What If Productivity Is Not The Point?

“Cristina Amigoni: There's now articles and reports of people even choosing to go to the grocery store, or to stores to pick up one thing and skip the self-check outline just to have a minimal human interaction with the cashier who's just going to ask you to pay.”

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to a very special episode of Uncover the Human. We have two reinstated hosts.

Cristina Amigoni: Just so you know, that lasted about 60 seconds, or less?

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, but I was lost for those 60 seconds. That was a very confusing time in my life.

Cristina Amigoni: I was drinking tea, and somehow.

Alex Cullimore: You were chugging tea.

Cristina Amigoni: I was chugging tea.

Alex Cullimore: I think you drank tea for most of the gap.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, yes, I'm always chugging tea.

Alex Cullimore: We fired and rehired ourselves inadvertently and advertently, respectively.

Cristina Amigoni: Well, nobody else showed up. I was drinking a tea, and nobody else showed up, so I was like, “Damn it. I guess, I got to do this one, too.”

Alex Cullimore: Oh, damn. Now we're hosts still.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. We're still here.

Alex Cullimore: Which interestingly, doesn't really relate to our topic at all. Our topic today that we decided – 

Cristina Amigoni: It sort of does.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah, the idea of belonging. The idea of community, of being able to be what it means to have some of that support and why it's important. This is something that we are noticing more and more people are feeling particularly isolated. You were seeing some recent stuff on this, too, that people are moving into what had seemed for a little bit there, old-fashioned spaces.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Malls are back, which we're definitely struggling in, like bookstores with actual books are back where people hang out and do what we used to do whenever, 10 years ago, or whenever before they went away. Also, there's now articles and reports of people even choosing to go to the grocery store, or to stores to pick up one thing and skip the self-check outline just to have a minimal human interaction with the cashier who's just going to ask you to pay. That's the level of loneliness that we've reached and the level of lack of community that we've reached is any type of connection with another being that's not a screen, or it's not a phone is very much needed right now.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. If you look, I think you could probably draw a through line on all of those about why some of those went away. We lost sight of the important facets of those. The bookstore example is a great one. Barnes and Noble and Borders, when we used to go and they eventually were like, “We'll put a coffee shop in here and go start our couches,” and people will just sat and read and it was nice. We stopped that, because we've treated the outcome, the business outcome as if that was the only thing that mattered. The important part was people buy books. Now you have a Kindle, so you can go buy a book directly from online and sit in your couch and never leave and just keep reading.

It's not that it’s not a part of being in a bookstore. Certainly, reading is there. But that wasn't the only portion of it. That's true for the interactions we have. We have self-checkout, a little bit more convenience sometimes. When you don't have to look up 17 different item codes, it's much more convenient. But you miss out on that just brief interaction or just meeting with somebody. Watching people's reels on Instagram, you're not actually communicating with them. It's like receiving a TV show. You're not on dialogue here. It's not something that's shared. All the things with AI being generated, you can generate all kinds of things, but is that the important part? You can write an email, but is it important that an email was sent, or is it important that there was communication that needed to happen?

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Was there was a connection briefly between people? We keep focusing on outcomes as if that was the important part, and we entirely lose. The same thing is getting a bunch of meeting summaries from AI, which I am absolutely guilty of. I do this all the time. AI summarizes all the notes, it's great. That means I didn't have to go through and think about it or re-summarize it. And so, I've lost all that critical thinking time. I'm just hoping that that bot did the right thing, and I might not even write about it and I haven't done the second layer of thinking that is helpful when you go through and rethink about a meeting and decide what's next and who needs to be reached out to and if you missed anything there. Those are all the necessary steps. It's not just that some meeting notes were created. It's that somebody did the thinking to create meeting notes, and somebody took the connection to do this.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes and wanted to connect with the other human. Yeah.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Had to think about what that means for the people. Who you would share it with and whether that works for them. All these considerations feel like we're lacking them a bit, or we've set them aside, almost as much as possible, almost try to set as many aside as possible.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, we went for convenience and productivity as if that's the measure of a successful life. But with all this convenience and productivity, what the hell are we supposed to do? Because I'm still washing dishes, because I go back to like, if you're going to build something to take away from me, please do my laundry and wash my dishes.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Can you just do my laundry and dishes?  Stand the tag. Figure out what load this is.

Cristina Amigoni: I actually want to do the rest of the time, so that I can be with humans.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Ah. We could have just done things, created things whenever. We can have time to do all this, pursue interests, do all the reading, whatever else, like the things that make human life interesting and allow us to share it with people, the things we want to share with people. We don't get together and be like, look at how many emails I wrote this week. Here's my Dropbox.

Cristina Amigoni: I'm pretty sure that those are metrics in a lot of companies is like, this number of Excel spreadsheets with these many lines, these number of slides in a PowerPoint. For something that could have taken one page, but no, I did it in 65 slides.

