Picture this:

It's back in the days of co-working offices before the internet was a ‘thing’. Today is the day you meet that new team mate you have been excited to work on a super cool project with. Your first working session is at 9:30, but you’re introduced at 9 and you decided to show them the awesome coffee machine in the kitchen. While you are making your almond decaf frappuccinos you get talking about the weekend that just passed, why they moved jobs and you even hear about how they love crocheting toys that they donate to the local children's hospital (you may even ask for your own crocheted carrot because…you like carrots). All the usual ‘corridor conversations’ that used to happen when we actually had literal corridors to converse in. 9:30 hits and you go to your meeting room, open up your computers and start working on that cool project.

The fact is that humans need to hear stories about the people they work with because we need to feel safe enough with each other to take the risk to: suggest new ways of working, give feedback so we can work better, and generally learn from each other. Basically, it’s the ol’addage: I can’t collaborate with someone I don’t trust.

The stats suggests this is a real problem for teams wanting to be highly effective and collaborative:

‘75% of hybrid & remote employees report disconnection with colleagues (and) 58% of workers feel collaboration is negatively impacted by hybrid & remote work’ [AHRI, 2023]. 

We love hybrid and remote working AND it’s not going anywhere - so, without our literal corridors to have the important chat that build relationships that make it safe enough to play with our work, how does a hybrid or remote company do that at scale? 

A company needs to build into the fabric of their remote office the capacity to hear and share stories that allow everyone to build the trust that high functioning teams depend on. It needs to be authentic, repeatable and scalable. Oh, and it’s got to be done fast because trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets. We call this ‘intentional cultural design’, and we think it’s going to be the leading feature of hybrid and remote teams that build amazing stuff and do amazing things.

Session 2-6 involves a series of 1 hour facilitated sessions to surface each person’s motivations and drive to connect you to your work.

Everyone attends the sessions and each week we take turns mining for connections of our stories to our work.