11 Jun What’s your workplace socialisation strategy?
Cultivate connections to boost performance
What’s your workplace socialisation strategy?
Catching up in the kitchen, idle hallway chats, water-cooler conversations.
There was a time when these types of workplace interactions were frowned upon because they weren’t considered ‘productive’.
Thankfully, we’ve come to understand much more about humans at work and research reinforces what we need to feel good and perform at our best: social connection.
According to David Blustein, PhD, a counselling professor at Boston College and co-editor of the book Rethinking Work, finding community at work enhances employee wellbeing and company productivity. “Humans aren’t cut out to be alone,” he said. At COMUNiTI, we agree.
We believe that socialisation is a largely under-utilised workplace strategy that sets the stage for psychological safety and improved performance. In fact, a study published by the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that teams with higher levels of informal social interactions exhibited greater psychological safety. This was because social interactions helped to build interpersonal trust and mutual respect among team members.
And, we know that organisations with higher levels of psychological safety benefit from:
Improved employee retention rates and productivity
Gallup’s research indicates that organisations with higher levels of psychological safety could realise a 27% reduction in turnover, a 12% increase in productivity, and a 40% decrease in safety incidents.
Improved team performance and innovation
The Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report highlights that businesses that prioritise psychological safety report better team performance, higher innovation rates, an increase in discretionary effort and a reduction in mistakes.
This is why COMUNiTI is intentional about socialisation strategies as a critical factor in workplace design — when we shape workplace experiences we think about how we can spark conversations and help people interact and forge relationships on a personal level.
At COMUNiTI we also understand that no behaviour happens without a prompt to nudge workers into action, so we develop purposeful zones that help employees anchor the desired socialisation behaviours to their existing habits, for example, the start of day rituals.
The cafe is intentionally the first touch point for staff on entering the workplace, positioned to encourage social connection as people grab a coffee to start their day. The world map is a conversation starter – each employee is given a tag to pin on their last holiday destination, providing an ice-breaker to get to know each other.
We’ve also observed that in the post-pandemic world, it’s even more important to engineer opportunities for connection into workplace design. For example, under a hybrid working model where people are only in the office a few days per week, early-career employees might not have as many opportunities for small talk with senior leaders in the kitchen, so we need to help increase the likelihood of these types of interactions through socialisation strategies.
If you’d like to learn more about socialisation strategies and nudge theory in workplace design, let’s connect!