How to Bring Your Human to Work with Workplace Strategist Erica Keswin
Season 3 Episode 9
“The absence of intentionality is a recipe for resentment.”
This episode of How We Future features Erica Keswin, a longtime advocate for human-centered leadership and the author of Bring Your Human to Work, Rituals Roadmap, and The Retention Revolution. Lisa and Erica explore how leaders can intentionally design work environments that honor connection, dignity, and trust in an era defined by AI, hybrid work, and constant change.
Erica shares three strategies to improve human connection that, data shows, increases ROI, productivity, and morale.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
How return to office policies may be working against an organization’s best interest
How clear protocols can dramatically improve trust and engagement
Why connection, empathy, and dignity are measurable business advantages
How trust determines whether employees embrace or resist AI and change
At a moment when many organizations are defaulting to control, compliance, or exhaustion, this conversation is a reminder that bringing your human to work may be the most future-ready move of all.
Links from the episode:
Thank You For Being Late by Thomas Friedman
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Erica Keswin: The data shows that companies whose people do feel a sense of purpose at work outperform the stock market by nearly 7%. Yes, the human stuff is the hardest stuff, and people say, “Oh, it’s the touchy-feely, soft stuff,” but I believe, and I have seen it, that there are business implications.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow, starting today.
Work has changed a lot in the last few years. Where we work, how we work, who we work with, almost all of it is foundationally different, but underneath all that change, what we should be valuing most is still the human experience. That’s why this week, I’m so excited to sit down with Erica Keswin. Erica is a bestselling author and workplace strategist who helps leaders and organizations figure out what it means to be human at work, especially in the era of AI.
In our conversation, Erica shares the personal moment that launched her work, why technology isn’t necessarily the villain, and how small, intentional choices can radically change how people feel and perform at work. This episode is an invitation to slow down just enough to notice the humans in the system, including yourself, and to rethink what leadership really asks of us right now. Let’s jump in with Erica Keswin.
Erica Keswin, I’m so excited to invite you to How We Future.
Erica: Thanks for the invitation. I’m so excited.
Lisa: You’ve been doing this work for over 25 years. You’ve written what I call the human-centered leadership trilogy. Bring Your Human to Work, Rituals Roadmap, The Retention Revolution, all of them focused on actionable, practical ways that we can make choices that help others do their best work. I call that design, and I also call that leadership. How did you get into this work?
Erica: Wow. It will take me back. I’ll share one story that really got me on this path. My background’s always been in that intersection of business and psychology. I’ve worked in the human capital space, human resources, executive recruiting, but specifically, the research on bringing your human to work and human connection really stems from something that happened to me over a period of 10 years. The way that I think about it is, in 1998, I was engaged to my now husband, Jeff, who you know, and Jeff invited me to join him at a conference in Bermuda. I said, “Well, I’d love to go, but I can’t because I’m saving all our vacation days for our honeymoon.”
Then I remember that I’d just gotten this thing, this device called the BlackBerry, which would allow me to work from anywhere. I went, and we had a great time, and I was really productive. I was sitting on the beach. I, true story, remember saying to myself out loud, “I can’t believe this is my life. This technology is so cool.” That was moment one, 1998. 10 years later, it’s 2008, I still have my BlackBerry, which, yes, shows my age, but I’d also added an iPhone, which had just come out. Now I’m walking around with two phones. I have three kids, and all the craziness that comes with that. There was a day, in contrast, my phones are ringing and pinging and ringing and pinging.
In contrast to that blissful moment in Bermuda 10 years earlier, when I was sitting peacefully by myself, I said out loud again, but a little differently, “I can’t believe this is my life.” It was those two moments, juxtaposed, that set me on this journey to begin to think about how do we find what I call the sweet spot between tech and connect? How do we leverage the technology for all of its greatness? It’s awesome, right? We’re sitting here. We’re doing a podcast. We’re using podcast technology. You’re in San Francisco, I presume. I’m in Florida. The technology is great. We’re looking at each other. I feel like I’m with you in the room.
I’d rather be with you, but this is sort of second best. Then how do we also put that technology “in its place” to connect with humans on a deeper level? From literally that moment, when I’m sitting there with my phones ringing and pinging and dinging, I set out on this journey interviewing hundreds of leaders and researchers around the world. It led to these three books on the topic.
