Steve  0:09  
The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly sponsored by Workhuman. Nearly nine in ten HR leaders say they don't have a strong leadership bench. Workhuman's future leaders gives organizations a smarter way to build one. Future Leaders is the first talent intelligence solution to identify high potential VP plus talent already within your workforce up to four years before promotion. Using proprietary AI and real-time recognition data, it uncovers the leadership signals hidden in everyday work, long before traditional succession planning can, it's a smarter, data-driven approach to building tomorrow's leaders. Learn more at workhuman. com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome back to the At Work in America show. My name is Steve Boese. Man, I am stoked today for today's show. We are talking about in a really important topic connection at work, but in a new way with new data. And I'm telling you, you're going to think about this differently than you ever have before. I am so excited to welcome to have this conversation, friend of the show, friend of mine, haven't seen him in ages, Jason Lauritsen. He's an advisor to executives, to CEOs. He's a keynote speaker. He's been figuring out how to make work better for a long time now, and he's with us today. Jason, first of all, how are you, man? It's great to see you.

Jason Lauritsen  1:41  
I am I'm great, Steve. I always love talking to you. It's always fun to always fun to to chew it up with you a little bit. And you know, I'll be honest. I'm I I think I'm hanging on for dear life this summer. There's a lot going on in the Lauritsen household, and so between work and life, man, I'm just trying to keep up.

Steve  1:59  
Yeah, I hear you. We were commiserating a little bit before we turned turned the recording on, and just how busy we've been. And typically, summertime, at least in the world of the worlds we tend to operate in, right, was always a little bit slower. Right, there's conferences aren't happening, events aren't happening, people take vacations, they well earned ones, right. So the pace tends to slow down, but I feel like we've been going nonstop. Which is, look, you know, I feel lucky to be able to do what I do every day, and so I'm not complaining, but just noting it. And but good to end the week. We're after we happen to be recording this on a Friday afternoon, so this is a good way to end the week and just try to catch up, but also to dive into this report. It's called the Human Connection Study, and we're going to talk a ton about it in a second. But first of all, Jason, what have you been up to these last? I don't know. It's probably been a good year or two since we've talked to you on the show, at least maybe more. But so, what's been what have been you've been focusing on the last say 12-18, months?

Jason Lauritsen  3:01  
Yeah, you know, it's it's been a really it's been a kind of interesting time, I guess, from a standpoint of work because, as you know, I've been kind of tilting at you know tilting at the windmills of how do we make work better, make work more human, make work work better for people and for organizations for a long time, and over the last year, year and a half, have been kind of, I guess, reimagining my work a little bit to bring a sort of more robust approach, I guess, to how we work with our clients, that I think one of the big realizations was, and and actually this study ended up kind of reinforcing the direction we'd been heading is that in order to you know really get the the the transformation that I think many of us are after, where we want a high performing organization that's also a great place to work. That that there's some deeper work that has to happen. There's some sort of system wide work that involves the executive team and the story they're telling. It involves kind of the the link between strategy and culture. It involves kind of how the system supports work and supports people in doing work, and we had been taking, I think, a too narrow approach, and so we're taking a broader approach to that. We call the connected performance system, and it's been it's been fun and it's been really effective. And so it's been a time of kind of you know how it is when you go through those periods where you're you're kind of rethinking things and creating things and partnering differently, just a lot of energy and a lot of work and a lot of a lot of new insight. So it's been a fun time.

Steve  4:46  
Great, yeah, I appreciate that, Jason, and I do appreciate even after doing this work for a while, you had the wherewithal or the the the presence of mind to say, "I'm gonna think about this. Maybe I'm gonna step back. I want to think." About this a little bit differently, and see if we can attack these challenges in in new ways, right? To try to help organizations make these breakthroughs, because we have been we meaning I guess you and me, but also you know the industry have been talking about these types of issues for a long time, right? It's it's no secret every year the you know the benchmarks come out about things like employee engagement, and you know they're whatever they are. They never change. They're pretty low, right? Organizations still struggle, and every year the top the top drivers of of HR leaders certainly, right? Their challenges involve retention and trying to engage people and trying to coax performance right out of systems that don't always aren't always set up to support any of those things. So, yeah, I think it's maybe time for some fresh, fresh approaches. I guess I'd say.

