Award-winning organisations prioritise more than one type of connection

Connection powers everything - from commitment to your organisation through to people’s ability to work together. 

If electricity brings to life every light, appliance, structure and device in your workplace, then connection is the power that makes every opportunity, process, structure and team just work. 

And not just in obvious ways.

How is this so? 

Let’s take an important function that looks completely cold and impersonal: the ticket queue on your help desk. 

Discrete requests are assigned, prioritised and tracked. You track volume and flow of requests, speed or time in the queue, quality of responses, cost, utilisation and compliance with SLAs or customer expectations. 

Jira, or your technology of choice, manages a lot of the process automatically. So far so good. 

Then your backlog increases suddenly due to a severe storm, lengthening your response time and setting up customer dissatisfaction - even before there is a conversation. Your agents spend stretches of time dealing with irate customers, who are more likely to escalate, and now you’re no longer meeting your stated commitments.   

How powerful would it be for your customer service agents to be able to connect meaningfully with callers, at this time? And for your team leaders to come alongside them in a way that reduces their stress? That’s 1:1 connection through relationships. Somewhat obvious.

Going deeper, there’s an equally powerful place where connection makes or breaks success, albeit harder to see. 

What if your help desk could make faster decisions about which requests should be shared with whom? Requests would move faster through the queue. And what if agents had the ability to quickly work together to reconfigure, in response to sudden changes? Your whole team would be more agile.

Those structures - accountability, decision rights and the ability to quickly reconfigure - enable powerful outcomes. Ultimately, they enable tight teamwork. It’s team connection empowered by the right structures.  

We could explore a third layer and again find connection where most people don’t expect it. Why do some individuals understand, respect and align with organisational structures and why some people are inherently much less inclined? That’s where alignment is also empowered by self-connection. 

Human connection is indeed the ultimate power source. That’s why we see leading organisations invest in it. 

Zurich UK invested in relationship connection with empathy training for their retail protection business. The training improved self-awareness, trained people in how to read behavioural cues and helped them determine how emotionally engaged a call should be. As a result, their post pilot result was: “92% of customers now rate Zurich a nine or 10 out of ten for helpfulness.” It’s no wonder that they rolled out the training to 21,000 employees globally.Some leading brands recognise that they need connection in the non-obvious places. 

In New Zealand, AA Insurance won the ANZIIF New Zealand Insurance Industry Claims Team of the Year awards in 2023 and 2024 by focusing on agility. They achieved it through structural connection - they evolved their internal processes to focus on culture, philosophy and automation. In doing so they increased decision speed, improved agility and gave more time to relationship connection. 

Scaling up during bad weather events is a significant challenge and that happened in 2023. Despite being hit with record claim numbers and increased premiums, they maintained high customer satisfaction scores and earned industry recognition in the process. 

It’s amazing what’s possible once you fully tap into this power. 

Imagine every person in your orbit moving in the same direction as your vision. Your business is aligned. Your team leans into change. When you communicate, people buy in.

Instead of drag and inertia, you enjoy freedom from friction to such a great extent that it feels like you’re riding a bullet train. You’re out of the woods of quiet resistance. Instead you’re in a space where everything feels lined up, even your people. And they’re connected with your vision. It feels like momentum, with real pace.  

It’s a beautiful state of play and it didn’t happen by accident. You got there by design. This kind of future is architected - connection is built into relationships, structures and personal approaches. 

If you are one of the leaders who sees the value of human connection, be inspired. Press on with discovering those hot spots and structural drags that are maintaining your status quo. You deserve momentum.