to make sure that that is addressed first and foremost and then we can supplement it with remote work. Um, we just can't replace in person. And we're all aware of this, right? A zoom meeting or a zoom brainstorming session. While it can be done and you can execute and it can be productive, it's not the same unless you're in the room together. So you got to find, you got to find. It's different for every organization. But I think folks are wildly underestimating how much we need human connection. And typically as humans we choose the route that's most convenient. Right. We go to the path of least resistance. And that's obviously not always good for our well being as individuals, our well being and our health of our organizations. So I think, you know, folks, organizations, leaders need to be thinking about how do we find that balance again and um, making sure that folks can have those connections as well as have the right tools at their disposal to, to make sure remote and hybrid work is still a vibrant part of the culture, because it's really not going away. We've all stress tested, it didn't break and um, it's here to stay.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, I always appreciate, you know, visiting one of the vox pop me offices. I'm remote. Uh, and certainly when you do that, the connection is very different, right? You don't really, you're not live streaming, you're not writing articles, you're not doing things like that, you're not launching surveys, you're really just meeting, you're connecting, right, for a couple days. Um, the one thing circling back to busyness. And don't my friends, please don't say, oh, we're too busy to connect. Right. I mean, you can do it on zoom calls too, in remote meetings. I mean, I do it sometimes just touch base with people you don't normally talk to because you can't run into people in the hallway. Now let's say you got an insights leader here trying to build that team. How do you even, how do you encourage connectivity? How do you, um, like what are some ways to do that? And you know, let's assume you have a team, maybe a local team, and maybe you have remote employees and different offices. Like, what are the different scenarios?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think step one, the big step one is of course, awareness, right? You got to be aware that this is an issue and then it's likely impacting your team. I mean, based off the numbers we shared, right? Bas just about three out of four workers, um, every month they're feeling detached and disconnected. And there's big bottom line deterrence to this, right? Because we've seen the engagement goes down, performance goes down, um, talent recruitment, attraction goes down. And then the biggest one is when folks feel a sense of disconnection inside their teams or inside their organizations, they're 313% less likely to quit. 313% less likely to quit if they don't feel a strong connection. Now this is quick side tangent. This makes sense when we understand the science of connection. Because back when our human ancestors roamed the plains, there was always strength in numbers. And if you got excluded from the group, your survival rate plummeted. So our body goes into a stress state and we're looking to self preserve and we're in flight or flight. So if we don't feel like that sense of connection at work and we're on the outside, of course we're going to be less loyal and we're going to be looking for another opportunity or less engaged because we're trying to, uh, address this issue, uh, of isolation and disconnection. Um, so that's really important. So this should not be taken lightly. And here's the real unfortunate kicker here. 90% of employees suffering from isolation or disconnection say they would not tell their supervisor. So, uh, this is often under the ground. And I talk to so many leaders all the time. They're thinking, this is a really important topic, but it's not impacting my team. I haven't heard my team talk about this or mention this, and I'm like, of course not. They're not going to tell you. In fact, according to the research that we unpacked in the book, folks are more likely to talk to a robot, um, about their mental health than their manager. So that's a whole nother conversation. And some more recent research about ChatGPT saying that it's more empathetic than an actual doctor. So we're. This is a really interesting trend, how humans are feeling like they're able to actually connect with these machines more so than humans. Um, but anyway, so that's kind of the state of it. So it's a big problem. It's impacting your team. That's kind of step one is the awareness, and then step two is to kind of understand it doesn't take as much effort as you might think. Research shows 40 seconds is as much time as it takes to actually feel a sense of connection between two individuals. So this could be just a small interaction that you have with someone on the way to your next meeting or in the elevator. Um, it also, according to Gallup, who's done the employee engagement survey Q12 for decades and decades and decades, they found that just having one other person at work that you feel a strong connection with improves engagement and performance and, um, all these retention and all these other items. So one person, 40 seconds. It doesn't take a lot of effort. It just takes intentionality. So one thing to think about as it relates to, uh, leaders and what they can do is to put a pause on busyness. Right. So often we jump on a meeting with our team, whether it's virtual or in person. It's right to business. Right?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: We're getting right down to it. We've got a lot to do, we're busy. And something that we do at our connection enabling product, uh, house that we have, it's called, uh, work rivet.com and what we do because we're a connection company, so we're always trying to figure out ways in which we can connect our team and one, one thing we do is called Connect 5. So we take five minutes at the top of every weekly meeting where one person shares a non work related picture. And just recently we had someone share a the picture where they were had, uh, just run a marathon. And we thought we had no idea you ran marathons. So not only did we see this person as this competent social media manager, but now this, she's this extraordinary athlete as well. So it created a data point for us to connect and take a step closer to see the human behind the job. So it doesn't take a lot of effort. So something like that. Right. Five minutes at the top of every meeting, someone shares something non work related can start to knit our company or our team members together. And it could be something as simple as that. I think the encouraging thing here is it just takes you. You don't have to get buy in from leadership or convince the whole team. All pro social behaviors we can do every day. Uh, and when someone else is on the receiving end of these pro social behaviors, they're 278% more likely to go and send that pro social behavior to somebody else. So there's a massive ripple effect here. Um, and a lot of leaders that we talk to find it encouraging that, hey, it just takes me, doesn't take a lot of time. I just got to be intentional about it.

