5 reasons why community-building in the workplace is no longer a “nice to have”, but absolutely business critical.
For a long time community-building in the workplace has been seen as a “nice to have”, often no more than an annual Christmas Party or maybe a Friday Bar if the newest recruits felt up for organizing it. But such a laissez-faire approach to community-building overlooks the massive changes that are happening today in terms of workplace culture and new corporate pressures, allowing those companies that do it well to stay ahead of the curve.
Below are 5 reasons why community-building in the workplace is absolutely business critical.
Quick note: In this context I use community-building to refer to a set of activities, both social, professional and cultural, that build relationships, affinity and trust between employees in an organization.
Reason 1: Your current and future employees all want it.
Gone are the days when it was enough for office workers to have a good salary and a fancy title. Today’s employees value a sense of belonging and community just as highly, if not more. A 2018 LinkedIn workplace culture study showed that the #1 factor that would keep professionals at their current company for the next 5+ years was “a sense of belonging and having people at work they can be themselves around”. Likewise, our own research has shown that so-called Millenials include factors like social activities with colleagues and how “homely” a workplace feels when deciding where to apply for jobs. In a labour market where corporates are increasingly competing for the same global talent, this matters. The office is the first place that international hires start to build connections, and if they’re not successful they are quick to move on to greener pastures, taking all that newly acquired learning with them:
“Sense of belonging is incredibly important for talent and attraction, as employees increasingly come from all over the world. It’s important that people feel included from day one, including getting introduced to social groups and forums, where they can ask questions or just meet. I also see that companies that don’t manage to create a strong company culture really struggle to retain people, because company events can quickly feel forced or unnatural if people haven’t genuinely connected with each other on a human level” says Mark Ivan Serunjogi, Employer Brand Strategist at Berlin-based GetYourGuide.
Reason 2: Close-knit teams perform better.
In 2016 Google made public an extremely useful piece of research under the title “Project Aristotle”. Prior to this the tech giant had spent years researching the factors that contribute most to the success of highly effective teams. Based on analyses of over 180 different teams, they identified the single most important factor to be “Psychological Safety”, meaning whether team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. More specifically, the research notes:
“Of the five key dynamics of effective teams that the researchers identified, psychological safety was by far the most important. The Google researchers found that individuals in teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.”
While creating psychological safety of course mainly falls under the responsibility of a team’s manager, much like team-building, community-building has a tremendous complimentary role to play in creating affinity and trust between team members, which is a solid corner stone and enabler of psychological safety.
Reason 3: The workspace won’t do it for you any longer.
In a traditional office setting employees generally tend to sit at the same desk every day, over time forming relationships with the colleagues they sit next to. However, many companies, The LEGO Group included, are moving to Activity Based Working (ABW) in an attempt to boost employee productivity and connectivity. For the uninitiated, ABW is a workspace design approach where workers no longer have assigned desks, but instead are free to work from a range of workspaces depending on the task at hand. This, in theory, should lead to a constant flow of people moving between different workspaces throughout the day and subsequently interacting with different colleagues as they go about their different tasks. While most people enjoyed the transition to ABW and the variety it offered, The LEGO Group’s Senior Workplace Anthropologist Anneke Beerkens also showed that our initial approach didn’t actually increase connectivity amongst employees, as simply being adjacent to each other didn’t necessarily lead to any interactions. Said in a different way, most human beings are unlikely to strike up a conversation with a random neighbour and instead need time, rituals and someone or something to broker the interaction. Indeed, her study showed that it was primarily through organized events or when queueing for coffee that social interactions occurred. This means that the role of active community-building becomes even more important, as the physical workspace no longer performs this role automatically.
Reason 4: It can save you money! (yes, truly)
The value of peer-to-peer exchange is becoming increasingly prominent with the global rise of platforms like Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Uber that allow people to share resources directly with each other. Resources they would otherwise have had to pay dearly for in the traditional marketplace. Exactly in the same way, fostering peer-to-peer communities in the workplace can help reduce costs, for instance on learning budgets. Take for instance Google which for a long time has had an active Googler-to-Googler (g2g) programme, where over 6,000 Google employees dedicate a portion of their time to helping their peers learn and grow. As a consequence, an astonishing 80% of all tracked learning is provided for free through this peer-to-peer community, saving Google considerable amounts of money in formal training. While the programme almost runs itself now, it did require substantial community-building efforts to get off the ground, as a Google employee in San Francisco informed me. Much in the same way, the UK’s Government Digital Services (which runs GOV.UK) has created communities of practice within its roster of website editors, with a Community Lead facilitating the peer-to-peer review of website pages before they get submitted for formal approval. This helps to vastly improve the quality of draft pages, thereby reducing bottlenecks and speeding up processing times.
Reason 5: It can help make your company values real and build pride and commitment.
For many employees company values can be an abstract phenomenon with no real relevance to their everyday lives. But they can hold real value, so much so that an MIT study from 2013 showed a strong correlation between company performance and the degree to which employees felt that that the company’s values were being practiced. A way to make them come alive is through, you guessed it, social and informal activities (aka community-building). Companies like Nike do this amazingly well by hosting employee sports activities throughout the year. Airbnb has a team called Ground Control tasked with building belonging (itself an Airbnb core value) through employee recognition, events and celebrations in every Airbnb office world-wide. Innocent, the smoothie company, combines charitable work with social employee activities in the annual Big Knit. And at The LEGO Group our annual Play Day is just one of many opportunities our colleagues have to come together around our core values of play, fun and learning. But more “serious” businesses need not fear. Whether an informal Fireplace Chat with the CEO, a Fail Fest celebrating team failures and learnings or a Show & Tell showcasing all the cool stuff that happens across the company, there are many options for connecting employees with company values in a way that is fun, brings people together and builds long-term pride and commitment.
In many ways, while it’s been around for decades, active community-building in the workplace is only in its infancy. Although it’s incredibly important for talent attraction, retention and development many companies have underinvested in this approach and continue to do so. The companies mentioned that do it well, like Google, Nike, Airbnb and Innocent have made the positive return of investment of such activities clear, thereby creating a strong business case for community-building. Now it’s up to others to follow their lead or fall behind.
Tim Ahrensbach is part of The LEGO Group’s Workplace Experience team tasked with creating workplaces that are as fun, playful and creative as our products.
