Is getting to know people in the workplace important? Does it contribute to the accomplishing the goals of the organization?

Attention to workplace relationships is usually a low priority. The practical, tangible tasks to complete projects are always present and obvious and have deadlines associated with them. In contrast, relationships are nebulous with no apparent time constraints. They draw our attention when they emerge as irritants. They may be a root cause as to why goals are not being achieved, but the connection may not be obvious. Building relationships can seem like a luxury when so much has to be done.

Add to this the fact that human relationships can be the most challenging and the most painful aspect of organizational life. People fear facing the conflicts that inevitably arise in working together. A colleague recently described his former company saying "Give us process problems and we’d jump all over them. But give us people problems, and folks just disappeared."

Impact of Diversity
In the less diverse workplace of earlier years, the need to know one another was not so obvious. There was a base of homogeneity that people could count on. White males did not just dominate organizational life; they were organizational life, and they brought a common socialization to it. Role expectations between genders, races, and classes were clearer. People stayed in the same community for longer periods and thus created a web of relationships outside work. Relationships happened naturally as part of the background.

This does not mean that the men at that time did not pay attention to relationships and social information. They did and do, but the thrust was and is of a certain kind. The system of cultivating networks by which power was gained and held is familiar, but it was still in the background - a given, part of an expectation of entitlement.

Today’s workplace presents a different picture. White males still largely dominate organizational culture; however, our awareness of it is much heightened. Minority groups challenge institutionalized discrimination. Women and people of color are slowly advancing into management roles. Globalization brings people from around the world to work together. Generational differences are exacerbated by burgeoning technology.

We can no longer rely on a base of shared assumptions. The diversity of our cultural backgrounds and expectations will not allow it. Increased diversity in the workplace challenges our traditional high focus on the task and demands that we pay more attention to knowing one another. Not doing so prevents us from achieving our productivity potential. Poor relationships and lack of understanding drain energy from the task at hand.

We continue, however, to behave as if we did have this base of common assumptions. We focus on tasks and processes, and we avoid the work of getting to know one another and fail to factor social information into our thinking. At its simplest, this may cause communication mishaps. More seriously, we may take steps that seem absolutely logical in relation to tasks, only to find people in uproar about them. Most seriously, we may enter a prejudicial spiral in which we make assumptions about others; they fail to behave as we expect, and as a result we develop new negative assumptions about them. These negative assumptions get reinforced each time we see them fulfilled. We now not only have miscommunication, we have built barriers to communication.