I have a friend who is a doctor.  She once asked for my advice about how to give one of her junior doctors some feedback about a body odour issue.  We talked it through and she left the conversation feeling positive.  Later she called me from the motorway on her way home. She was feeling angry and embarrassed. ”What went wrong?” I said.  “You didn’t tell me that I couldn’t do it on a WhatsApp message”.

Speechless, I remember sitting there feeling completely stumped by the fact that she would ever think it was ok to communicate such an important message via a WhatsApp.  I hadn’t told her not to do it because I didn’t think I needed to.

Fast forward a few years and the world is becoming even more reliant on communicating virtually.  People are losing the art of responding to a person in real time, or picking up on all of the rich data that comes from being in a room with someone and looking them in the eye.  But we also have to accept that this is a reality of the working world.  People sit behind screens. People send messages rather than having conversations.  And the power of relationship is being eroded.

For some of our clients, they need their people to develop the skills of relationship within the constraints of the online world.  They recognise that we aren’t going back to the good old days of solving a problem with a quick chat and preferring to be in a room with someone rather than behind a screen.  Of course face to face meetings will still happen – they just won’t be the norm.  So how can you get your staff to build relationships and have impact when they are on a screen instead of in a room?  Certainly if you want to have a competitive advantage you still need people to build connections and relationships and have good quality conversations because otherwise the business won’t flourish and grow.

As a people development consultancy we know all about the importance of behaviours, relationships and connections. And that’s why we’ve developed some short online programmes for some of our clients to help their people shine online.  If you’d like to know more about how we could do this for you, check out our case study from leading law firm Womble Bond Dickinson.  And if you’d like to talk about some of your challenges with people in the online world, please do get in touch. We’d be happy to share our knowledge and experiences with you.