Why It's So Hard to Be Loving at Work

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In this episode...

Why It's So Hard to Be Loving at Work

https://faithfulontheclock.com/why-its-so-hard-to-be-loving-at-work

Offices are known as productive environments, but loving ones? Not so much. We’ll highlight three reasons why it’s so difficult to be loving on the job and what you can do to overcome those hurdles in Episode 55 of Faithful on the Clock.

Timestamps:

[00:05] - Intro

[00:35] - Why it’s important to discuss being loving at work 

[01:14] - The first hurdle to being loving is the agenda, which constrains natural conversation and makes objectives, not people, the focus.

[02:28] - The second hurdle to being loving is time constraints. Full to-do lists leave little time for people to interact on deeper levels and learn each other’s love languages.

[03:40] - The third hurdle to being loving is social or regulatory constraints. People can fear retaliation, isolation, etc. or be hindered from making loving decisions by company policy/laws.

[04:38] - Building time into your processes will allow for better interaction and simultaneously force you to select what’s truly a top priority for your agenda.

[05:53] - Look at your policies and operations to eliminate bottlenecks, especially around collaboration. The more collaboration you’ve got, the more efficient people are and the more time they’ll have to learn about and love on each other.

[06:52] - Create spaces where people can share when not on task. This doesn’t have to cost tons of money.

[07:56] - Communicate clear intent about wanting a loving environment, model the love you want to see, and provide lots of opportunities so people can use the love languages they are most comfortable with. Refrain from micromanaging and do the inner work to understand where your social fears really come from. With mutual vulnerability, you’ll build trust.

[10:40] - Recap of 3 main points; Creating a loving culture is critical not just for the business, but because it’s what God wants.

[11:15] - Prayer

[11:55] - Outro/What’s coming up next

Key takeaways:

• It’s important to talk about why it’s hard to be loving at work because we spend so much time at the office and need it to be a place where we’re able to be obedient to God.
• The first thing that keeps people from being loving is the agenda. All the things people are trying to do constrain conversation and prevent us from learning about each other.f
• The second issue that keeps people from being loving is time constraints. Companies don’t want to pay people to chit-chat and put pressure on people to do a lot in very little time.
• The third issue that keeps people from being loving is social and regulatory constraints, such as a fear of hugging someone because others see that as not acceptable in a professional setting.
• People can fight against the above issues by building allowances into meetings (i.e., padding time for the human element), examining their policies and operations to eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks, creating spaces where people can share, communicating clear intent through good modeling; providing multiple, different opportunities; and doing inner work to identify and then discuss underlying fears or biases.

CTAs:

• Figure out one step you can take for each of the suggestions outlined in today’s show.
• Intentionally observe those on your team and try to figure out which love language they might prefer you to use.
• Schedule and complete an all-hands meeting to bring up the concept of being more loving within your company.

What’s coming up next:

Listen to a lot of the gurus out there and it’s easy to get the idea that you shouldn’t be afraid of anything. Ever. Episode 56 of Faithful on the Clock explains why the fearless mindset that’s so popular in business circles is actually harmful and needs to be put to bed.

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