Lisa: I love that. I never heard that story. It is such a moment. It’s like time passes, and yet you can have that same instinct, and the context switches completely. I think, particularly, yes, where I live right now, in the Bay Area, it feels like technology is going to save us. I think your story reminds us sometimes I feel like that old, this is going to date me now, that old Soylent Green movie, “It’s about people. People.” Of course, that was a dystopic story of people eating people. I think that technology can eat people. It can eat our humanity. All of a sudden, we’re responding, as you said, to these dings and pings and the promise that technology was supposed to make us more productive, to allow us to have better returns.
Yet your research suggests that when you invest in the humans, that that’s one of the best business strategies that you can do. It’s not just the technology. It’s really about honoring how humans can use them, and that requires an appreciation for psychology, for the emotional intelligence, for where it sits within the context of their work. I love that you continue to say the human stuff is the hardest stuff. We tend to take it for granted, but as you point out time and time again, that’s actually the stuff that really needs our attention. How do you get leaders to buy into that?
Erica: Lead with data to show them the ROI of human connection. In my work these days, I’ve been out on the road talking to leaders about how to be a great human leader in the age of AI. I came up with this roadmap. There’s a million things we can do. My goal in my work is to say, “Let’s just start with these three. If you start with these three and make some headway, you’ll be a good part of the way there.” The first piece is great human leaders connect their people to purpose and to the mission and the values of the organization. The data shows that companies whose people do feel a sense of purpose at work outperform the stock market by nearly 7%.
Yes, the human stuff is the hardest stuff, and people say, “Oh, it’s the touchy-feely soft stuff,” but I believe, and I have seen it, that there are business implications. One of my favorite examples, and I’m sure you’ve heard this story, but I’ll share it for your listeners, is when JFK walked into NASA for the first time in 1962, the first person he saw was a man holding a broom. That man was the janitor. He said to the janitor, “Well, what do you do here?” The janitor is like, “Oh my God, Mr. President, I’m helping to put a man on the moon.” He was right. Every single person in that building in 1962, in some way, shape, or form, was helping to put a man on the moon.
One of the challenges in many organizations today is that people don’t know how what they do is connected to that bigger purpose. That’s one of the buckets that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, around how do we bring our human to work, is it’s to make people at the top levels, the middle levels, the front office, the back office feel connected to that bigger mission. To your question, I’m like, look, there is a business case for this.
Lisa: I love that. We could just pause there for a minute. First of all, it shows the humanity of what can happen. As you said, a janitor feeling pride in what he’s doing, more than on the surface, I’m sweeping the floors, I’m making sure things are clean. I am connected to something bigger than myself. Also, really shows a sense of respect and dignity, and something that will help us pull to our better senses. It’s something that motivates us beyond any individual task. It reminds me also, Erica. A few years ago, I was visiting Paris with my daughter, and Notre Dame was still being reconstructed after the fire.
One of the things that struck me was when you went out, you couldn’t get too close, but you saw the fenced scaffolding. They had the most gorgeous pictures of all of the construction workers that were rebuilding the gorgeous cathedral, the plumbers, the electricians, in an almost like Annie Leibovitz gorgeous photo. I just thought, “This is incredible. What an intentional choice to honor the people that are bringing back this symbol of this great city.” It didn’t take any more money. It just took intention. I think so much of the work that you do is about reminding leaders we can make different choices intentionally that don’t necessarily require huge budgets or specialty. Just about honoring the people and allowing them to be the best version of themselves.
Erica: One thing I would add to that is one of my big takeaways in my work around all the technology and being human is that it’s the default use of technology that degrades connection. It’s not the technology itself. It’s if we always default to it. You and I met in a very in real life way at a conference. One thing led to another, and here we are. For the rest of our lives, if we only texted or emailed or even met virtually and seeing each other like we’re doing now, I do believe the relationship, it begins to degrade. You need those moments of in real life. That, to me, it’s like we need to stop defaulting, which is another way of saying what you just said, which is we need to be intentional around how, when, where, why we connect.
Lisa: I love that. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power of human conversation and connection. Something that I came to when I was researching my book about conversations, the more human the conversation, the more human the response. I think you’re right. If you think about how all this technology has narrowed the way that we communicate, we’ve lost that holistic connection. One of the other things that I remember doing research on is that the emotion that we can feel when we connect to each other can actually make us better decision-makers.
