Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we're going to wrap up our membership drive series with The Art of Gathering author Priya Parker. This time, we're going to talk about returning to the office. Not whether you should return to the office, whether it's right to demand that people return to the office, not that kind of conversation about returning to the office, but if you're doing it, what it's been like, and why it hasn't for everybody been the smoothest transition, and how to make it as positive a thing as possible.

You may have noticed the social scene isn't quite the same. Despite everyone's best intentions, it can feel awkward. Maybe you've gotten up early, put on your best outfit, made the commute, only to find that the office feels like a ghost town. Has that happened to you? Or you started your job remotely-- I know this has happened to many of you. Despite being around for the last six months to a year, you haven't had the opportunity to get to know your colleagues at all in person yet, and this might make you feel disconnected and uncomfortable when you do.

Let's talk about returning to the office, or even going there for the first time with Priya Parker, conflict facilitator and author of The Art of Gathering, both the book and the newsletter. Priya, thanks for this whole series, and thanks for coming out to talk about this.

Priya Parker: Thank you so much for having me and having me back.

Brian Lehrer: Is this up to the boss to establish the ground rules for how people are going to interact in person for the first time in a long time, or for some of them, for the first time ever?

Priya Parker: It's up to the boss and those in power to really deeply think about how to, at some level, metaphorically be a good host, physically in person, virtually online. When people are coming back into the office-- Yesterday, we spoke about generous authority. What does it mean to really think about-- If you're listening, you may be a manager, you may be a boss, you may not want to go back yourself, but to really think about, how do I connect my guests, how do I practice generous authority?

How do I connect my guests, metaphorical guests to each other, connect them to the purpose of our work? How do I protect them from each other, and how do I temporarily equalize them? And very practically what that means is, in many companies, organizations, teams, like a third of the employees are new. Meaning they joined during the pandemic, they've never met each other. What that actually means is to begin to think about how do we have-- When should we meet in person? What should rise to the level of everybody being at the same place at the same time?

When we do that, one of the rare things one can do in person is to actually have people talk, have some coffee together. Not just have one person and everyone else on mute. There are very specific things you can do when you're in person. I was recently working with a public school that was bringing back their teachers for the first time. They spent three hours just gathering their faculty and their staff and their administrators together, and did something as simple as sit in a room and raise your hands if you have experience over the last two years teaching on Zoom. If for the first time, you are wearing pants with a buckle.

Like, naming all of these-- If you're new, just simply pausing and marking the moment together to actually acknowledge, we've all been through something together that might rhyme and be different in certain ways, but it's also shared. One of the biggest mistakes we make as managers is actually skipping over that part and just kind of "getting back to work." The managers that are doing this really well are designing for the types of connections they actually want to see.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and you have a great phrase for this, "designing for connection," and that we need collective mechanisms that give social permission for connection. Don't just let it happen, set up conditions for success. I think that's a great message for everybody. You wrote a piece for The New York Times called How Should We Meet, and Who Decides, and one of the things that you wrote in there is that there's a yawning gap in the sense of belonging at work between white people and people of color, and that's nothing new. Do you think it's different or worse as a result of pandemic separation?

Priya Parker: There's a great study done by the Slack Future Forum I think every six months, and the most recent data showed that people of color, women, also often caregivers, are less likely to want to return to work in the same numbers or percentages as their white colleagues. One of the elements of this and the racial reckoning that we have experienced as a country over the last two and a half years has really shifted, I think, all people's perceptions and awareness of how people of color or people that are, whatever the context is, not in the majority cultural context, experience what it's like to navigate a workplace. One of the things that the study showed was people experience microaggressions in much higher percentages when they're in person than if you're just zooming in and zooming out.

I think workplaces that are doing relatively well are the ones facing this data, not denying it, and adapting to the cultures that have frankly always existed and now people are just talking about. Doing things, whether it's like affinity groups, or whether it's actually thinking about the trainings all different types of people need within an organization, but I don't think that this is a new experience. I think the cultural context has changed so that people can now talk more openly and report what it actually is like to sometimes experience hierarchies within in-person spaces.

Brian Lehrer: Priya Parker is the author of The Art of Gathering. She also has an Art of Gathering newsletter, which has really fascinating topics over and over again, like the ones we've been talking about in this four-part series that we did with her this week. The one relevant to today, Designing for Connection in the Workplace, and we also touched on her New York Times article called How Should We Meet, and Who Decides? Priya, I think people have really gotten a lot out of this. Thank you so much for doing it with us.

Priya Parker: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much for focusing on gathering. I think this is a complicated time, and for the first time in many years, people are actually realizing that we actually need to design and think about how we want to come together. This vacuum won't be open forever, and so it's a beautiful time to really talk about it. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Thanks again.

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