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: Therefore, I deserve a paycheck.

Alex Cullimore: There's no way for people to abuse that system. They definitely won't just create 62 fluff slides on top of the three that were necessary.

Cristina Amigoni: No. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely not. No way to abuse it.

Alex Cullimore: All while feeling a bit burnt out, because they're creating a bunch of fluff, that doesn't mean people, and burns into cynicism while slowly driving them away from community.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, yes. Also, burning down the community. Burning down the community, because now they can be trusted, because they hand that over to somebody that looks at them and like, “Well, it didn't help me. You actually made my job worse. You didn't take the time to understand the human experience. I don't want to interact with you anymore.”

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. There was a theory that went around for a while. I think there's some truth to it. It might not be as generalizing as they would have liked to make it at the time, but there was an idea that the change from pensions to 401k was actually a huge shift in culture and mindset, because there was some idea of loyalty, or part of this company. You're there for 40 years, you're building a pension. They also are going to pay for you in retirement, because there's some social contract for, of course, you put a lot of time into this and you get this reward out of it. 401k is you get one per company. Yes, you have to roll those into each other and whatever. These are all just individualized and people are jumping jobs every two years, or in AI lands, they're being laid off every few months to go try and find something new. There's a loss of community in that, because you're never building the strong relationships. You're never building the long-term identity of like, “Oh, I'm part of this. this is what carries forward.”

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, because when we get to a certain positions in certain places at work, where because the social contract has been broken, because the company is no longer creating that community for us. When we leave, or move on, we bring the community with us. We bring whoever we can with us, because that's what stuck. Yes, we learned something and we received a paycheck and hopefully, we enjoyed what we were doing, but we know that's temporary. We know that's part of the process. The people is who we want to live life with. You see it all the time, especially in leadership position, or in POTS position, in personal title positions, where if you have the capacity, the budget and the authority, you will move companies and then bring your community with you, /cult sometimes. You'll just start bringing it back, because that's what mattered. It was the community. It wasn't how many Excel spreadsheets you created.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I can count on more times than little finger digits I have on pop ads around here, the number of times I've heard someone say –

Cristina Amigoni: Which is a lot.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I have six cats. There's a lot of toe pads around here.

Cristina Amigoni: We want to do math.

Alex Cullimore: The number of times I've heard people say, “I really like the people. I want to sit around for the people. What I care about is these people. What I miss most from that job was the people. I really miss having that team. I really miss being part of this.” Because that's what our brain is programmed to do. It wasn't programmed to be a marketing specialist number three in whatever company. It was meant to just be part of contributing to a community.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Community is what's very much lacking. Community is what we found when working with clients in situations where we are working with quite a few teams where they've, I don’t want to say taking advantage of us, but they've given us the privilege to create those community moments for the sake of creating community. Yes, the goal is we need better collaboration. We need people to be able to go through the change, so that we can get to the other side. Really, all of the foundation of all of those objectives and outcomes was let's bring in people together and create opportunities for community sharing and community building.

Then, they will collaborate and talk to each other, because now they like each other a little bit more, and they know each other a little bit more and they will help each other go through the change and figure out how they can get to the other side together, because now they don't feel alone. It all comes back to let's create community moments without 65 slides to present, because most of the time you don't need them. You just literally just need the space.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I think that hits on one really important facet of any actual community building is it has to feel genuine, both in intention and in the people showing up. You have to be genuine. Because you're not going to make a real connection if you're like, I'm getting some weird work version of this person, and so, I'm not getting this person. I'm getting some facet of this, just – I'd say, there's so many people who play some kind of corporate role of like, and this is, we're all doing this today and this is this and you can't stand them, because you have no idea who the real person is. You're not sure when it's going to change. You have to be really authentic about the connections you're making. That's why you don't need the 65 slides, because you can just be like, “Yeah, nope. This is what's important to do.”

I worked in consulting right out of college and they would take – as long as we had met our targets, which we did almost every year, they would take the whole company on a trip, and it was literally a full weekend where there was maybe an hour of talking about some of the stuff and most of them were just different events you could be part of and different things to get people together. Yeah, it cost them millions, but it was worth the investment, because after that, everybody suddenly had new friends, many people they were talking to and people they could join projects with. They had just collaborated on something that needed to be done internally with the company. It was a great way to just connect a lot of people, and you just take your hands off the wheel and let people mix.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. It was actually consulting, too. My first consulting job was one of my first jobs back in New York. It was, I think, probably a few months after I started within a practice and they put all of us as whatever, 50, 60, 70 people of all the jobs, so everybody in the practice. It wasn't just only the senior consultants, only the directors, only the BPs, everybody else, you get to stay back. No, it was everybody. This is a day off, get on the bus, we're going, we went to some really nice place in New Jersey. Yes, I did say New Jersey, but it was a very nice place.