It means so much of, at least what I learned in business school, was keep emotion out of the boardroom. Sure, unchecked emotion can be unhelpful, but we are human. We are not robots. That emotion is a source of data, whether we’re feeling nervous or fearful or excited. If there’s ways to incorporate it, and being in person allows us to get a wider range of those data inputs, I think, is really, really valuable.
Erica: Yes, 100%.
Lisa: Okay. That’s one.
Erica: Yes. That’s the first bucket. The second bucket is great human leaders connect people with others, which is increasingly hard in this hybrid world. One of the things I share in my keynote and gives me a chuckle is I’ll say to people that have come from all over, let’s say, to be at a conference, I’ll say, “All right, you just took trains, planes, or automobiles to get here. You checked in, you got your badge, you got your swag bag, you filled up your water bottle, and you are ready to take this conference by storm.” Then the person leading the conference says, “All right, Lisa, you can head right back up to your room and listen to the keynote and participate in the workshops from your room on Zoom.”
I bet you’d be pretty pissed off. Yet this is happening in offices all across the country every single day. People commute into their offices, half their team is not there, and they’re doing the exact same type of work they could be doing from home in their sweatpants. This is what someone who wants to be a great human leader needs to keep forefront in their mind is the absence of intentionality is a recipe for resentment. When you bring people together, there needs to be, one, a purpose. The purpose could be, let’s just get together to remember that you’re an actual human. It could be to accelerate a work project, it could be for learning and development, whatever it is, be explicit.
If there’s no purpose, think about making it an email. Then we need to have protocols. When we are getting together in real life, or virtually, everybody’s multitasking their way through their days, and it really is hurting relationship. Again, none of this is rocket science. I feel like, as a society, we were better at this in the year or two post-COVID. Everybody was honoring relationships and making sure they were checking in, and I’ve seen it just fall off the cliff. I really want to think about how we bring those protocols back, and we can talk about it as it relates to AI.
I talk about in my book having-- this will date me too, and you, but Julie McCoy from The Love Boat to have a cruise director, who owns connection? Whose job is it to make sure that people are having those moments with each other? This is totally cheesy, but left to our own devices, pun very much intended, we’re not connecting. Back to the ROI, the data shows that when people feel that they’re connected to others, no surprise to you as a design person, but employee engagement goes up, job satisfaction goes up, health and wellness goes up. We are still in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and even productivity goes up. Again, the numbers are there.
Lisa: Yes, I love it, and I love that you have a whole book on how to think about rituals or protocols as a way of connecting others that can be designed, and they can be small, small interventions. I know even in my class, I always have music when people come in, and we always--
Erica: Oh, cool.
Lisa: Yes. The music is always also themed to our guests, so our guest feels totally alive. It was really fun. One time, we were talking about future of sustainability, we had Here Comes the Sun, we had all kinds of songs about the earth. It’s just small. It’s a small thing, but it really helps people get centered. We actually say in the beginning of a class, “This is a no laptop class. We’re going to give you a journal, and we want you to bring the journal.” Even the guests notice it. Then my favorite part, which is really paying off, one of the core assignments in the class, because it is a speaker series, the students have to write handwritten thank you notes to at least two guests.
We don’t tell them which one. We don’t tell them what to say. Handwritten thank you notes. Some of them are loose leaf, ripped out, with the spirals still there. Some are beautiful cards. It doesn’t matter. Then we send them to our guests. We don’t tell them it’s coming. It’s just surprise for everybody. Those are just small choices. We often say in design, of course, constraints are a gift. They actually allow you to be more creative if they’re designed, as you were saying, with that intent in mind.
Erica: I love that. I’m writing that down. Constraints are a gift. I say this sometimes. I think about it like parenting. The kids don’t want a curfew, but deep down, they want to know that there’s someone actually looking out for them. I also feel like, as it relates to constraints at work and protocols, things are so stressful right now, and the pendulum is swinging, and AI, and am I going to have a job? I do think it’s this moment where employees just want their leaders to put a stake in the ground and be really clear about a lot of this stuff. They may not agree with it at all, but just tell me, because if you don’t tell me, I’m going to feel like it’s changing every 20 minutes.
