MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Building Human Connection in a Remote World

The best way for leaders to develop employee engagement is through personal connection. This requires purposeful strategies in a virtual setting.

Employee engagement — the measure of individual commitment to organizational success — positively correlates with discretionary effort and meaningfully impacts every individual and organizational performance metric that matters. However, despite significant investments across most industries, leading engagement studies have never found more than 36% of employees engaged at work.

The Gallup Q¹² survey tool, which some consider the gold standard for measuring employee engagement, assesses what it considers to be the 12 most powerful predictors of discretionary effort. Ten of the 12 focus on human relationships, dynamics, or exchanges. Engagement and discretionary effort, then, are driven by healthy and productive human connection. That can be achieved only on a team-by-team basis.

About the Author

Jordan Birnbaum is an industrial/organizational psychologist and behavioral economist who applies social science concepts to solve clients’ workplace challenges.

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