New Rituals for Building Social Capital in a Hybrid World

In May of 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella?warned?that we should “be on the lookout for what is lost” as people around the world began working from home. “What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after,” he said. “Maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote.”

So as we move forward into a hybrid world, we need to find ways to rebuild the social capital that we accrued more naturally in the in-person pre-pandemic world. Human beings?are?hard-wired to connect. If anything, our collective need to tap into the treasures we all have — our empathy and creativity, our capacity for intimacy and collaboration — by connecting with others and by connecting with ourselves has only grown stronger.?

A Work Trend Index report by Microsoft?shows?that, as workers went remote during the pandemic, interaction and connection within immediate teams or close networks was strengthened, but interactions outside of those?teams and networks was weakened. “Remote work makes for more siloed teams,” the report states. “Leaders must look for ways to foster the social capital, cross-team collaboration and spontaneous idea-sharing that’s been driving workplace innovation for decades.”?

So how can companies continue to build social capital, nurture connection and collaboration and drive innovation among employees working remotely? By replacing the serendipitous connection with new, intentional rituals.?As forward-thinking companies are showing, to create building blocks of social capital in a hybrid world, we need to be much more intentional about the ways we interact — from onboarding to the use of technology.?

Thrive Reset is one of these hybrid tools — it’s based on neuroscience that shows that we can course-correct from stress in just 60 to 90 seconds. We have produced over 100 Thrive Resets to choose from on themes like gratitude, movement, mindfulness and reframing problems, and each Reset includes a guided breathing bubble that helps you inhale, exhale and interrupt stress before it can become cumulative, overwhelming and damaging to our health. You can also create your own personal 60-second Resets by selecting images, quotes and music that bring you calm and joy.?

Reset activates our parasympathetic nervous system, lowering our levels of the stress hormone cortisol. By lowering our stress levels, Reset allows us to move out of survival mode, access our empathy, and be more fully available to connect with others and collaborate on a deeper level. And the personalized Resets are even more powerful as builders of social capital. At Thrive, we’ve brought Reset into our meetings, beginning each of our All Hands with a different member of our team sharing their Reset with the rest of the company. Instead of launching straight into updates and announcements, we get an intimate glimpse of our colleagues by being brought into their world?—?photographs of places they’ve traveled, cute pets, passions and talents we’d otherwise never know about. It’s amazing how much we can learn about each other in 60 seconds. Sharing Resets in meetings, within teams or across teams, is a way to break out of the silos of the hybrid world, create moments of serendipity and connection and build social capital.

Creating your own personal Reset is now part of onboarding at Thrive. Onboarding has never been more important than it is now in our hybrid world. And a powerful onboarding ritual we’ve implemented at Thrive is the Entry Interview between the new hire and their manager. The first question is: “What’s important to you in your life?outside?of work and how can we support you?” Answers can involve responsibilities, like childcare or elderly parents, but also whatever gives you joy in your life that you want to make time for. The Entry Interview is all the more important when, as is often the case, the manager has never met the new employee. And to keep their connection strong, managers and employees revisit this initial Entry Interview conversation during their regular one-on-ones.

Shishir Mehrotra, Coda’s CEO, has compiled a great?list?of rituals for our hybrid world. Obviously not all of these rituals will feel right for all companies. The key is to find the rituals that match your own culture. At Gusto, for example,?offer calls are turned into mini-parties in which team members jump in to say positive things about the new hire.?At the online book club platform Fable, CEO Padmasree Warrior has introduced a?Swedish ritual?called “fika.” Each week a new question is posted on Slack. For example, “What true crime story do you obsess about?” And “If you could live in any fictional world — which one and why?” Whoever posted the topic acts as host. As Warrior put it, “When you share a great story with a friend or co-worker, you forge stronger connections as you discover new characters, places and ideas together — an idea that’s at the heart of Fable.” At the email client company Superhuman, there are Friday Tweet Readings where founder and CEO Rahul Vohra re-enacts positive tweets that customers have posted that week about Superhuman team members.?