Alex Cullimore: Almost sounded like a nice thing in one place. There are nice places in New Jersey.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. It was a beautiful place. I think it was in New Jersey, because it was outside of the city. We just hung out all day and we did activities, and it was all in nature and there was a lake and then we did a scotch tasting, because one of the partners was from Scotland, he taught us all how to properly drink scotch and all these things. The next day back in the office, it was a completely different atmosphere. The productivity, the collaboration that happened after that was skyrocketing. Before, it was like, oh, I don't even know people's names and I'm still five months in trying to figure out who's doing what and what their name is and how I get in touch with them when somebody asks me to, or what they want when they come to my desk and want something.

After that, it was like, oh, yeah, we all know each other and we can all just walk up to everybody's desk. When somebody asks for something, or is asking for – first of all, they're asking for help. But when they're interacting, like “Yup, I know you, I trust you. I now have a human connection with you. Whatever you need, how can I help?” As opposed to, “I'm too busy. Look at my calendar. Come back in two weeks.”

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yeah. That's one thing that we heard when we did our leadership program right as COVID was starting to open back up. It was a little bit before we returned to office. We were working with a very distributed company and we kept bringing people in from all different offices and all different departments. One of the comments we got consistently was, wow, it's just so nice to know these people as people. I've occasionally known these people basically as a name on a giant team's directory, a giant active directory, workplace contact sheet, not – and then somebody I would have a chat with on a chat bot, a chat message, not on the phone. Suddenly, they're just easy to just call up and be like, “Oh, I just need this one thing for 15 minutes.” The relationships are better. The productivity is better.

I saw that productivity should be the only measure of life, but it is important to note that if you are only focused on trying to do productivity, then community is still a huge portion of getting that done.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It's the foundation. You want productivity, create community. You will get productivity. I can't remember if it's –

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. If you want to fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I think there's just no way to do this if you don't get people to work together.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly. I was meeting up with a client who has actually gone through our leadership program in a bunch of our community solutions to get to whatever organizational objective. It's amazing, because with all the changes and everything that's going out and the burning out, she said, “We all feel like we're going to lose our job the next day. We're all just counting the hours until I'm the one that loses it.” But the feeling of community is still there. They're still all working together. They're still all going through it together. No, it doesn't make it good, or right to create a culture where everybody's afraid they're going to get fired in an hour constantly. At least they have something to latch on in that feeling.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yes. It helps a lot when you reorg things, when people move around and get shuffled around. Not just the reorgs that are just euphemisms for layoffs, but the reorgs where you're just actually restructuring different departments, it helps when you have that relationship party. You just rebuild that. Now people just have some level of trust with somebody who's suddenly in a new function. It moves a lot smoother. It's a lot easier to make those dynamic changes. It's also a huge ingredient in agility and your ability to change easily, be a little bit more flexible, be more adaptable. You get everybody to move together in a more – it's like a school of fish. They're all moving more in harmony and they're staying safe that way.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Exactly. When the destination changes, they all move. As opposed to all scattered, because they're in their own sea.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: Fish tank.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. If you were to move into like, how do we help create a community? There's a few things. What are things that come to your minds when you think about ways? We've talked about one that I think is really great, that people don't maybe do enough, which is company retreats that are not title specific. It's not the off site for the executives. It's an actual mix. I've never been at a workplace where I didn't have friends at all different titles and voice.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, yeah. Yes. I still remember, after that New Jersey trip, all these directors and partners, which were intimidating, because it was one of my first jobs. I was at the bottom. I mean, I wasn't even in the food chain. I was outside of that.

Alex Cullimore: I was looking at the food chain being like, “Oh, God.”

Cristina Amigoni: Was looking at the food chain. All those people of a sudden was like, “Oh, I can approach you. We can all just communicate.” I don't have to go through five layers to approach you. It changed completely. The titles no longer matter. They matter for the right things. They matter for the decisions. They matter for the expertise. They matter for all those things, but they don't prevent – they don't create silos. They don't prevent human connection. The human connection actually made work go much faster. Yeah, that's definitely a huge thing.

Creating, like investing in creating community moments half an hour a month, an hour a month. Just actually putting on the calendar community moments of like, “We’re here. Just do. I’ll be in the same room and talk about what’s going on.” And it’s a safe space to do that. If you can't, use a third party. We're available.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. We do that all the time. That's one of the main things we end up doing, no matter what the original engagement is, we end up putting a lot of community building in places, just because we offer a lot of space. There's space to be. That's the other huge thing that I would recommend to leaders. I’m just thinking about creating space. What are the places that allow people to have more of a say? What can you do to model having more of a say, being more vulnerable at bidding your own mistakes, so that people feel like, “Oh, this is not a culture where we have to act infallible while we all inevitably make some mistakes and then try and hide them.”

