Tanveer Ghazi texts his poem Kaari Kaari to music composer Shantanu Moitra. Moitra reads out the lyrics on Skype to Qurat ul Ain Balouch (QB), a Pakistani singer based in New York. QB and Moitra record the first version of the song on Skype.

Hyper-connected but not quite

This is how work happens in a hyper-connected world. A slice of the work can be carved out and given to someone sitting in one corner of the world. Others elsewhere on the planet do their bit.

Finally, someone stitches all the disparate pieces together to create the complete picture. That is how it was happening until the composer stumbled on to something.

In Moitra’s words: “I had never done a long-distance recording like this. Both of us were developing the song. Finally, she had to come to Pakistan for her Coke Studio recording. And because she was in a comfort zone, I saw a complete change in her approach to the song, in her voice. This is a lament that comes from the heart. There is this introspectiveness which was there in QB’s voice.” Two million people listened to the song within 72 hours of its release.

Work is like a slice of pizza

Imagine making a pizza where the ingredients are sourced from different corners of the world. The dough is kneaded in one city and sent to the chef who puts it all together and bakes it. It is passed on to the master chef elsewhere who adds the toppings and serves it up.

But what about the workers who made the pizza? Do they have a sense of ownership of it? Do they wonder if the customer liked the pizza? When they go back home do they think of what work means to them? Should it even matter to the customer who pays for the slice of pizza?

That is how a lot of work is getting done. Digital tech allows us to slice up the work and get discrete parts of it done by different people. This allows the producer to keep costs low. The outsourcing industry in India was the byproduct of a hyperconnected world. Labour arbitrage made it an attractive value proposition to move several call centre operations to India. Customers resented the move. And the call centre employees did not relate to the customer’s world even though they were trained to speak in the American accent (in the initial days) and take on Western names. Something was missing: Authenticity. We crave authentic human connections.

Authenticity impacts bottom line

Call centres are notorious for extraordinarily high turnover among new hires. In 2011, 605 new Wipro employees across three different operations centres were part of a field experiment to see if an authentic approach led to greater performance and retention. The result was a stunning 33 per cent improvement in retention and impact on the bottom line.

How was it done? During the new hire onboarding, the newcomer’s unique perspective and strengths were sought to be incorporated into their work. Their individual identities were acknowledged and a conscious effort was made to align them to the organisation’s norms and values. The feeling of being part of a whole makes human beings feel valued.

Look into my eyes

Face to face contact can work wonders. Laughter during an interaction releases endorphins. This builds an authentic empathy-based engagement that can impact the organisation’s culture.

Remote working takes away that human connection. It subdues the identity of the worker and makes the work purely transactional and a way to earn a living. No surprise that engagement levels are dropping. Only 13 per cent employees worldwide are engaged. As more and more organisations work with gig workers, they have to learn how to engage someone who is baking just one slice of the pizza. It is like trying to make your Uber driver care about the meeting you are rushing to.

Leaders have for long worked with virtual teams. What they are not used to is working with a virtual team of people who are not employees. Not every manager will be effective at engaging a remote group of gig workers. When a large tech company gets its employees together for an annual offsite, they use the two days to bond rather than to upskill.

Fragmented learning

When we learn something, we are most motivated to learn what we can apply immediately. Most micro-learning modules do just that. Without creating a context information does not translate to knowledge that we can use to add to our inner world. That means relating what we have just read to what we already know. Unless we are able to retrieve that at will, the information is akin to a drop of water that evaporates quickly.

To be able to make that learning a part of our mental model, we need to take a long-term view of what we learn. Expertise is built when we learn something in depth and apply it to solve known and unknown problems.

Meaning matters

Recently I sat through the onboarding process of first-time managers of a Fortune 500 company. The MD talked to them about the dilemmas he faced when he had joined the firm twenty years ago. He spoke about the need to build soft skills while being a domain expert. He spoke about the need to balance accountability with learning through trial and error. The ten-week journey aimed to help the new managers make meaning of their roles.

Our work is not just a source of livelihood. It shapes our identity. As the world of work changes, it needs leaders who can avoid “conversation fatigue”. In the last two decades, the profusion of social media platforms, flatter structures and constant change is creating a “collaborative overload”. Yet never before has the need for human connection been greater. Making sense of it all will fast become a skill that will define successful leaders.

Abhijit Bhaduri is a talent management advisor to several organisations and coach to CEOs. He is the author of The Digital Tsunami

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