The Power of Connection: Building Resilient Workplaces During Transition
At the beginning of 2025 we shared three words that will ground and inform our work throughout the year: Connection, Clarity, and Empowerment. Over the next few weeks, we will share blogs that focus on why we believe these topics must be prioritized in all workplaces to support productivity, innovation, and increased retention. We begin with connection.
Imagine a workplace that has been weathering a lot of transition. There have been leadership changes, vacancies in almost every department, budget cuts, hiring freezes, and hiring and onboarding new employees. Perhaps this transition is recent, perhaps it’s been several months of ongoing changes or maybe even years in the making. And perhaps there are even more changes on the close horizon.
This may not be too difficult to imagine because many workplaces are, and have been, in transition. At JT Consulting we partner with many different kinds of workplaces that each have their unique set of strengths and challenges. We are often approached to help address a a need or a gap in their external work such as improving their services to their clients or creating a more trauma-informed learning environment for their students. Every time we begin a new partnership, we make it explicitly clear that our ability to improve the work they do externally is intrinsically connected to how their employees are experiencing the organization internally. For this partnership to be successful and achieve the desired results, we need to address both the internal and the external. Even when organizations are in a place of stability, we believe it is important to do the work to ensure that employees feel connected and supported at work. But when a workplace is in a place of transition this work becomes even more crucial.
When an organization is short-staffed the demand to continue to deliver high quality, and in some cases life-saving services, does not decrease. The staff who stay are scheduling and/or conducting interviews, taking on bigger caseloads and increased responsibilities, and juggling many demands while wearing far too many hats. Finding time to forge authentic and supportive connection with each other can be difficult; meetings get missed or rescheduled and anything that doesn’t directly address our outputs and outcomes may be deemed less of a priority. We may find that the small pockets of time we spend together is dominated by venting (which is different than processing) and while this type of commiserating can feel good in the moment, it can leave us feeling more overwhelmed and depleted overall.
When a new staff member is finally hired there can be a sigh of relief as well as additional stress as we try to onboard them as quickly as possible so they are able to jump into the “doing” of the role and start to take things off of the plates of our colleagues who have taken on too much during the transition and could be at risk of leaving, too.
When our company or organization is weathering tough transitions, building and maintaining relationships can fall to the wayside. We overly prioritize what we need to do over who we are doing it with. Especially for organizations that address trauma- health care systems, social service agencies, domestic and sexual violence organizations- the biggest risk factor for burnout is not the work itself but the work environment. If we have been in a state of transition and perhaps operating from a place of crisis, our interactions with our colleagues may become more transactional and less relational. I’ve heard many employees that while they value connecting with their colleagues, they do not have time to do that and get everything done that needs to get done. They face an impossible choice of working even more hours when they are already overworked or feeling disconnected from the people they rely on and depend on them.
If we do not prioritize connection, our workplaces will continue to be in a state of transition and we will continue to lose good people. Working in the sexual and domestic violence field for more than two decades, I saw many people leave organizations they loved- or worse, the field itself- because doing this work no longer felt sustainable, let alone enjoyable, when they felt consistently disconnected and overwhelmed. More often than not, they loved the work, they just could not find a work environment that allowed them to feel sustainable and whole while doing it.
Relationship building does not have to necessitate more hours or more meetings but it does require intentionality. It requires leaders to not skip over the kinds of engagement that fosters authentic connection just to try to “get more done.” Leaders need to ask questions that may illicit difficult truths about the individual and collective morale of the organization. They need to listen fully and hold themselves accountable to bringing concerns and possible solutions to leadership team and to say no, when necessary, to taking on more if it means sacrificing the connection and trust on the team. Leaders need support themselves to process the impact on them, so they can show up fully to support and lead the organization. At JTC, we do just that. We know we are all capable of hard things, but we cannot- and should not- do them alone. We are here to support workplaces become more connected and more sustainable places to work, which in turn fosters creativity and innovation and allows organizations to evolve from a place of survival to one where they can become a leader in their industry.
In our next blog we will dive into how to engage in these conversations directly, with compassion, and how to provide clarity through boundaried transparency. Stay tuned!
Discover how to create a workplace that fosters connection, builds resilience, and thrives even during times of transition. Contact JT Consulting today to learn how we can support your team in creating sustainable and empowered work environments.
