It’s always been difficult to maintain meaningful connections with colleagues, said Casey Wahl, founder and CEO of Attuned, a company that studies intrinsic motivation in the workplace, but “with the scale of things and the speed of things, it’s getting exponentially difficult.”

In opposition are two “forces,” as he puts it. The first is our natural limit, our ability to maintain only a finite number of meaningful relationships. The second is that technology multiplies the number of connections we need to maintain and the ways we’re expected to maintain them. “All of this busy-ness is limiting our brain capacity to keep track and really understand and motivate and build those deep connective relationships with our team,” said Wahl.

When there are so many connections to make and endless ways of making them, how do you form strong relationships at work? I interviewed Wahl about this for a recent webinar hosted by From Day One, titled “Solving Miscommunication at Scale.” His theory is that by understanding one’s own intrinsic motivation, as well as that of others–think values like autonomy, competition, innovation, progress, and social relationships–we can make meaningful connections and communicate effectively in the workplace.

Understanding Motivation to Resolve Conflict

According to Wahl, conflict arises when one individual’s values don’t align with another’s, and miscommunication happens when we don’t know what that other person values. If employees are made aware of this, then disagreements in the workplace become less about who is to blame, who is the problem, and more about reaching an agreement.

For example, one of Attuned’s clients encountered a problem of mismatched values. After a disgruntled former employee returned to the office and vandalized company property, leaders agreed that every time an employee departs, the building would be rekeyed. An expensive policy, but understandable given the damage. When another employee left just a few months later under more amicable terms, the new rekeying process was initiated, but one leader resisted. After all, they had just paid to rekey the building, and it wasn’t cheap. The chief of operations insisted on adhering to the new plan.

The resisting manager didn’t value process as much as he valued financial matters, and the COO was more keen on process. When those conflicting values met, conflict ensued.

“We can’t see why somebody is approaching a problem a particular way because we just generally don’t have this information available,” Wahl said. “That’s just not visible for us, and most of us don’t have the techniques to pick it up.” But when you do have that information about how someone is thinking and feeling, you can develop respect rather than conflict.

Why Would We Check Our Empathy at the Office Door?

We do this in our relationships outside of the workplace—practice empathy and work to understand other perspectives—so why not in the office? Wahl suspects it’s to do with the hard line of separation people want to maintain between work life and home life. There’s value to that demarcation, to be sure, but why not learn from the relationship-building we undergo in our personal relationships?

Wahl argued that “if you can use something where you can see my values, you can see what’s most important to me, we can have an honest conversation pretty quickly, and we can break through some of those things much, much faster.”

Beginning with Self-Understanding

Before focusing on what motivates others, self-understanding should be cultivated, said Wahl. He likened it to the pre-flight safety briefing instructions: “Put on your own oxygen mask first.”

“You need to understand yourself and what is driving your emotions or your feelings or your behaviors,” he said. “The benefit for an individual is that you’re going to make better decisions if you know that this type of project, or this type of work, or this type of team gets me excited.”

But cultivating self-awareness and an understanding of others’ values is a practice, not a one-time evaluation. Motivation is a result of personal experiences and environment, Wahl believes, and as those influences change, so do our motivations. “Feeling a big emotional impact from something can change our value set, but those change quite slowly. The key is the uniqueness of it,” he said.

Building Psychological Safety

In one-on-one conversations, gauging an employee’s values can be as simple as asking, “What’s important to you?” Understanding the individual motivations of 11,000 employees is more challenging.

Solving miscommunication requires psychological safety, or, as Wahl put it, a workplace where employees can say what they believe without fear of penalty. Knowing that others have values that differ from your own and that those values should be respected is a way of building psychological safety into company culture. “It’s the unwritten rules,” he said. “The way we do things around here.”

Embedding the importance of individual values into company culture translates to better communication across an organization. Wahl recommended making it clear that “we’re going to understand each person’s motivations and values. We’re going to have this combination of psychological safety plus intrinsic motivation, so each individual is being motivated, is being inspired in the way that they need, and you put those two together, then you can do it at scale.”

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Attuned.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter who writes about the workplace, recruiting, HR, and women’s experiences at work. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Digiday’s Worklife, and Fast Company.