Social media has made it easier than ever to tell the stories of our lives. It is just the latest evolution of the history of storytelling that goes back thousands of years. Cave dwellers painted murals depicting hunting of mammoths, bulls, and lions over 30,000 years ago. The ancient Greeks left us vivid myths of sorrow, courage, love, and war. 

When BBC Culture, in 2018, asked writers around the globe to pick stories that most shaped the world, Homer’s Odyssey (written in the 8th century BC) topped the list, One Thousand and One Nights (8th to 18th centuries), Hamlet (1603), Don Quixote (1605), and Frankenstein (1818) made the top ten.

This begs the question of why some stories have endured across generations and continents. One reason is that stories is how our species has shared wisdom and built empathy through the millennia. In addition to the evolutionary reason, the field of neuroscience found that stories affect the brain and change the way we think, feel, and act.

Empathy is crucial during times of crisis when so many people are struggling. It’s also key to producing the kinds of connections with colleagues that can generate much-needed innovation. Empathetic leaders know how to create an atmosphere in which all of their team members – not just a few – come forward with ideas. They know how to engage with team members who are different from themselves because of culture, or background, or personality, or age.

COVID-19 revealed the importance of leaders showing that they cared and were supporting their team and employees. Individuals need to know that their leaders have their back and that they still have whatever they were getting from work e.g. status, certainty, autonomy, relationships, fairness, belonging and security. With each phone call, zoom meeting, involvement in team activities, recalled personal story and connection with the leader, the bond between team member and organization grows.  In the early stages of the ‘change curve’ people are scared.

There is little information to make them less scared. It results in classic fight of flight responses of ‘denial’, burying our heads in the sand until it goes away or hyper defensiveness, sceptically challenging everything.

Now is not the time to leave anyone isolated or excluded. Leaders must value and practice diversity and inclusion, create safety and belonging and acknowledge the emotions that the team may be feeling. Leaders don’t always know the answers either so they must lead with care, giving and building trust through intimacy, reliability and selflessness rather than credibility. Intimacy demands knowing how the change is affecting people’s personal experiences (home, kids, family, social life etc.) and being genuinely interested in their world.

Some people love working from home. They are happy and thriving at work in the virtual world and are finding ways to keep their energy and positivity flowing most of the time. Others are finding it difficult to get into ‘work mode’ and perhaps fear the camera that video calls require. They may be disappointing their managers and peers in the way they are showing up and feeling quite isolated.

Either way, the current reality for many is a home desk and lots of zoom calls. If this is your current reality, how are you showing up for both yourself and others?

It’s a lot harder in this virtual world to portray energy and enthusiasm, let alone to feel those things. For a start you are seated all day and as we know this is known to reduce energy levels. You no longer have a commute in which you might have walked and got fresh air and you don’t have an office to stroll through for spontaneous ‘hallway’ conversations with your colleagues.

Your work persona is now largely based on your head and shoulders on a screen.

Physically having to sit at a desk all day and only view the heads and shoulders of people on screen, you could almost argue that body language is a thing of the past now at work, but as NLP taught us, body language is a huge factor in building rapport with people so we have to find ways to make it work on screen.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, an associate professor at Insead who explores sustainable learning and development in the workplace says “Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat. Video chats mean we need to work harder to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice, and body language; paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy. Our minds are together when our bodies feel we’re not. That dissonance, which causes people to have conflicting feelings, is exhausting. You cannot relax into the conversation naturally” he says.

“Silence is another challenge” he adds. “Silence creates a natural rhythm in a real-life conversation. However, when it happens in a video call, you became anxious about the technology. It also makes people uncomfortable.”  One 2014 study by German academics showed that delays on phone or conferencing systems shaped our views of people negatively: even delays of 1.2 seconds made people perceive the responder as less friendly or focused.