Lisa: This is such a huge theme, Erica, that’s been coming up, particularly this season, where we’re focused on skills that we could have learned or at least gotten more practice on before it was a crisis, navigating ambiguity. We just talked with Sabrina Sullivan about the Maybe Monster. I was like, “Oh, maybe, I thought, was like this hedgy word. She was like, “No, maybe is your gift because it allows you to lean into the potential opportunity,” with the hope of doing exactly what you’re talking about, which is clarity. That’s the other theme we keep hearing. Can you be clear? You don’t have to be right necessarily or perfect, but you have clarity.
I think this is where your work is so valuable because you’re saying, “Get clarity on your values.” If, at the end of the day, what you value are the humans that you’ve really worked hard to recruit into your organization to ask them to give their most precious resource, which is their time and energy, how are you honoring that? How are you creating the space and the conditions? I think you and I spent a lot of time thinking about those details. The other thing I’ll just say, going back to your post-COVID, as you were describing that, one of my absolute favorite commercials, and maybe we’ll link to it in the show notes, was an EXTRA commercial. It was to the Celine Dion, It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.
I don’t know if you remember this, but it was playing this Celine-- “And it’s all coming back.” People were coming out of their doors and rubbing their eyes, with long beards. The whole thing was popping in the EXTRA so that they could go and be close to each other.
Erica: Oh my gosh, that’s so funny.”
Lisa: It was just epic. Again, I realized, and maybe this was even more prevalent for me because I get undergrad students. They spent their COVID years in high school, that moment where you’re supposed to really take some risks and figure out who you are. They were behind, they were protected, they were insulated from some of those natural experiences. Erica, I had to really coax them to be present. It was amazing. They just came in a little flat because they were unpracticed.
Erica: Yes, 100%. The last one is just great human leaders connect people to themselves and how they want to grow and develop. The whole personal and professional development, and the focus on skills, there’s a lot going on in that area also. What I think about, as it relates to AI, is that there’s been a lot of interesting articles recently about AI and empathy, but we’re asking employees to take a leap of faith and gain these new skills, and potentially be training their replacement. So much of bringing your human to work in this third bucket right now is, I think it’s very difficult, or I know it’s very difficult to roll out AI and all of this new stuff in the absence of trust and in the absence of transparency.
A recent article even went beyond that and said that if there isn’t that sense of empathy within the organization, they’re seeing employees almost oppose, and begin to think about sabotaging a company’s AI strategy. It’s the skill piece. We’re only seeing the beginning of how companies are thinking about this.
Lisa: Oh, it’s so nuanced. It’s so complex. That’s exactly right. For the first time, we’re really seeing the knowledge worker being outsourced in a very foundational way if they are not on that adaption curve, but it’s not going to happen on its own. A couple of models come to mind, too. I’d love to get your reaction. I think a lot about, in 2016, Thomas Friedman wrote a book called Thank You for Being Late, and in the opening chapter, he talked about a conversation he had with Astro Teller, who was at the time the head of Google Moonshot X. Basically, Thomas Friedman was like, “What’s going on with all these technologies?”
This is, again, 10 years ago. Astro Teller drew the exponential curve. He said, “This is what’s happening with technology, Moore’s law, doubling of power,” and then he drew this linear line and said, “But humans adapt linearly.” What we’re seeing is an outpacing of the technology and how it’s growing more powerful, and humans’ ability to change, to adapt, to be flexible and nimble, in part because more of them needed to read your books. The thing that I think about in that chart is that it’s a powerful description of these two different systems that are operating under very different paces of change, but that it was also 10 years ago.
Now we have a curve that’s even steeper, tools begetting tools, code creating code, and our society given misinformation, the lack of trust that you talked about. Loneliness, lack of connection. I think we’re on the decline. I don’t even think we are literally adapting. I think we are flat, if not declining, which to me suggests the importance of your work and your roadmaps to help people connect to themselves. What is your own growth pattern? Why? Connect with others, people to people, and connect to a higher purpose that actually helps them feel hopeful and optimistic and part of something.
To me, that is absolutely foundational in order to help get that gap, and at least a little bit smaller. I think that is the core leadership of our time. I wonder, Erica, if you could share, because you are in front of all these corporations and different kinds of leaders, do you have any examples of people doing it well?