However you do it, the key to creating new rituals to build social capital is to be intentional. It might seem paradoxical to be deliberate about creating serendipity, but this is the only way to create the space and seed it with elements that can spark human connection. And the stakes are high. As the Microsoft report?concludes, “The data shows that rebuilding social capital and culture isn’t just nice to have — it’s a business imperative.” The pandemic has given us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform how we work. By creating new rituals of connection, we can create a more human workplace, no matter where we are located.

Read More on Thrive:?Building Social Capital in a Hybrid World

Joy as an Antidote to Burnout

We have, if we’re lucky, about 30,000 days to play the game of life. So given our fleeting time on earth, how can we bring more joy into our lives? Joy is one of our most powerful emotions. And it’s an effective antidote to burnout.

Unlike happiness, which can sometimes seem like a far-off, distant, end-state, joy is about being in the moment. And joy doesn’t just make us feel good. According to?Mental Health America, it can lower anxiety, decrease stress hormones, promote heart health and even lessen pain.

Here’s another great thing about joy — it’s contagious. According to sociologist?Nicholas Christakis, “When you make positive changes in your own life, those effects ripple out from you and you can find yourself surrounded by the very thing you fostered.”?

That’s why joy can be so powerful at work — it’s a force multiplier that allows teams and companies to set ambitious goals and meet them without burning out. A study by researchers at Warwick University?found?that joy and happiness made people 12% more productive.?

Every person deserves to find joy in their work. That doesn’t mean every day and every task is going to be joyful. At Thrive we encourage Thrivers to speak up (in a culture of Compassionate Directness) if a job has ceased to light that spark. In that case, we’ll?support them in exploring other roles at Thrive that would bring them joy, or in?looking for a job outside the company that can rekindle that sense.?

But as the Great Resignation shows, we still have a long way to go in creating joyful, thriving cultures at work.?The good news is that we don’t have to wait until something comes along that sparks joy — we can help light that spark. As Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern,?says,?since our brains create emotions out of physiological signals, by taking care of ourselves, we increase positive signals: “You can get more sleep. You can eat properly and exercise.” We can also prime ourselves for joy by practicing the emotions we want to have.?

A particularly touching expression of joy came during the Senate hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Photojournalist Sarahbeth Maney snapped a?photo?showing Judge Jackson’s daughter Leila beaming with pride as she watched her mother. It was a vivid example of?kvelling, one of my favorite Yiddish words that means bursting with pride. It was also a vivid reminder, as the photographer explained after the photo went viral, that there’s a racial inequity in the media’s depictions of joy. “I also look for joy in the Black community and try to represent it as much as I can,” she?said. “Historically, we have not seen many images of Black joy or what it feels like to be a proud Black person. That look from Leila to Judge Jackson felt so joyful that I wanted others to experience it.”

Gratitude is another powerful way to bring more joy?into our lives. One way I do it, which I borrowed from my daughter Christina, is to simply write down a few things I’m grateful for before going to bed. Sharing your gratitude list with friends can amplify its power —?again,?the difference between?feeling gratitude and practicing?gratitude.?

It’s also important to note that cultivating joy doesn’t mean not allowing ourselves to feel sad or melancholy.?In fact, joy is deeply connected to these emotions. That’s the premise of Susan Cain’s brilliant new book,?Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.?As Cain writes, it’s “the recognition that light and dark, birth and death — bitter and sweet — are forever paired.” We tend to think of our times of sorrow and misfortune as departures from an idealized state of happiness and joy. But as Cain puts it, “our stories of loss and separation are also the baseline state, right alongside our stories of landing our dream job, falling in love, giving birth to our miraculous children. And the very highest states — of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity — emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect — but because it’s not.”

So allowing ourselves to experience and embrace the full range of our emotions is what makes the feeling of joy so special. As Brené Brown?puts it, “My bittersweet state of mind is not about perpetual sadness or melancholy. In fact, it is the source of my joy, my gratitude and my hope. I have a very clear understanding of pain and sorrow and loss, and the reverence I have for what is hard makes what is sweet and good about life even sweeter.”

