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10/10/2018

How to Connect with People Virtually, Part 2

The steps to morphing online connections into commitments

So, as I indicated in the first part of this post, the research shows that the use of social media can help strengthen work connections, with colleagues, on teams, with customers. But what we’re talking about is making a bad situation just a little bit better. Overall, the statistics on how employees feel about their companies are terrible. If you’re a top executive, you should be very, very afraid. Two-thirds of your workers are alienated. A quarter of them are actively trying to destroy you from within. Along with that, your customers don’t like you either – trust in brands and institutions has never been lower. The only group that rates pretty highly are firefighters, so, apparently, you have to be willing to risk your life by running toward a burning building to build trust with the average person in this half-online-half-face-to-face world.

Is there any way that we can help make online connections better? How can we turn online connections into commitments? Is that even possible? After all, we humans still crave commitment, a happy state that is increasingly rare in this suspicious, angry era.

One of the problems in the virtual world is that we have fewer ways to judge the reality of the commitment than in the real world. To put it simply, people are more inclined to kick the tires—with suspicion—in the digital world, because they can’t see you and judge your intent very clearly. They believe that they don’t know what they’re getting.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Public Words.

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