Erica: It’s leader by leader. I think a big piece of it, again, none of it is really rocket science, but it is really addressing it head-on, and in almost like we were doing during the pandemic, to say, “Look, I don’t know when we’re going back to the office. I don’t know when this is going to end.” The leaders that can say, “I don’t have all the answers,” is really important because no one does have all the answers. My model for this is the leaders that have vulnerability, that are willing to say they don’t have the answers, who bring that sense of empathy, and are willing to experiment in different ways.
Helen Russell, who’s the head of HR at HubSpot, recently shared that they created a ritual at HubSpot called Mondai, but it’s spelled M-O-N-D-A-I. The idea was on Mondays, people would share use cases around how they’re using AI. It could be professionally, it could be personally. Companies that urge their employees to share not only their successes with it, but their screw-ups with it. That’s going to begin to normalize it, to make people feel like it’s safe to play around with it. You want that sense of experimentation.
I was at an event last week and sat next to a COO of an insurance company. They have all these operations, customer support, and we hear all these stories about getting rid of the customer support and using AI to answer these basic questions. He said, “We reiterate over and over, we want you to learn this, but we’re not looking to replace you.” I pushed back on him a little bit, and I was like, “Look, I just don’t think these days that’s enough, that you need to be rethinking how their jobs might change.”
Maybe it’s that certain basic questions go this way to AI, and other ones, they’re going to upskill them, but just by saying, “Yes, the cat’s out of the bag,” and people are so worried about the Oracles of the world that lay off, whatever, 10,000, however many thousands of people they laid off via a single email at 6:00 AM.
Lisa: Talk about inhumane at work. That actually got my trajectory even going on this path of futures and design at the leadership level was in 1999, when the dot-bomb bottomed out. I was part of a company, we hired super smart, super nice people, that was our motto. Then, as all of our customers who were the dot-com companies started to crack, the board said, “You got to lay off 30% of your workforce.” It was my very first RIF, reduction in force, I didn’t even know what that term was. The way that the leadership handled it was so inhumane, so counter-cultural to everything we had built. I was appalled. I was so naive.
Even though I was spared, I didn’t see the leadership the same anymore. To your point, trust was fundamentally broken. Not only did I eventually leave, but I dedicated my life to saying, “How could we do better?” That helped me understand this connection of, wow, leaders can design different choices. They can have different conversations. I think your earlier point about trust is so powerful, something people can maybe audit right now. Are they building trust? I don’t think trust is something you buy down on the shelf when you need it because you’re going to announce a tough decision. It’s all of the small decisions that you make now, as you were saying, showing up authentically and honestly.
I just want to share one example I saw yesterday. There’s a colleague that I’ve worked with before at LinkedIn. I didn’t realize that LinkedIn had just announced another round of layoffs. He said, I think you would approve, but you tell me. Just a very human-centered leadership post. He said, “I am just so sorry for all my colleagues. I want you to know I’m here for you. Reach out if I can be helpful. This is really hard.” Just not sugarcoating it, not dismissing it, and just offering what he could, which was care and a personal connection, and an offer to be useful. I just think even that kind of acknowledgement at a very, very human level can be really powerful.
Erica: Yes, 100%.
Lisa: Erica, I know you don’t only just coach, and it’s worth saying again that you are not only an incredible speaker and researcher and writer, author, you are also a practitioner yourself. You do this in your own life. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about The Spaghetti Project, which is a passion of yours, and even just how you take some of what you teach others into your own work and practice, and even personal relationships.
Erica: The Spaghetti Project was inspired by a study that I came upon when I was writing my first book, Bring Your Human to Work, which came out in 2018. The study was out of Cornell, and it was done by a guy named Kevin Kniffin. Kevin was studying team performance and what makes one team higher-performing than another team. Kevin’s dad was a firefighter, and he grew up hanging out mostly in the firehouses with the guys, and that’s who he decided to study as part of his PhD. The short version of what he found was that the firefighters who were the most dedicated to the ritual of the firehouse meal, sitting around the table, connecting as humans, those firefighters actually saved more lives.