Jason Lauritsen  5:54  
Yeah, and I mean, we. I think I think if I were to summarize the, it it was almost as if the universe kind of gave us a nudge, right? Because between COVID, you know, we'd been pre 2020 talking about we need a new system, we need to disrupt the system. I've been saying that for a long time, but I think like COVID came along and and broke the system, right? Blew everything wide open, and then we have AI comes riding in and says, "Hold my beer, you know, watch this. Yeah, and all of a sudden, everything's disrupted. And I think, at least for me, it felt like the solutions that we were bringing to the table pre 2020 are not they they aren't big enough or good enough or compelling enough, right? We live in a time where now the transformation is real and it's happening faster. We have to elevate and bring a different, more effective solution to the table. And so, so we've been trying to answer that call.

Steve  6:48  
Yeah, Jason and I think yeah that wants that leads me to where I want to go next, which is to talk about this work, this human the Human Connection study. First of all, tell me a little about the study. How you managed to put it together? You've got some partners on it, I know, and it's it's quite a large study, quite a huge data set. Give us a little background on the study, and then we'll dive into some of the key and interesting and important things you guys found out.

Jason Lauritsen  7:16  
So, a little, I guess, a bit of origin story. I mean, as as I think we've probably talked about in a prior a prior conversation, even on the podcast at some point, is you know for the last 10-15 years at the heart of what I you know sort of preach in my work or sort of help people understand is that work is a relationship. People experience work as a relationship, and once you understand that, it helps you kind of show up to the work differently. And so, I've been interested in this for a long time, and I've been poking around at different ways to help people do the work, understand the work, understand how do you make work feel better that way. And along the way, I I connected with the folks at Ingenuity Design. They're a kind of employee experience design agency in out east, and they we we shared in common an interest in this topic. They'd done a couple of actually studies on connection. I was doing thinking about putting something else together, and we said, "Hey, what if we partnered together on doing another study? and I said, but I I want to think about it a little bit more broadly because for for me, connection is one of those topics that I think it's been increasingly getting talked about. Particularly, I guess I I brought up COVID, but I think during during the the pandemic and everybody being apart for remote work, I think connection really came to the forefront as a you know this is really important and we need to keep people feeling connected. But I've always been dissatisfied with what we actually know about it. We talk about it a lot. We talk about it as something that you should have, or maybe it's a nice to have, or something we feel like is important. But like, but what exactly is it, and how does it work? And so I've been I've been asking that question and digging for answers for a while. And so when we started, I was like, let's you know, let's let's try to do this a little bit more broadly. And so we we started out actually initially our first phase, we kind of took a broader approach. It was more of a qualitative survey approach, an open ended survey. We ended up surveying 806 people. I think in that sample, it's a representative sample of kind of what the U.S. workforce looks like demographically, and we got some really interesting stuff. Like we learned a lot about kind of a model of connection emerged, and we learned just a whole bunch of really interesting, deep, kind of rich insights came out of that. But then along the way, I connected with the folks at Intergage, and of course, Intergauge is the the company behind the top workplaces programs contests across the country. So they've been collecting data, you know, on workplaces for 20 years and have collected 10s of millions of employee survey responses. And I said to them, you know, hey, we're doing this interesting thing. Would you guys do you guys partner? Would you be interested in helping us collect some data on this? And they said, we would love to. And so we basically took our model and we built out kind of a secondary research item set to try and validate what we had learned in phase one. We wanted to validate it at scale and then see what kind of of impact it had or what it tied to in terms of outcomes in workplace data. And so they took that and they collected some data. And they, you know, it took several months. We kind of put this together. We we knew we were going to get a sizable number of of of responses back, but then they sent us back the data, and in the sample they sent us are you know there was over 286,000 employee survey responses in this data file across almost seven almost 1700 organizations, and of course, this is non-attributed anonymous data that they that they helped it sort of collected through the top workplaces process, and we were like, "Wow, okay, we've got some work to do now. Yeah, and so that's and so then we started digging in and trying to make sense of it, and the beauty of is is that a lot of what we learned and sort of the hypotheses that came out of phase one really proved out in some pretty powerful and interesting ways in the larger data set, and so that's how we got here.

