Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel join our podcast to discuss in-person mentoring and why your reasons for RTO matter.

It’s a relational paradox: nearness can isolate and distance connect. Understanding this paradox can help managers enforcing return-to-office mandates to capitalize on the “proximity effect” of in-person work.

Just getting people back in the office won’t automatically improve collaborative productivity or rebuild organizational trust. But paying attention to what brain researchers call “neural synchrony” suggests that in-person work can support effective mentoring and a more reliable team.

But it all comes down to why you want those brains syncing up.

I encountered a failure of neural synchrony while researching for my book Digital Overwhelm. One rising professional told me that after taking a remote job with a firm, she would laugh at a joke in an email but then see her coworkers’ faces on Zoom and think, Oh, they weren’t joking at all. Her experience showed how hard it can be to connect with coworkers while staring into the depths of a laptop screen. (It didn’t help that her boss never read more than two lines of her emails.)

Sure, it’s possible to exaggerate the power of neural synchrony. But Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel join this week’s Mode/Switch Pod to argue that what happens when people work in the same location can catalyze stronger working communities.. Their just-released book, In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth, shows how.

I reached out to Emma and Natalia this summer after seeing their New York Times article, which shared data from research on togetherness and work. Their research suggests that a huge benefit of proximity comes with mentoring. Their conversation on this podcast shows how mentoring does more than help rising professionals survive workplace bureaucracy; it also helps them become generous contributors to working community.

If you as a manager are questioning the sacrifices you’re making to show up at work, this podcast’s for you. This week’s conversation fully acknowledges the obnoxiousness of your commute, the expense of childcare, and the peculiar obligation to put on grown-up pants. (Emma’s confession of “marital disharmony” and her husband’s sometimes ambivalence about his commute may be worth the pod.) But the podcast also helps you recognize that the best motivation for RTO may be to support the wisdom and wellbeing of your team.

Regular listeners know that The Mode/Switch Pod features an intergenerational roundtable. I doubt there’s a topic that more requires intergenerational insight than the RTO vs. In-Person debates. I’m glad to be joined by my cohosts Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and Madeline the Z.

What can a TikTok dance tell you about your team member? Less than you think, says this week’s guest, Kylan Rutherford.

Podcasts like The Mode/Switch keep telling managers to try to better understand their team members. Get curious. Build empathy. Cultivate rapport.

What better way to do that than finding them on FB or TikTok?

Scratch that. Social media may be one of the worst places to get to know your team.

Or so says our Mode/Switch Pod guest Dr. Kylan Rutherford. He’s a social scientist who’s done work at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, and he’s now the director of Normsy Labs, which uses AI to “transform toxic online behavior and build pathways to healthier digital conversations.”

The only way you’ll get to know your employee better is if you can access their finsta. Which you probably can’t. If you’re unsure what a finsta is, you’re in good company. Our intergenerational table was split on that one too, and Kylan brings everyone up to speed. Around the table: Gen X insight from David Wilson and me, Millennial tact from Josh DiMarco, and Gen Z skepticism from Alex Johnson.

If as a manager, you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “Well, my employee chose to post it, so why not check it out?” or “Following them online will help build rapport at work,” this conversation will give you pause. What you’re trying to learn on Insta, and what you’ll actually learn, Kylan says, will be widely divergent.

But here’s what you’ll come away from this podcast better able to do:

• Ask what an online signal tells you about a team member

• Grasp why some people disclose so much online while others don’t

• Stop treating an employee’s feed as their “real” self

• Discern when to make space for politics and religion in tricky workspaces

Managers, let me ask: Have you ever learned something about a coworker online that changed how you saw them at work? Let me know in the comments below!

You can learn more about Kylan Rutherford’s research here.

This podcast addresses dead nerve endings between and among managers, employees, and senior leadership. Welcome to a brand new podcast: Mode/Switch: Second Opinion!

This might sound like a bad LinkedIn post with a dubious moral parable. But I think managers need second opinions, too, especially when it comes to insensitivity between senior leadership and employees.

Dayforce Research now reports that “Only 42% of frontline workers say leaders understand their challenges.” That represents a 20% decline in two years. But managers don’t need that research to know that senior leadership has lost a feel for what’s happening on teams and in workflows.

Nobody feels this organizational neuropathy as painfully as managers. But the usual prescriptions are unhelpful: Be candid. Be clear. Be sincere. Be resilient.

But even after managers do all these things, the “Communication Gap Between Leadership and Frontline Employees” continues. And managerial consultancy and coaching basically say, “You’re going to have to live with this.”

Seeking help with a new podcast concept
Feeling the weight of this problem, I reached out to a clinical psychologist, Dr. Irene Kraegel, of Dwell Psychological Services, and asked her if she’d be willing to help me address wicked organizational problems for mid-level managers.

Once a month, we’ll welcome a mid-level manager to the table who’s experiencing a management problem—not a huge crisis, per se, but a puzzling challenge—and then discuss it, moving toward action steps. (Maybe checking back later to see how the action steps worked.)

This spinoff edition of The Mode/Switch would seek to help mid-level leaders make vital “reframes” in their work. We still call these “mode switches” but we’ll resource interdisciplinary expertise instead of the intergenerational wisdom the Mode/Switch Pod usually offers.