We live in a super fast-paced, digital world where others expect immediate response, and sometimes even instant results.

I didn’t grow up professionally in the digital age.  Shoot I remember when we had a fax machine and if we wanted to fax we had to call the person to whom we were sending the document and determine if their fax machine was compatible with ours.   Texting, IMing, snap chatting and all the other digital ways we communicate were not what I dealt with as a young manager, but today’s leaders do.

Leaders have had to adjust their style to getting things done quickly and what gets missed in all this is the human factor.  And clearly technology has been an enormous boom for business, it leaves the human element out of the equation, and that component is incredibly important.  We simply aren’t connected, at the human level, in today’s digital world.

So much gets missed in communication when we don’t have people to people conversations, and our focus is digital to digital conversations.   We miss the facial expression or tone of voice that may indicate the other person doesn’t understand. Team building, camaraderie, cohesion between people and groups is lost.  We miss laughing together, noodling through something together and yes even arguing with each other…and those connections are what binds us to other human beings.

Think of relationships that matter to you, friends and family.  At holidays do you want to sit across the table with people that are important or communicate via text?  You want to see their face, sit beside them and talk, share stories and much more.

The workplace isn’t any different.  People, all people want to feel connected to others.  They want to hear encouragement, be nurtured, feel like they matter and not just for the work they do but for who they are as a person.  That requires leaders to listen deeply and have communication skills that go beyond assigning tasks and hoping they will get accomplished.  And none of this can happen when your primary or worse yet exclusive source of communication is digital.

I have a client who told me recently that in the last year, yes year, she has not had one conversation with her boss.  Not once has he sat down with her to discuss her performance, or strategy or direction. He has texted her regularly. He has emailed her single sentence emails (or sometimes emails with only 2 or 3 words), but not once have they had a conversation.  How do you think this has made her feel?

She feels unimportant, that he probably doesn’t like her and that he isn’t interested in her growth and development.  She feels disconnected from the rest of the team, and while she isn’t hearing that he’s unhappy with her performance, the voice in her head says that he must be unhappy with her otherwise why wouldn’t he want to interface with her?

The point is that while she not a new leader and has many years of experience, we all want to feel connected at work.  Who wants to spend 8 – 12 hours a day feeling isolated because our only connection to our boss is emails or text messages?  

It’s so easy to push an email or text message out rather than have a conversation.  It’s efficient and we can do it any time of the day or night. It also allows us to hide and not have the conversations we should be having with others and connect with them at a heart level.

If you want your team or organization to be seen as a great workplace, it starts with the human aspect.  That means communicating (and not digitally), with others. It means taking the time to talk to people, not throw tasks at them.  And it means investing in the relationship, which can’t happen when their only connection is digitally.