Why in-person connection?

Reimagining In-Person Connections

(Contd. from part 1 of 3 in this article series, which you can read here).

The reason we connect in person is very simple. It’s trust.

Indeed, Slack hit the nail on the head with their new research which revealed that “trust is the key driver of productivity” and that people who don’t feel trusted are far less productive, two times more likely to leave, and far less likely to put in "extra effort". And psychological safety famously comes up as the most important factor for team effectiveness at Google.

In the context of distributed teams, more conscious work needs to be done to engender trust and psychological safety to unlock our most fantastic work and this is exciting as I believe this conscious effort will bring the value back to in-person connection.?

Indeed, McKinsey’s report on psychological safety and leadership identified that there were significant competitive gains to be achieved for team leaders that invested in “leadership-development experiences that are emotional, sensory, and create aha moments.”

The Chartered Institute for Professional Development recently listed quality in-person team building as the number one intervention to build a high-performing team within the context of remote work being more prolific (“increasing team building activity…focused on helping people to get to know each other and build social ties”). And, the World Economic Forum and Harvard Business Review listed distributed work + offsites as one of their 5 office work trends that will define 2024.?

When we come together, we open up more. We enjoy synchronous moments in an asynchronous world, inspiring a sense of belonging to the same tribe, tackling the same problems. This is extremely powerful in guiding us in the same direction.

"I'm committed to the power of connection and gathering and... having shared experiences gives you as a team a collective vocabulary and set of memories" - Tom Hall, GM, Lego Education International on The Future of Teams Podcast?

In-Person Connection: A Renaissance

So, there is a renaissance in in-person connection for teams, but how well are we doing??

The answer is mixed.?

Some leaders will attempt to craft in-person connection through RTO mandates. This will have limited success as after a year of RTO experiments, productivity has remained flat. Others will use their office footprint more intelligently using hybrid models like Bloom and Wild’s squad assemble sessions which combine remote and in-person with office time. But many of the newest companies will go fully-distributed and then use offsites to craft that in-person time.?

(My favourite recent example is Sasha Haco, who featured on BBC Radio 4 last week about her journey as co-founder and CEO at Unitary - an amazing multimodal approach to harmful video content moderation. Unitary has raised $25m and has team all across Europe. They are scaling through a winning remote-first work model for a wider talent pool and strategic quarterly offsites to build a connected team.)

What we see at WorkTripp, is that this is the new frontier of leadership, but many leaders are struggling with this. Our mission is to cut through the noise with measurements and insights.Next time...

The Business Case for In-Person Connection

Responding to Global Challenges

Human Connections in the AI Age

Help us build a better world of team connection

Hi! I'm Sophie, the Co-Founder of WorkTripp. At WorkTripp, we are two female founders developing the next version of our platform to connect teams better and we are seeking our first 100 beta testers. Want to get involved? Drop us a line here and we will be in touch! https://www.worktripp.com/beta