Steve  11:32  
Jason, thank you for setting that up, and it's it's it's kind of a unique approach too, because often we see you know a lot of folks would have stopped with phase one. They would have surveyed a whole bunch of people, got some really interesting data, got some answers, draw drawn some conclusions, and you know, and published, which is great. That you could have done that, and it would have been pretty cool and been interesting. But now you get to hold up that those conclusions and those hypotheses against a huge data set, and see what comes out. And it does sound like a lot of what you thought, maybe most of what you thought heading into it, really said, "Yeah, we're getting some validation here, and we've got something here. So once you discovered that, what's what are some of the things the data told you about connection and its importance you know, to both people's experience of work, but also to the organization itself, right? We are all still in the business of trying to keep our organization successful, right? So we can all stay engaged, if you will. What are some of the things you guys found?

Jason Lauritsen  12:41  
Well, there's, I mean, there's so much, but I'll I'll start with I'll start with a couple of the headlines. So first, I'll say that one of the things that I think was interesting about the way we approached this was that we we really did it as kind of an open exploration, kind of an emergent, almost like an emergent theory kind of approach to this research, and so we didn't go into it with like, okay, here's what, here's how we define connection. Let's go see if that holds up. We actually, the definition that we use and we have in the report was one that emerged from how people in phase one talked about and described their experiences of connection, and basically, what that looked like was connection is the experience of meaningful engagement with something that matters to you. So, meaningful engagement with something that matters to you, and and in that one of the one of the most important things about that definition is the word something. Something. It's not. It's not someone. It might be someone, but it it doesn't have to be. And so that was another one of the really interesting insights that I think came out of it for us, is that we went into it assuming that connection, and I think most people do assume that connection is about people, right? Your your relationships with other people, and so that's where most of the discussion about like, well, remote work. Obviously, people are less connected. You think about people, right? I'm not in the office with people, so I'm I'm maybe more lonely, or I don't have those relationships. Or the one happened.

Steve  14:20  
Sorry, Jason. There's been a ton of you know. You need to have two good friends at work, right? We've there's been data on that and reporting on that, and that's a good thing to have friends at work. I'm not saying that's not a good thing, but that's been the focus a lot, right?

Jason Lauritsen  14:34  
That's the narrative, and so we assumed that connection was going to be primarily about inter you know interpersonal kind of relationships, but what happened or what showed up in phase one was that when you ask people to talk about experiences or moments when they felt really connected, both in their life and at work, it became clear right away that while people do experience, they talk about you know relationships. And experiences with other people, just as often they talk about things like being part of a cause or contributing to something that they felt was important or that matters or was bigger than themselves, and that showed up almost as often. And so, what we came out of phase one saying we think there's actually two types of connection. There's what we called relational connection, which is our connection with other people. But then there's this other thing that we're calling resonance connection, which is kind of our connection to meaning and purpose and significance. And those are we thought those felt like they were kind of almost equally important. What the the big data set showed us is that actually there's some surprising things about what's most important, which I'll leave that for a minute. So connection, there's two types of connection, which that was surprising and interesting to us. So that was one of the big, I think, headlines, and I think it it helps explain some of what we found. The other thing that I think is sort of the Headline was like we went into it like we we we we did this because we we thought connection mattered right we we we were pretty sure it was important and we were pretty sure it was way more important than what people that most leaders would sort of tell you it is because it usually gets treated kind of like a cultural outcome or a cultural metric. It's a nice to have. We want our people to feel connected, but it's not like something we're investing a ton of money in because you know, let's get real, we want results. Well, well, what happened was we found that connected employees, those that are like sort of genuinely fully connected in our data set, Were 6.7 times more motivated than those who aren't connected. Like seven times more motivated, they were also seven times more likely to recommend your organization. So when you think about that as a you know you think about what what do leaders and managers want in their organization? People who want to work hard for you and go the extra mile, and people that are going to stick around and refer their friends. It turns out connection really vital to those things. It it actually turns the dial way up on those things to the point that the way we start, and I mean, there's several other places like connection accounted for over half of the variation in motivation, in inclusion, and whether my work feels meaningful. Like all these things we care about, this one single thing, this one single metric, is contributing a huge amount to to how people feel and how people are showing up. And so we ended up calling it the way I describe that is that I think the big kind of finding of this is that connection is the energy of performance. Okay, when you have it, like connection is sort of upstream. When you create connection, that provides the energy that that people use to do their best work, to give their best to go that extra mile to, you know, to sort of contribute to the organization, and so some pretty powerful stuff. And and I mean, I could talk for two hours about this, so I'm going to stop there for a minute. But tell you, those are two big headings that I think are pretty interesting.