What he found was that there was a correlation between human connection and bottom-line performance, which, at the time, I knew that intuitively, but then there was data and science and this study to back it up. I was over the moon. When I interviewed a lot of firefighters and heard their stories, I said, “What does this mean in practice?” Because if you ever watch TV shows or movies about firefighters, their stereotypical go-to meal in the firehouse is spaghetti. I launched The Spaghetti Project, which is a platform that shares the science and stories of connection at work.
I host dinners or lunches, and we have spaghetti. Sometimes I hosted one in my apartment, and our gas wasn’t working, so we substituted sushi, but the idea was the same. It’s something that I think about a lot and use it as a vehicle to bring people together.
Lisa: Again, amazing. We have to eat. It’s a meal, but why not do it together? Why not do it with a communal dish, comfort food, something that brings us together? Sometimes there’s an agenda. Sometimes there isn’t. Just to be together is just so powerful. I love how you model that in all facets of your life. I know you spend a lot of time, in particular, mentoring young women to support them, bring them together over Spaghetti Project. Can you talk a little bit about some of that work and why it’s so important?
Erica: Yes. I do with all different groups of people, but I feel like when you bring people together, groups of young women, one of the questions I often ask at The Spaghetti Project events is I ask everyone to go around and just share one thing that they could use help with from the group. Sometimes it’s work-related. Sometimes it’s we’re going on a vacation, and you have a good travel age-- It doesn’t matter what it is. I’m the note-taker. After the meal, we’ll reconnect people. Hopefully, it just builds on itself, and it gives people a network. I also think that women, we often don’t ask for things. We’re taking care of the world, trying to help everybody else, so it pushes people.
It’s funny. Sometimes people are so uncomfortable. I have to say something like, “You all are willing to help me? I’m always the helper.” That, I have found, is even more meaningful with groups of women. The other group that I’ve gotten involved with, and I know you and I share a passion for sports and high-level athletics, I started to get involved in the Olympics when I was at a dinner and had no idea that in our country, our US athletes get no federal funding. When they’re competing, 57% of them make less than $50,000 a year. I started volunteering and getting involved from a career perspective, trying to help the athletes figure out what are their transferable skills? What might they do when they retire?
Many of them are really overwhelmed and even depressed, coming down off that high of that Olympic experience. I created something called the Women’s Circle, where we bring female athletes and ultimately try to raise awareness and money. More and more women are having kids and then going back to compete, and they can’t afford childcare, or we have to raise money to ship their breast milk back from some other country. There’s just so many things that people don’t think about. Those events have been great because, again, it’s under the umbrella of great things happen when women connect, and people build all kinds of relationships as part of these.
Lisa: I love both of those examples, Erica, because I think it is, again, modeling your own human at work and in life. I think people sometimes overlook the power of both listening and caring, like what’s going on, what you need help with, and then the ability to connect. These are things that you can do that create outsized value for people, and it just requires being aware. I often talk about with some of my colleagues that we are all the heroes of our own story, that we forget. How could we be helpful to someone if we just listen, ask a question? Sometimes it’s a small thing. Sometimes, even just helping people feel seen about what they need help with is extraordinary as an opener. “Wait, what did you say? What? You want to help me?”
Then the gift of help, incredible. Incredible. I know the research suggests that giving can be a huge source of your own personal resilience and your own personal sense of meaning and connection that often gets overlooked. We can all learn to do that, and I love that you’re doing that in these different ways, and even bringing attention, going back to the athletes, here are these athletes that do incredible things. We celebrate them when we see them perform, but pausing to say, “What did it take to get there? What obstacles did they overcome?”
As you’re saying, asking a few questions to realize we are one of the only countries that does not provide some of the foundational support for these athletes to represent their country. Really, we have an opportunity to think wider about what it means to support such a celebrated part of our cycles of life. As we near the end of our time, and I just always love learning from you, what are some practical things? When people get you on the side after a big note, they’re like, “Okay, Erica, this all sounds great. What’s one or two things that I could start to do immediately?”
Erica: That’s a great question. A big issue right now, and I don’t think there’s an easy answer. Maybe you’ve seen some of this in your work, but I wouldn’t think six years post-COVID that a lot of companies are still struggling with this idea of return to office, and do we make it a mandate, and how do we do it, and do you make exceptions? You want to be all things to all people. I think that’s an ongoing struggle. How do you do it? My response to them goes back to that absence of intentionality is a recipe for resentment.