Though we can find joy on big occasions and during major milestones, we can also find it?in very small moments. Sara Moniuszko recently?wrote?in?USA Today?about “glimmers,” a term coined by licensed clinical social worker Deb Dana in her book?The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. “We're not talking great, big, expansive experiences of joy or safety or connection,” Dana explains. “These are micro moments that begin to shape our system in very gentle ways." In addition to sparking joy, glimmers can also bring on feelings of calm and lower our stress. And once we recognize what causes them in our own lives, we can create the conditions to have more of them. “What we've discovered is as you begin to see a glimmer, you begin to look for more,” says Dana. “It's just what we do... and we then delight in finding them.”

The past two years have been a crucible time of sorrow and loss. And our future is going to continue to be defined by uncertainty and disruption. That’s why we need to seek out the power of joy more than ever. So find whatever it is that gives you joy, or create glimmers that delight you — in moments big and small — and light the spark.

Read More on Thrive:?Joy as an Antidote to Burnout

Before You Go

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Time to Brainstorm

Next month I’ll be heading to my favorite conference of the year,?Fortune?Brainstorm Health, which, I’m very happy to say, will be in-person in Los Angeles on May 10-11. The theme this year couldn't be more urgent:?Connecting the World,?which is all about how the pandemic has turbocharged innovation at the nexus of health, well-being, science and technology. Along with my co-chairs, Dr. David Agus, Siobhan O’Connor, and?Fortune’s Erika Fry, we’ll be leading conversations on the future of health and healthcare with?the CEOs of Pfizer, Abbott, Cigna, Tempus, Lyra Health, MedExpress, Maven Clinic, BIO, Northwell Direct, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Stripe, Cano Health, Imagene AI, Carrot Fertility, Forward, Embodied and more. You can register?here?(enter the code?THRIVE21?in the “additional comments” field for a discount). Hope to see you there!

Create Your Own Digital Rest Stop

In?The Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz?writes?about the increasing popularity of “digital rest stops” — relaxing social media videos and images designed to give people a break from, yes, social media. “People are craving spaces that aren’t quite logging off, but aren’t fully checked in either,” writes Lorenz. It’s a perfect example of what we’re doing at Thrive with?Reset. Companies are realizing that well-being is no longer a perk, but something that needs to be embedded into the workflow itself. So we’ve integrated Reset into virtual meeting software like Zoom, Cisco Webex?and Microsoft Teams. With Slack and Teams, we’re integrating Reset into communications software. And with Genesys, we recently launched a partnership to integrate Reset into call center software to reduce stress for contact center workers. It’s our version of a digital rest stop to take a break from the stressful bumper-to-bumper traffic on the digital highway.

Oxygen Mask Moment of the Month

One of Thrive’s core principles is that we’re better at taking care of others if we take care of ourselves first.?Or, as they say on airplanes, secure your?own oxygen mask before helping others. A great recent example comes from Laurie Santos, who?taught the enormously popular Yale?course “Psychology and the Good Life” and hosts the podcast “The Happiness Lab.” She?announced?she’s taking a leave of absence before?she burns out: “I know the signs of burnout. It’s not like one morning you wake up, and you’re burnt. You’re noticing more emotional exhaustion. You’re noticing what researchers call depersonalization. You get annoyed with people more quickly. You immediately assume someone’s intentions are bad. You start feeling ineffective. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t noticing those things in myself. I can’t be telling my students, 'Oh, take time off if you’re overwhelmed' if?I’m?ignoring those signals. You can’t just power through and wish things weren’t happening. From learning about the science of happiness, I treat it like any other health issue: If my blood pressure was soaring — you need to take action. So it’s not a story of?Even the happiness professor isn’t happy. This is a story of, I’m making these changes now so I don’t get to that point of being burned out. I see it as a positive.” Us, too!

How to Help the People of Ukraine

The?war in Ukraine rages on,?leading to countless stories of tragedy and heartbreak. But as?this photo essay?by Kirsty Mackay shows, we can do more than look on in helpless outrage. Entitled “We Have the Power,” it features people in the UK who are doing what they can to help the people of Ukraine. As author Yuval Harari?says, “The Ukrainians are fighting so courageously they are giving courage to the whole world. It should give courage to every single one of us, to do something. Everyone can do something.” You can go?here?for ways to help.

Glimmer Moment

There’s no shortage of trouble in the world, but nature keeps its own rhythms. My favorite marker of spring and renewal: cherry blossom season, seen here as the sun rises over the Jefferson Memorial.

Best,