Speaker B: You know, I'm thinking a lot of our, uh, researchers listening to the show can relate to the comment about, oh, nobody has ever said anything to me. Right. Um, and because of course, we always hear those stories. Well, everybody said in the survey that they would buy the product. Right. So it depends on how you ask. It depends on how you, um, how you structure that conversation. You know, would people go up to their manager and tell them some of those things? I can see why they wouldn't. Um, so you kind of have to figure out how to do that. Um, but let's talk about the ROI here. So especially as we're trying to understand our customers, get better research, ask better questions. Don't just ask, would you buy the product or are you disconnected? No, I'm fine. Right.

Speaker C: Um, right.

Speaker B: What is the bottom line? How does a connected team actually help us understand the customer better and you know, drive business results?

Speaker C: Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, connected teams perform better and they engage more fully. Um, I like to kind of think of it as a, uh, um, a brick wall. Right. You might have all the, the right bricks, AKA team members, stacked on top of each other. They might be fitting real Nice together. And it looks like you've got a pretty formidable wall. But if you don't have mortar, if you don't have something connecting all those bricks, you can just push that wall right over and it's going to tumble. It's going to tumble on the, the first sign of stress, or there's going to be zero resilience, uh, on that wall. And so this idea of mortar, right, the connection, what exists between team members, it what makes them strong, what makes them loyal, what, uh, makes the whole team be able to execute and perform what it's supposed to do. So that's kind of how I like to think about connection. It's the things between that really solidifies us. And I think the other thing to keep in mind here that really stands out for a lot of folks, um, recently they did some research where they were trying to figure out how does exclusion impact our brain? Like, how does our brain react to that? And so they, they studied it, they put a group of folks through an experience of exclusion and their brain lit up. Well, that wasn't very surprising, people. But where the brain lit up was what was really interesting. And so it was actually the same part of the brain that was registering the exclusion was the same part of the brain that registers physical pain. So what they were able to deduce from that is when you and I feel detached, when we feel disconnected from the tribe or our team, it's the same as if we're being physically hit. And so of course, if you were to show up to work, whether it was digitally or in person, and you had a bleeding appendage, of course you're not going to be able to work that day. Your brain is thinking, I need to address this before I can show up fully to work. Same thing is happening when we experience a sense of isolation and disconnection. Again, our body's in that fight or flight state and we're thinking, I have to address this before I can show up fully to work. And so that's why we've got to get this right, because we're not going to be able to show up fully for our colleagues, we're not going to be able to deliver, uh, for our clients and customers. We're not going to be able to do that better research and drive action in the insights market. We're not going to be able do any of that if we feel a sense of disconnection from our team. So it is just that critical. And again, I don't, you know, feel like I'm beating A dead horse here. But I think it's important that the single greatest predictor of human health is the, our social connections with others. And what better place to cultivate some of these strong connections than at the place you and I spend the most of our waking hours, which is at work.

Speaker B: Yeah, very interesting. Uh, so when people, if people don't tell their manager, how can you even get pulse? How can you even understand? I mean, you can certainly look at the results, right? The team is performing well, but just does good performance mean a good performance? Does it mean they're actually connected? Or does it just mean they're really good at their job? Um, is one option, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here, to maybe have people just leave feedback. They just record feedback, send it over so they're not, um, talking to people, uh, one on one. Or how else can you kind of get a pulse on what's going on?

Speaker C: Yeah, because it's tricky, right, because it's, it's invisible. We can't. It's. How do you measure how connected you feel? Um, so we've, we've been trying to help in that space. So we kind of took a three step, uh, approach to addressing disconnection. We didn't want to just write books and speak at conferences about this. We wanted to give folks specific tools and, uh, assessments that they could take to address all this. So phase one was write the book. We did all this research. Um, the book hit number seven on the Wall Street Journal and it was just rated the number three leadership book of 2022 by thousands of readers. So we feel like we hit the nail on the head. Folks are finally ready to address disconnection and talk more about how to cultivate connection at work. So that was phase one, Phase two, to your point, and your question, Christoph, is how do we measure this thing? Um, we have two assessments. We've got one that's empirically validated to assess the connection levels of oneself personally. So how connected, you know, how isolated or disconnected do you feel in your kind of your personal life? So you can take that assessment. Secondly, we created what's called the team connection assessment. So we work with researchers out of Harvard and University of Canterbury, and it's the first empirically Valley assessment to actually quantify how strongly connected the team are. So folks can take that to figure out where are their gaps or how strong are we connected to one another? Because to your point, it's kind of intangible. And then the third phase with this is how do we create, uh, Something scalable that could really make a dent and connect team members. We created a product that's called Rivet, which just like it sounds, it's like a little pin that connects two structures to make them stronger. Um, it's an AI powered tech platform that actually is, connects to individuals that are scientifically proven to develop a strong relationship with. And so teams are using that inside their organizations to connect folks that would normally not connect to find that one other person that boosts performance, engagement, retention, etc. So we're addressing all of that. If anyone's interested in learning more or taking these assessments, uh, they're free on our website. You can go to connectionmadeeasy.com.

Speaker B: very interesting. That's like dating in the workplace. Not except you have the right.

Speaker C: Well it's. Yeah, that's a good, great, great point. The uh, if you remember eharmony, Kristoff, it was ah, one of the most popular matching uh, but it was romantic matches. But uh, the, the chief scientific officer at eharmony was uh, helped. Who helped us create the algorithm. But you're right, it's not romantic. It's about how are we uh, scientifically based off of personalities who's, who's best suited to actually develop a strong relationship with someone else that they work with in a professional manner.

Speaker B: Very interesting. Um, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me. Congratulations on the uh, successful book launch and really appreciate you making the time.

Speaker C: My pleasure. Thanks Kristoff.

Speaker B: All right, thanks everyone for joining us today. I'll be back on Friday with James Wykerle of the Insights Management Academy. See you then.