Adam "Smiley" Poswolsky: The Future of Work is Human Connection.

At the Podium with Patrick Huey

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Work. Where Church and State Collide.

“Should we attempt to foster meaningful, human connections and engagement in the workplace?” This is the core question of my conversation with author, keynote speaker and workplace belonging expert Smiley Poswolsky.

Whatever our individual thoughts are on this question, the facts that Smiley lays out in his latest book Friendship in the Age of Loneliness and his Harvard Business Review article Gen Z Employees are Feeling Disconnected. Here’s How Employers Can Help. are quite startling and convincing. Our church and state views of work and home may not serve the emotional needs of not only the emerging workforce, but also those of us like myself, who have been a laborer for now three decades. Simply put - no one (or rather very few) are satisfied in the workplace. If you drill down into the numbers, 70% of workers are disengaged at work. And if they aren’t resigning and job hopping (the great resignation), they just show up and do as little as possible to get a paycheck (quiet quitting). The number I found even more alarming was that 20% of those who are disengaged at work are actively working to sabotage the business from within. The negative financial impacts of the state of the modern worker range into the multiples of billions on the modern economy. If you throw in the epidemic rates of loneliness that all generations are experiencing (61% of all adults in the US according to CIGNA), we have created the perfect storm for human burnout and emotional distress.

The reality is that we spend a third of our lives at work and that is on the conservative side. As one moves up the corporate ladder, that percentage only increases. As the lines continue to blur between work and life, the dramas of our lives will continue to impact how we behave and what we do at work, and what we expect work to provide for us. The other unique feature of the modern workplace is that work is one of the few places where we still regularly interact with people who may not share our beliefs or values. We can thank technology, social media, and our highly separated and individualized social and political spheres for this phenomenon. If we aren’t making work a place where meaningful connections between people can happen, it does not bode well for the future of sharing within the great arena and marketplace of ideas outside of work.

My conversation with Smiley in many ways isn’t about work, or the devastating financial implications of the epidemic disengagement of the workforce today. At core, our conversation is about what type of world do we want to live in; do we want a world of connection and engagement, or do we not? It’s a binary choice and it is that simple. Your perspective and views on this question impact everything in our society, from work to play, from church to school, from whom we choose to value to whom we choose to forget. It is the animating question of our time and our ongoing question about what good citizenship is. What good humanity is. The answers will either bring us closer together or further stoke the flames of division and misunderstanding. On a basic, fundamental level it comes back to the "house divided" principle: we stand together, or we fall together.

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