Communal Time

*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast. This is the space where we discuss leadership, team and organizational topics and better practices. We like to provide concepts and ideas that you can turn into pragmatic experiments to help you develop your higher potential in your work and in your leadership. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: Ralph today’s topic is this idea of communal time. What do we mean by communal time?

Ralph Simone: Well, this is time that we spend together. It’s actually a concept that we’re all familiar with. And I got to admit I wasn’t a big fan of it when I first became exposed to it. As you may know, I was a production buyer for carrier air conditioning in the late seventies, early eighties. And some of my suppliers were European suppliers. And it used to frustrate the heck out of me that they were on holiday. All of them were the month of August. But that’s an example of communal time. And the concept came up and I’m starting to rethink it a little bit through a different lens when I was rereading the book 4000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. But he talks about that if we treat time as a commodity to hoard and actually not share with others, then we’re really not getting the benefit out of it. And in fact, having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively, isn’t just useless, but sometimes actively unpleasant. And so he makes the case for this communal time. And I thought it was pretty interesting. So I thought we’d talk about it in perhaps the applications for both organizations, teams and families as we manage our lives.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, this is a really interesting topic. And I feel like we may have gotten even further and further away from communal time with remote working and hybrid situations. So, what does it mean to have time together now in the workplace or in our teams?

Ralph Simone: Well, I think there’s no question that we. And you know, one of the reasons given that we’ve gotten farther away is that we’re constantly feel connected. Therefore we want to spend as much time separated from as we can. But you know there’s a, book. Bowling alone. Right. Bowling leagues used to be pervasive. They’re less popular now. But if you remember, and maybe you’re not quite old enough to remember, but when I was growing up as a kid, most stores were not open on Sundays. It was called the blue law. And that was one of the reasons was the family was intended to spend communal time together. Time with less distractions. But now everything is open all the time. And so it becomes very isolated. And I think that we’re kind of a little bit out of sync because we’re not looking at time together as something to share, we’re looking at as more of something to hoard and protect. Kind of a silly example, but we’ve seen this. We’ll do Team building sessions, right, for small teams, and often everyone will drive separately to the event, and it doesn’t even occur to them. In fact, I’ve even actually brought it up. I said, did you guys come together? And I think I’ve even gotten responses, why would we do that?

Ralph Simone: And so just that simple example that we kind of hoard our independence in our time in such a way that we do it separately rather than together. So I think driving together, in fact, we’ve tried to, and I don’t think we’ve been as successful as we’d like. We’ve talked about when we do a strategic planning session for our organization, and if we do it off site, we ought to ride together, use that time, that communal time, to strengthen our relationships and to have these accidental collisions in conversation.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, yeah. No, I think those accidental collisions and conversation, just that, time spent together. I, think of it as dwell time. Right. Even if you’re not, quote unquote, doing something, there is an effect of being together, whether that’s commuting, whether that’s sharing a meal. I mean, invariably conversation breaks out, but there can be, you know, eating together or meal time together. This doesn’t have to be big examples like vacationing together, but there is something about taking time off away from the business together. get

Ralph Simone: Well, I think it’s, the research would say it’s the connection between the synchronization and life satisfaction. So when you synchronize these things, it actually pays off in life satisfaction. the study that was done in Sweden was around this, people taking vacation at the same time. so the more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the happier people got. They derive their psychological benefits not merely from vacation time, but from having the same vacation time as other people.

Bill Berthel: Right, right. Really makes sense that I remember so many surveys and research pieces done around why people don’t take PTO is they’re really concerned what they’re missing back at the office while others are working. Right. So this would, not all offices, not all work types can necessarily shut down because they might have an essential service they’re providing to the community or their customers. And some of that might be perceived and not real as well. I get that. But, yeah, imagine everybody not being there. That anxiety of what am I missing? Goes away. I get my time off.

Ralph Simone: I’m a little humbled by this because we teach around energy management and time management and weekly planning and doing it as a team and doing it as an entity. My wife and I have been unable to find four days in our schedule in the month of April where we can go down to Florida together. So, you know, this communal time gets eaten up by all of these other commitments we make to other things and other people. You mentioned. I want to go back to it. The eating together. There’s a lot of studies on this, but breaking bread together is as much about relationship building as it is around nourishment.

Bill Berthel: Absolutely.

Ralph Simone: And that’s the other finding we’ve had where we’ve brought groups together, around training, where we’ll have lunch provided at the end. And a recent one, somebody commented, we’ve been together over a year and we have either never or only once broken bread together as a team. And again, I think one of the things that whether we go to communal time, where you’re vacationing with the people you work with, not necessarily suggesting that, but what are the small steps that organizations can take in communal time to drive engagement, to improve their culture and to improve the performance of their organization. I think there’s lots of upside to this concept.