Steve  18:13  
I I think that's great. It's just I thank you for explaining it, and I I love this idea that hey, there's really two kinds of connection here that are that are both important, but maybe don't don't manifest in the same way. And as the data shows, and I'd love for you to talk about it too, is the the outcomes that they help drive are a little different too. And I guess I'd say first of all, from at least from my experience, and I think the report data backs us up too. That that interpersonal connection, right? That that your friend at work, or your team member, or just you you like the people you work with, and they're they're good people, and maybe you pitch in to help each other, and you got each other's backs, and all of that thing, which is all great. That could probably only take you so far, right? If some of these other type of connection is either deprecated or missing or just not focused on at all, right? That that mission driven stuff, right? We're here for a purpose. We're I'm contributing meaningfully to what we're doing as an organization, and I can understand how right, which is a little bit more maybe difficult to do. And I do feel like as organizations, in fact, we just did a show on on the first part of connection a couple weeks ago, right? Helping people connect to each other, and I feel like I don't know what the number is? Is it 75% Is it 80% I think a high percentage of the bandwidth that's been spent previously, right, on connection has been spent on that interpersonal one, right? Like trying to help people do team building or offsites. Or you mentioned COVID, right? What did we do during COVID? Like 50 million Zoom happy hours, right? With you know, in the evening outside of work, and I, you know, the difference in these connections matter not just because you have to work on them differently, but also in what they mean to the organization. And I'd love to get your thoughts on that too.

Jason Lauritsen  20:18  
Yeah, there's so there's a few there's a few really interesting layers to this. One is like one of the big surprises surprises for us. So let me let me add just one sort of additional layer of of specificity to the the definition. So we said two types of connection. There's resonance connection or relational connection and resonance connection, relational connection. There's basically at work two types of primary relationships we have: our peers and with our direct manager. Right? No surprise there. That makes sense. So we do talk about those, and and those are important, really vitally important. On the other side is this resonance connection. There's two types there too, as well. Primarily, there's what we call personal resonance, which is your how how significant sort of your work feels. Does it feel like your work is important? Does it matter? Do you feel like it? You're making a difference in the work that you're doing. So it's your work and your connection there. And then there's organizational resonance, which is do I am do I feel connected to the direction and purpose of my organization?

Steve  21:28  
Okay.

Speaker 1  21:29  
Now, the the interesting thing, and this was surprising to us, was that when you looked at when you looked at the four those four subset subtypes of connection, and we looked at them in correlation against all of these other sort of workplace metrics that Entergage is measuring inside of their their survey. The most significant or highly correlated type of connection to all of the kind of workplace outcomes actually 12 of the 15 that were being measured wasn't peer connection. It wasn't manager connection. It was organizational resonance.

Speaker 2  22:08  
Wow. Okay.

Speaker 3  22:09  
So the the thing that is is has the most highest correlation with motivation and inclusion, or motivation for sure. I think a lot of the intent to stay. I can't remember which of the 15 that that were not most highly correlated, but like most of the performance outcomes that we care about, the things that are kind of driving the stuff we're looking for, the thing that most strongly sort of correlates with that, which would be sort of where you'd make your bet, is do I feel connected to the purpose and direction of the organization? That was shocking to me. Like that was not what I expected to find. Now that doesn't mean that you don't pay attention to all of it. But what the opportunity here is that organisationally, if you aren't telling a clear and compelling story about where you're going, your organizational strategy in a way that people can connect to. If people don't understand the mission and purpose of the organization in a way that they can connect to, that is a huge lost opportunity. And that, to your point, Steve, I can I can feel like I got BFFs all over the place. But if I don't have that kind of connection, I still might end up leaving, or I might not do my best work, or I might not feel the most motivated, right? So, so they're all in the mix. But I thought that was a really interesting finding that challenged a lot of what we expected going in.

