Víctor told us that Telefónica carried out a qualitative and quantitative study on the activity carried out by the company that has been connecting people’s lives for a hundred years.
Although Telefónica is a technology company, it is also a tremendously humanist company, because what it places as its primary value and in its entirety is to put the focus on all people through digital connection, promoting their environment or context with its technology.
For this reason, Telefónica has been deploying networks for years, because it is of the utmost importance those affections that navigate the networks and connectivity towers, and not so much the gigabytes and megabytes of the technological connection itself.
This study is based on the relationship between this topic and one of the company’s purposes, which, in addition to its commercial interest, is to ‘Make the world more human by connecting people’s lives’.
In this way, they ventured to carry out this qualitative and quantitative research in the countries where Telefonica operates, and sought answers to these questions:
- How important are people’s relationships with other people to them?
- How important are those special relationships that distinguish one relationship from another?
Some are more meaningful and quality, versus others more toxic. It was assessed what drives people to have such relationships.
A study was carried out on loneliness, and how technology helps to prevent this loneliness, encouraging digital connections to facilitate contact between people.
Having personal relationships ‘is the oxygen for life’, says Víctor Aguado, and even more so if they are positive, as they give great meaning to people’s lives.
The importance of belonging
With this introduction, I would like to highlight the importance for people’s development of connecting, belonging to a specific social group, be it a work group, a sports team, or a study community related to our interests, where we feel comfortable, integrated, listened to and accompanied. Where help is mutual and collaborative, with a positive atmosphere for exchanging ideas and work methodologies, a contribution is achieved, with a significant contribution, whether in our personal lives or in the work organisations where we develop.
In this way we are contributing in a positive way to what we know as ‘work climate’.
The characteristics of a good work climate
With this reflection, I dare to say that a good work climate directly reflects how a person feels within a team, when he/she feels included and immersed in a positive way in it, and details how those interpersonal connections are in that space. As a consequence, a sense of well-being will be achieved in each of its members.
Positive relationships have several benefits:
- They help people feel good, motivated and successful in achieving their goals.
- They reduce stress, improve people’s physical and mental health, reducing absences.
- They reinforce the feeling of belonging, making each employee want to stay in the company where they work.
- Encourages collaboration and teamwork, giving more decisive power when it comes to dealing with conflicts.
- It helps to boost the productivity of the people who make up a team for a given project.
It is essential that positive relationships are present in a healthy and productive work environment. With collaborators who understand and support each other.
In this way a team will feel more united. And when active listening is exercised, respecting the needs of each member, it will help to work better.
There is a model for working on positive relationships in the workplace, which is called ASPIRE and belongs to the principles that a leader uses to improve relationships with his or her collaborators. I will explain the meaning of each of the letters that make it up:
- Agency: It is the control we have over what we do and decide. Empowering employees means letting them take the initiative and feel responsible for their work. This strengthens their own motivation.
- Security: In a healthy relationship, people feel secure, physically and mentally. Confidence in each other’s abilities, honesty and good intentions allows people to be authentic and to ask for help, if needed.
- Positivity: Relationships improve when pleasant emotions such as kindness, gratitude, fun, pride, hope and others are experienced and expressed. Pleasant emotions facilitate collaboration, reduce conflict and increase resilience.
- Inclusion: Feeling part of a group is a basic need. In addition, it is important for each person to feel valued and that their contribution matters. Therefore, it is important to show interest in maintaining relationships with others by being kind, listening, celebrating and supporting their ideas.
- Respect: Showing kindness and consideration for others is key to good relationships at work. This includes greeting with kindness, using the name of the person we are speaking to, listening attentively and showing genuine interest.
- Fairness: Recognise that everyone has different needs and adapt to them. Do not treat everyone the same. It is important to accept differences and make everyone feel part of the team. Using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ promotes fairness.
To this model I would also add, having developed ‘social awareness’, i.e. being aware of the emotions of the people I interact with. Observing the body language of others to understand how they feel.
Another necessary skill for interpersonal relationships is practising active listening, i.e. listening attentively, making eye contact, paying attention to what they say and how they say it. If necessary, nod with gestures, affirming that we understand and listen attentively.
It is essential to know how to manage relationships, to use knowledge of our emotions and those expressed by others, to manage relationships in a positive way.
To do this, it is necessary to be open, to share information about ourselves with others, to be curious and to get to know the people in my work team more closely.
Developing empathy with others helps in difficult conversations, always use questions or phrases that show empathy, or paraphrase after a conversation, i.e., ask questions about issues that we did not understand, to confirm whether we have received information correctly, which will avoid misunderstandings and, above all, maintain a good atmosphere in the space where we are interacting.
Conclusions
I conclude this article by underlining that we are integral beings, our productivity in every challenge is always accompanied by our wellbeing, how well we feel, and how we manage to connect.
In this way we can collaborate more amicably with our environment, helping to maintain an appropriate working environment, with respect and empathising with every need required, in an objective manner.
Keeping ourselves happy will make us feel good wherever we are, achieving goals and recognition for our achievements.
