How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely by McKenna Sweazey
I think it’s fair to say that since the pandemic began, most of us suddenly had to find a new rhythm and figure out what being professionally efficient would look like from an at-home environment. While most of us may have achieved a certain level of comfort in our home offices, there have been new potential obstacles in recent months, as some workplaces have moved back to working together full-time or embracing hybrid home-office models.
But in the wake of new conversations regarding quiet quitting, quiet firing and burnout quickly gaining traction on social media in recent weeks, it’s important that employees and their managers discuss harder-hitting subjects than the color of their background on their Zoom calls. They need to discuss issues that impact employees on a very human level: their feelings of working too many hours and of being overworked.
McKenna Sweazey addresses these important issues in How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely (Career Press), which is meant to be read as a professional resource text and how-to guide for managers and employees who are navigating a virtual workplace and attempting to show empathy to their fellow humans.
IT’S ALL ABOUT EMPATHY
While Sweazey addresses a wide range of important subjects that arise in the traditional workplace, including conducting interviews and participating constructively in meetings, the book’s core focus is on the reader’s development and embrace of their sense of empathy.
Sweazey explains that while we used to have access to hundreds of social cues at a time when we were working together in the same office space, we have to further expand our use of empathy. This can be done by understanding what our coworkers are feeling and anticipating why they may be feeling that way (Cognitive Empathy), attempting to “walk in their shoes” and understand their situation and feelings (Emotional Empathy), and sometimes helping them solve the problems that are making them feel a certain way (Compassionate Empathy).
Displays of empathy in upper management and staff have demonstrated long-time positive correlations for employee performance and satisfaction in the workplace. Not to mention, with this new predominantly virtual movement, increased empathy gives us a chance to sidestep feelings of loneliness, poor relationships among colleagues and dehumanization of workers.
Throughout the book, Sweazey returns to this concept of empathy and emphasizes its importance, no matter the context in the workplace: working from home, collaborating, giving feedback, conducting an interview and more. This book functions as an easy and reliable step-by-step guide to succeeding in the online workplace, with examples of how an employee or manager could apply their empathy and improve the situation at hand for everyone involved.
A FAMILIAR CONNECTION
Sweazey’s title is also a play on one of the bestselling books of all time: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (Simon & Schuster). The book embraces the same easy-to-read flow, step-by-step actionable steps and engaging examples of how to apply the content.
The title also could have been some combination of “Managing Remotely” and “Influencing People” because of the importance Sweazey places on the concept of empathy and how she argues that improved empathetic environments will lead to greater managerial returns when more employees feel their needs are also being met, which surely must be a form of influence.
A THING OF THE PAST
The era of glorifying busyness and being overworked is a thing of the past with the pandemic, especially when it comes to remote work. How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely immensely values a thoughtful work-life balance, whether it’s taking place in a traditional office space, 100% at home or in a hybrid-style workplace.
That includes not only creating a workspace that feels comfortable, a to-do list that feels attainable, and a work-life schedule that feels good to the individual — but also creating a culture of reasonable expectations and an understanding that each person is a human who lives beyond clocking out.
That all begins … with empathy.
About McKenna Sweazey:
As an accomplished global executive, both in corporates and start-ups, and with a top-rated global MBA (INSEAD), McKenna Sweazey has had to hone her interpersonal relationship skills over Skype, Google Hangouts, Slack, good old-fashioned phone lines, and now Zoom. Her career has spanned successful start-ups, like Taboola where she spent five years and IPO’d in 2021. She also worked at the venerated Financial Times as head of global marketing. Currently, she is the VP of marketing at an early-stage start-up.