Steve  23:28  
Yeah, and it's it's has the most at least has the most impact on driving these outcomes, right? Which we're trying to to foster and we're trying to improve often in the workplace, and we probably spend maybe a disproportionately little amount of time on it, right? As organizations, because we have focused so much, it seems to me, on both the the interpersonal, the personal kind of connection that we talked about. The manager employee relationship is super important, and we've talked about that for a long time. We meaning our industry, right? That's not a new thing. The peer-to-peer stuff a little less so. People do talk about that, maybe not as much, but but on the organizational resonance side, this idea of hey, I'm really connecting to this mission. I understand it, and I can see I can see my place in it. I feel less so, and maybe you can sort of tell me if you think that's true, and if if you do, maybe you know what do we do with that? You know, now that we've got this data that tells us, hey, this is really important, and maybe we have underinvested in it, and in what what should we be doing?

Jason Lauritsen  24:43  
Yeah. So interestingly, I think the so one of the findings that that I think backs up sort of why we have this. So so number one, I'll add to add to the data. Organizational resonance is the one that had out of the four it outperformed the four in terms of producing or impacting or being correlated, I should say, with the all of these outcomes, engagement, performance, all these things. It's also the lowest in terms of the what when you think about which ones being experienced the most. When you ask employees like which of them they're feeling, organizational resonance is the lowest in terms of the ones that employer experiencing, so biggest biggest impact, lowest experience. So it's the biggest gap right now.

Steve  25:26  
Yeah.

Jason Lauritsen  25:27  
The reason the reason I think that is the case is because we also the data also shows that the higher up in the organization you are, the more likely you are to feel connected. The farther you are from the top, the the least there's a correlation, so there's a distance on that. Yeah. So, and and of course that makes sense because if you're at the top of the organization, you're sitting in meetings where you're building strategy. You're talking about like you have your hands on the the steering wheel and on the levers of strategy and culture, and and where we're going, and what our purpose is-you feel it, you see it, you experience it. The farthest farther away you get, you don't have that. And so, if you organisationally aren't really intentional about being crystal clear about what those things are, and then telling a story and providing it-you know-in a way that people can digest and connect to and understand. Of course, that makes sense. And so, it like I think it's it's very logical that this is happening. So, what does organization need to do? I from and this was this was where one of those those findings that we were like, oh, this is why. Like, because we had started in our, you know, I talked about our pivot. One of the things we've been doing more work with is working with leadership teams to kind of help them go through a process to understand where they have clarity and where they don't have clarity. Because without clarity, it's hard to you know really communicate effectively downstream. We knew that mattered a lot, but then the connection data kind of reflected, like, oh, that's why it matters. Is because if you're not clear at the top, the rest of the organization can't connect to it. And so, so that's I think where the where the work is. There is that you have to make sure you have clear strategy. You have to make sure that your culture is aligned to support that strategy. That they feel like they are pulling in the same direction, and then that's where you have then the opportunity for people to kind of buy in and connect to it

Steve  27:27  
Yeah, and that requires it requires active, intentional activities, right? By leaders, right from the top down, because a lot of that other the personal connection stuff. I mean, honestly, sometimes I think we just hope that happens, but it's up to any anybody individually, right? To you know, make friends at work and and get along with your colleagues and find those people who can help you, and and and up to managers, right? We do our best, and most managers try their best to try to have good relationships with their team members, and and they try, and it's a hard job management, but they try, and so this organizational resonance and that building that connection through clarity, through communication, and through I think transparency probably is part of this too, really does put more the onus on the folks who are creating, as you said, Jason, creating the mission, creating the strategy, responsible for executing at a high level, right?