Cristina Amigoni: Which works out really well for –

Alex Cullimore: Works out well every time. I've never seen it backfire.

Cristina Amigoni: Every time. Yes. Every time.

Alex Cullimore: No, these are the things that you can think about. Also, if you can't find it at work, it's okay to find it outside, because you should be, you should have a diverse community, regardless. You should be looking at that. There's lots of ways to do it. You can even focus on work in communities. We're actually hosting a few calls. We're doing a series called leadership conversations and we're doing another series called Siamo on the DL, which is for dialogues and leadership. These are two different versions of either drop-in hours for leaders to get support from each other. Or here's a set topic where we'll talk a little bit about it and let's share different experiences and understand, here's what we're really confronting as leaders currently, or as people in the workplace. What are we confronting and what do we need to face down? You can get a lot of help. It's like finding a much more personalized Reddit thread.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Indeed, with that human connection.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. And actually get a human connection.

Cristina Amigoni: Stop going to the store to buy eggs that you just bought yesterday, so that the cashier can actually greet you and have that human connection.

Alex Cullimore: That's a tragic mental image of somebody coming home to their fridge with 48 cartons of eggs.

Cristina Amigoni: Still eating eggs. Eating eggs again, and we're going to throw them all away.

Alex Cullimore: I’m going to start making souffles and casseroles. I’m going to use those fast.

Cristina Amigoni: That's how you end up with so many duplicates in your fridge, by the way, because somebody is missing human connection and going to the store over and over.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. It's definitely not my own mental disorganization. It's totally just –

Cristina Amigoni: It's definitely not writing a list down where you actually go to the store.

Alex Cullimore: Definitely not that.

Cristina Amigoni: But yes. Come together and find communities. If you need to find a third party, or outside, that's some of our conversations in our Siamo on the DL are about.

Alex Cullimore: That's what most of our work is.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. That's what most of our work is. Just come and share. It is amazing what it does for our well-being, our preventing burnout, and just wanting to feel better about our lives when we feel heard. If nothing else, you can feel heard, because there's other humans that are taking 5, 10, 30 minutes, 60 minutes to just listen.

Alex Cullimore: There's a real power in both doing the listening and being listened to and feeling that space. That could actually like, “Oh, okay. Now I don't feel as alone. This isn't just bouncing around my head in a circle endlessly. It feels like it was shared, understood.” It doesn't feel as lonely, and it doesn't feel as isolating. It is just trapping when you have those thoughts that just move in a circle. There's plenty of reasons that these can't be set up very easily within companies, so it's fine to find that outside. Companies can have just hard cultures, and they can be psychologically unsafe. I would argue, they should work on changing those things. But because many haven't, and you might be in one of those places, it's fair to seek that elsewhere. It's fair to find that. Doesn't mean you can't find help. It doesn't mean you can't be helped professionally, just because it's not a culture of helping each other. It doesn't mean you can't find help from people. Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: There's ways to find help from people. Yes, it's true. Sometimes you want to be outside, because you want to be.

Alex Cullimore: That's nice, too.

Cristina Amigoni: That’s nice, too. There's lack of psychological safety, or you want to learn different things that you're not hearing within the company, even if you had the psychological safety. There's various ways to learn and to provide help for others and support. Everybody's more richer. More richer.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Everybody's more richer.

Cristina Amigoni: More richer.

Alex Cullimore: Everybody's richer.

Cristina Amigoni: Everybody's richer.

Alex Cullimore: More richly rich.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: No, but it does enrich that. Also, one of the things that people have talked about in this era of job insecurity is how nice it just happened at work, because that's what really depends, how you can get interest. That's how you can find other things, and how you can feel a little bit more like you know what's going on, and you have people that are in your corner and happy to stand up for you, and this is a great way to build it. Go find people who are there, have similar interests, and want similar things.

Cristina Amigoni: There's somebody wanting community at my doorbell. They just walked up, but it's okay. They don't need to speak to me.

Alex Cullimore: This is what causes disengagement.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah.

Alex Cullimore: In summary, community is very important. It's something that I think is particularly currently lacking. We have a lot of reinforcement. Maybe we shouldn't have let sociopaths who don't care about people build all the tools that we use. Maybe we should have had more empathy infused in these tools.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Maybe.

Alex Cullimore: Either way, we can do it ourselves.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, indeed. Thank you for listening.

Alex Cullimore: Thanks for listening.

 [END OF EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We Are Siamo, that is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. If you’d like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions, or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is @wearesiamo, S-I-A-M-O. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or, I suppose, Cristina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere else.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. We’d like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you. And Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you guys so much for listening. Tune in next time.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

[END]