Bill Berthel: Absolutely. Just thinking about it and focusing on it, it seems like there are things we could do that would not be a heavy lift to start moving in this direction.

Ralph Simone: I think so. you probably have a couple in mind. Like what would be a few that you have in mind that would not be a heavy lift.

Bill Berthel: I am thinking about meals together. What if there were? It doesn’t have to be every meal, but if there’s a team or a work group that could adjust their schedules to make sure that they occasionally get together and share a lunch break, I don’t know. I mean, that seems doable.

Ralph Simone: Well, in fact, Bill, what is the pervasive pattern that we bump up against with many people around taking lunch?

Bill Berthel: Oh right, they’re just eating at their desk, or they’re working a working lunch. Right, a working lunch.

Ralph Simone: Or could we get out earlier if we work through lunch or skip lunch? And so I think what we’re doing is we’re missing the benefits of that community coming together because we’re seeing time as a commodity, to be hoarded, to be used to be time well spent. And oftentimes time well spent is only when we are productive. Right. From a very traditional standpoint that we’re making things right. There’s some output associated with it.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, absolutely.

Ralph Simone: What would be, another example?

Bill Berthel: Probably a heavier lift. But I wonder how organizations can create purposeful events that get people socializing and bouncing off of each other. I, am thinking about one specific example. I won’t name the client because I’m amazed they do this when the weather is really nice right here in downtown Syracuse. They have a happy hour on the rooftop of their building. It’s kind of a bring your own beer kind of thing. Bring your own beverage kind of thing. But they get almost 100% turnout.

Ralph Simone: Wow. Wow.

Bill Berthel: So, like, people want this, right? And it’s somewhat organically, it’s just known that, like it. I’m, going to make this up. Every third Wednesday afternoon at 04:00. You know, gather. Folks just might stop in for 15 minutes, others might stay for a couple hours, lower social pressure.

Ralph Simone: Great example. And I think what happens when we convene that way is it levels the playing field for connection. People start to talk to people as other people, the organizational titles and the power goes away. I was reminded with that example, we were down in Miami, and we were doing a two or three day training, and this is a number of years ago, and I was actually first put out by it because it was going to interfere with the time of the training. But they said they had a ritual every 03:00 where they have cuban coffee.

Bill Berthel: Oh.

Ralph Simone: And everybody joins the break room, and it takes about 30 to 40 minutes to get all this stuff brewed up and made and distributed.

Bill Berthel: It’s not a k cup.

Ralph Simone: No. But watching it. Yeah. and watching the interaction slightly softened by initial reaction. But I think it’s this initial resistance to wasting time. And I think the communal time is actually creating the connection, and it’s balancing relating with achieving. It’s creating these opportunities for accidental collisions, and it’s really creating a sense of unity, which makes an organization, a family, a team, stronger.

Bill Berthel: And stronger isn’t just those social connections. This is stronger as a business. What I’m hearing is there’s an organizational and a human case for this.

Ralph Simone: Yeah, no question. I mean, I’m convinced that even in our small organization, that I think we do okay with this. We have a lot of upside opportunity to create more communal time. You know, we’ve been talking about not going on vacations together, but being off at the same time. And there’s a paradigm that says, oh, we need coverage. But then there’s a paradigm of, you brought this up earlier that having great relief in knowing we’re all off together. And so I think it requires some level of rethinking, but really seeing the benefit of spending this time together, being able to go away or have free time off, the same as your friends and family do.

Bill Berthel: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think about it in the way that, and not to be too philosophical, but I think this was the structure of federal holidays, or not to be too religious, a sabbath on a specific day to bring those communities together.

Ralph Simone: Absolutely. And I think that there is some value in kind of thinking about which ones or which things would we want to bring to our organization as communal time that would strengthen the connectivity among our people. So I think it’s really something to think about. I find myself not landing on an answer, but really rethinking something that my initial reaction some 40 years ago is, what a massive inconvenience that everybody’s on holiday. And just looking at it through this lens of the benefit, communal time together, I see an opportunity for not only myself, but for our organizations and the organizations we serve.

Bill Berthel: Absolutely, Ralph thank you.

Ralph Simone: Thanks, Bill.

Bill Berthel: Thanks for listening, everyone. You can listen to a new podcast two times every month here at Get Emergent or wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is where we bring you leadership topics with better practices that you can apply directly to your work and your leadership. Thank you.