Jason Lauritsen  28:29  
Yeah, there's. So it's a. It's interesting. I mean, I think the thing that that is really clear in the data that came out is that like there are there's opportunities at kind of all levels to like it's a it's a what what was that you know what was that saying back in the I think in the '90s or maybe it was the early 2000s like it takes a village I think that's kind of it's kind of the message that came out here is that is that when you when we looked at connect you what we understand about connection and what this sort of showed us is that from the top of the organization, there has to be a commitment to creating what basically the what we learned or sort of what we think this data suggests is that for connection to flourish in the organization, which you need in order to have a high-performing, sort of high results workplace, you you need the conditions for connection to happen. The inconvenience part of this is you can't just give people connect connection or tell them to be connected or what. Like, there's multiple facets to this, and what the role of the executives, the role of those that think about the organization is how do we create the conditions for connection to thrive? One of the connect one of the conditions is we need a clear and compelling direction, strategy, purpose, vision that we can communicate, we can role model, we can share, we can create buy-in for. That's one of the conditions. One of the conditions. To your point, people need the opportunity to connect to one another. They need the opportunity to build those peer relationships. They, you know, we need to create the conditions for managers to have the skills and the time to foster the kinds of relationships and connection with their people that drive this work. We need, you know, we need to, you know, create the conditions for people to understand why and how their work matters. Right? It's all-it's a matter of like shaping the work experience, and there's everybody has a role to play in that. And in the the two points that you've mentioned already, the executives play a huge role, and I don't think their eye is on this ball just because they didn't realize how much it mattered. Yeah, and then the the other one is the manager. I mean, that's the least surprising finding is that managers play a huge role in this. Not not shockingly, they play a big role in this, and so it takes a system approach to actually really have impact because you want to sort of lift all the types of connection as you're doing this work.

Steve  31:09  
Yeah, yeah, Jason. I think the last thing I'd want to ask you about this, and I'm going to, again, and I will at the at the end of the show encourage everybody to to read the study and dig into it, like we have been talking about, and I was able to do this morning. But James, we have a lot of HR people who listen to this show, right? That's probably most of the people, maybe who are listening today. Yep. So they influence this work. They they arguably can drive some of it, maybe not all of it. But if you were thinking at this from that point of view as an HR manager, HR leader, maybe just doing HR in a smaller organization itself, right? Which might be a little bit easier to pull some of this off the smaller the organization is. I don't know, but you know, is there one or two things you'd say to them? Say, hey, let's. How do I go about just maybe even figuring out if this is a problem for me, assessing it, and then maybe taking the first steps towards trying to make it better in my organization.

Jason Lauritsen  32:09  
Yeah, I think so. To the first question, in terms of assessing it, every organization has some level of connection, right? It's a it's a spectrum, so it's not like an organization is disconnected or they're connected. They're on a spectrum somewhere, and so regardless of where you are, it's you. You have some degree of connection. The question is really, do you have the connection you need to sort of power the the results, to power the the trajectory that you're on, the growth that you want as an organization? And I would I would bet I mean you always have opportunities. Now, if you if you if you want to get more like granular about that, we have a like a self assessment connection diagnostic that people can use on their own. You can if you DM me on LinkedIn, I will give you the diagnostic. You can run and use it, but I don't. I think you can just assume that you have opportunity because everybody has opportunity. So that's that's what that's number one. Number two is I think at its at its most basic level, what we learned is that the individual has experiences and moments and interactions that make them feel connected, right? That contribute, and so it's all these different moments. And there, there's a few places, I guess, on the relational side. I think the most fundamental thing to remember is that the moments that make us feel connected are the moments when we feel seen and understood by another person.

Steve  33:40  
Okay.

Jason Lauritsen  33:40  
And so if you understand that, and and actually that's that's what drives manager connection. What we found is like the two things that are most important to an employee feeling like they're or they have connection with their manager is my manager genuinely listens to me, and I can be honest with my manager without fear. And so it's really that, like, am I can I be seen and understood in a safe in a safe space, right? That's really what that's about. So, if I'm an HR leader, I'm like, okay, how can I make sure? Like, how can I equip my managers with skills that help them do that?

Steve  34:19  
Yeah.