If you work for an organization and you’re bringing people together a couple of days a week, and you would probably have thoughts on this from a design perspective. I say to them, “It’s not that you need to have activities and connections and all this stuff all day long, but it’s to be strategic about how people are spending their time together on those days, that the connecting is the work, that you don’t have to feel like you’re wasting time doing that, that it’s built in.” Whether it’s a team meeting, your one-on-one, a lunch and learn, giving back to your local community, and having a service day once a month, whatever that is, I’m always looking for great examples of companies that are figuring out ways to think about that.
It’s funny, when we talk about it, I get sometimes a lot of eye rolls, going, “Are we still talking about it?” So many people are still thinking about it. It’s just not going away. It’s hard. It is really hard to do it well. Again, you’re the design person, maybe we can do it together, try to begin to figure this thing out. What is sad to me is so many companies are saying, “I’m too tired of trying to figure it out.” Basically, “Screw it, we’re all going back.” That is not the right answer, in my opinion. The technology is amazing. We don’t have to be in the office five days a week, 24-7, but people are really burned out trying to figure it out.
Lisa: Yes. No, it’s a great question. I think partly, as you said, they might’ve been thinking about it in the wrong way, more of a compliance, like are you here butt-in-seat, versus what do you get? What is the joy? At the d.school, I will say, we also have a bit of a fluid policy, but we’re asked to come in a few days a week. What happens to us, in part, we’re a very, very creative culture. The spontaneous connections are unbelievable. I often think, particularly as you were saying in a conference, and maybe it’s too much to do on a weekly basis, but I always think about really breaking things down to when the day is done, what has happened? What are you talking about? What are you thinking about? What are you still remembering?
I certainly thought about that with my class, whether it’s the song, or the question, or an exchange that happened that was memorable. Then sometimes I even put a quantified component to it. Sometimes, when I’m designing a conference, I say, “Three, two, one. I want you to have three things you’re excited to explore or questions that align with you, two people you’re excited to follow up with in some capacity, and one thing you’re ready to try.” Even just putting that little frame up, people are like, “Oh, I could do that. Three, two, one. I could do that.”
I think it gets back to that trust piece. I’m often asked about how to design conversations in person so that they’re worthwhile. I often think about what is the experience that you want to facilitate so that it sticks with them on the other side. How do you really make it valuable for them in the choices that you make? Just taking that different perspective around designing with the end in mind can be really valuable. Over time, this is the thing, you’ll develop a reputation. “Oh, I don’t want to miss Erica’s meeting,” but really thinking about it as a sense of responsibility, and that then builds the trust.
Erica: Yes.
Lisa: Anyway. Erica, is there anything that you’re particularly excited about? For folks that are listening, they want to learn more about your work, where should they go?
Erica: They can go to my website, which is just my name, ericakeswin.com. My books are on there. I have a relatively new speaker reel. You get a sense of the kinds of things that I talk about. These days, I’m really trying to think about-- it’s almost going back to my very first book, six-plus years ago, Bring Your Human to Work, and what does that look like in the age of AI? I’m really trying to dig into what is my own point of view on what that looks like.
Lisa: I just really want to thank you, not only for joining us today on How We Future, but for all the work that you’re doing. I just feel like you are a tireless advocate for the human spirit. The way you show up, the energy that you bring. I want to encourage everyone listening to also sign up for your amazing newsletter. So personal. You walk the talk. I’ve seen you share things vulnerably, like, “Whoops, made that mistake. Here’s why it was a mistake. Here’s what I learned from it.” So valuable, a tireless champion, so generous. Thank you for joining us.
Erica: Well, thanks for having me, and I’ll see you in real life in a month or so.
Lisa: I can’t wait.
I love Erica’s thoughts on connection and how it doesn’t have to disappear just because of technology. We just have to be intentional about maintaining it. Here’s something concrete to try this week. Choose one moment where people are already together. A meeting, a team lunch, a class, even a family dinner, and make the connection the point, not the background. Name why you’re together. Put the phones away. Ask one question that helps people feel seen and heard, not evaluated. If you learned something from this episode, I’d love to hear it. Leave a comment and visit our Substack at the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and I’ll see you next week.