Jason Lauritsen  34:19  
Active listening, teach them how to have better conversations. Teach them how to ask better questions. Teach them how to kind of see people and reflect back what they're understanding, not just what they're hearing. Like that's that's one of the biggest levers you can pull. I also would suggest teaching, like doing, get some get some education and tools to your people, where you're teaching them how to check in with each other, how to have more meaningful conversations with each other. Because if you can get that right, and people can just have a little bit better conversations, that's going to lift the relational connection overall. The lat, the other thing I would say as an HR leader, that sort of the secret weapon that you have is for connection is your appreciation and recognition programs, systems, and processes. Because what the the the tool there or the secret there is that the recognition is specific. That it's like that you really help people understand or encourage people to give very specific recommendation or recognition to individuals because the specific recognition does a couple of things. It's like number one, you see me. Number two, you value and understood what I did, and then number three, you just told me how my work has significance-that my work matters-and so it pings on several connection points. And so it's one of those kind of, I think, super tools for building connection if you're doing it broadly and widely across the organization.

Steve  35:58  
Yeah, super underrated and super valuable, Jason. I'm glad you mentioned that, and we talk about that a fair bit on the show. We've worked with our friends at Workhuman, of course, for a while on those on that topic, and yeah, I couldn't couldn't agree with it more. I, Jason, I think this is why I thought I was so excited when I read through the study. I felt like for me, and I read a lot of these kinds of things, right? For what we do, and we have a lot of guests on the show talking about research. This was not just, oh, here's some data about stuff you already know about. This was, I learned something really new here, right? Like I, it wasn't just X percent of people said this about you know why and things I sort of felt like I knew this was this taught me new things right this this taking this idea of connection and describing the two different kinds of connection and then the two types it within each kind of connection and why those matter and how they matter and this is you will learn something new from this study. I guarantee it. Almost, you know, 99% of you, I think, will. And you'll also be able to say, "Hey, I can see how this might matter in my organization and how we can put some of this to work. Which is why. So kudos to you and the folks you worked with to put this together, because that's hard to do, right? That's hard to do. I think is to to really actually educate folks with some something that they maybe hadn't ever thought about before?

Jason Lauritsen  37:29  
I appreciate that, Steve. I it's I you know this is a passion project for me. It's I have believed deeply in the impact of this for a long time, but it's so It's affirming that the data supports, I think, what a lot of us had hunches. Like we could feel it in our gut that we knew, like relationships and connection and meaning and all this stuff mattered. But it's really powerful to have some some data and have some evidence of the real impact. And so, and the fact that you found something new and interesting in in it. Given how much stuff you look at, is is is pretty awesome, and I'm grateful for that. No, I did. I'm grateful for that.

Steve  38:11  
Kudos, and so the one more time here, the the the report and the data we've been talking about for the last little while, it's the the Human Connection study: How connection shapes motivation, retention, and performance at work. Jason, can we sort of tell people where you would have them go to get get their copy of this and dig in?

Jason Lauritsen  38:33  
Well, the easiest place to to remember is just go to humanconnectionstudy.com. Oh, you go there. That's that's the landing page. You can download the the report there. If you connect with me, if you forget that, if you remember my name and you connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a DM, I will send it to you, or I will you know give it give it to you. Or if you if you happen to know my email, email me and I'll send it to you. But humanconnectionstudy.com is the the place you can go,

Steve  39:01  
And we'll link to that in the show notes, of course, as well for folks. But yeah, humanconnectionstudy.com highly recommended, and not not 100 pages long either. You can read this, you know, in a morning over a couple of cups of coffee, and then maybe have a have a lunchtime conversation with your colleagues and start talking about it. I think highly recommend it. Really great stuff, and Jason, thank you. Great to see you. I know it's been a while. We've got to do this a little more often, but I really appreciate you taking the time today and then sharing with us like this great research and some of these great findings.

Jason Lauritsen  39:39  
Steve, I appreciate the opportunity to share with you, and and I feel like we just scratched the surface. There's so much good stuff in there, so I will be out talking about this for a long time. So maybe we'll have another conversation in the future. But thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Steve  39:54  
Yeah, Jason Lauritsen, everyone. Thank you, Jason. Great great guy. Great friend of the show. In the show notes, please, please read it. Promise me you will. I'm beg. I'm telling. I'm going to check up on everybody listening to this. I want to thank Jason once again. I want to thank everybody for listening. Thanks to our friends at Workhuman. We did get to mention them earlier. Great supporters of the network. Check us out. The video for this show will be on YouTube as well. If you haven't checked out our YouTube yet, but of course everywhere you get your podcasts? Thank you so much for listening. My name is Steve Boese. We'll see you next time, and bye for now.

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