Employee bonds are the secret to business success

Team culture

Apr 12

Team culture

Employee bonds are the secret to business success

Sara Iannacone · 1/12/2024

Group of people gathered around a fire in a sand dune at night

Building a thriving, engaged workforce is non-negotiable for the success of any organization. But how do you do it? By creating opportunities for real, organic human connection. Here’s how.

According to Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and many other reputable sources, the “War for Talent” is still a major problem for organizations everywhere—even as major layoffs roll out across industries. Organizations at every level are increasingly struggling with attracting, retaining, and developing top talent.

To combat these recruitment struggles, many organizations are relying on upskilling and reskilling their current employees. But with voluntary turnover at an all-time high, expected to reach 35% of the workforce, some don’t even have enough internal talent to effectively retrain existing staff.

So, how can you win the War for Talent and boost retention, engagement, and connectedness without tripling your recruitment budget?

Why relationships define the success of your organization

The secret is to build strong relationships and bonds between the employees at your organization—not just within teams, but also across teams, levels, and geographic locations.

Gallup has shared that having a friend at work is strongly linked to greater profitability and employee retention. It also helps create safer work environments and increases job satisfaction perhaps greater than any other factor. Despite this clear value, only 5% of employees historically feel like their organizations help them build stronger relationships with their team members.

Here are just a few of the top reasons why your organization can create a competitive advantage by investing in relationships.

Relationships are how problems get solved

Psychological safety, or the feeling that you can share freely without the fear of exclusion, degradation, or shame, is critical to problem-solving at work. Those who feel psychologically safe at work are 2x more effective than their peers and are more creative, more likely to take risks, and more willing to speak their minds.

With this, Harvard Business Review shares that an environment that fosters psychological safety shifts team members from “fight-or-flight” mode into “broaden-and-build” mode, “which allows us to solve complex problems and foster cooperative relationships.”

Our workplace is part of our community

Since our world is increasingly remote, it’s harder than ever to create a healthy support system. People are riding their Pelotons rather than heading to an in-person spin class. They’re learning new languages and finding new hobbies via apps rather than the local community center.

John Clifton, CEO of Gallup, shared with Harvard Business Review:

“With the unavoidable increase in remote and hybrid work, best friends at work have become lifelines who provide crucial social connection, collaboration, and support for each other during times of change.”

Work often provides one of the few places where people can cultivate a personal community that supports them during the ups and downs of life. Coworkers can easily become a community if given the right tools and environment, helping to “[heal] the epidemic of loneliness,” according to Clifton.

Employee culture defines customer culture

You’ve probably heard the famous quote by business guru Richard Branson before:

“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”

If your employees are struggling to connect with their team, discouraged about their progress within the organization, or bitter about the way they’re treated by management, those feelings are going to directly filter down to the way that they treat and serve your clients.

How to foster employee bonds

Now that you understand more about why these strong relationships are important, how do you create them? We have some tips for where to begin.

Adopt human-centric leadership practices

Employee bonds will always start foremost within the context of the workplace, not just at after-hours, supplemental social occasions. This places importance on embracing connection-oriented leadership practices within the workplace itself.

Human-centric leadership can simply be defined as putting your people and your culture above your business whenever possible, with the understanding that if you take care of your people, success will follow.

Human-centric leadership can be characterized by:

Promoting employee well-being and connection
Collaborative goal setting that spans all levels of the organization
Transparency with business goals, initiatives, and strategies
Approaching problems as opportunities rather than failures

Build bridges between teams and individuals

Once you’ve implemented a strategy within the context of how work gets done, next comes the social element. When team members can connect over similar interests, a great meal, or a fun activity, the fruits of your human-centric environment will start to be harvested.

Ideas for socializing at work

To start, consider how you can inject moments of connection into typical workdays. This is often simplest with in-person and hybrid teams, so let’s start there.

Some fun ideas for workplace socialization are:

Monthly lunch and learns with free lunch and time to chat and socialize
Wellness classes before or after work or at lunchtime
A walking challenge that encourages teams to take walking meetings
Having a board game closet, pinball machine, or video gaming setup in the lunchroom
A day or week where you create fun opportunities for playfulness, like mini golf holes around the office
Creating a gardening competition where each department gets a box and can plant whatever their heart desires with end-of-season awards for creativity, biggest veggie, etc.

Get creative and let team members suggest ideas for the upcoming quarter through a pulse survey.

Offsites & retreats

As a fully remote company, BoomPop’s own favorite way to create connection is through offsites and retreats.

Getting out of your day-to-day environment and meeting your team face-to-face is critical for business success. MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab found that 35% of a team’s performance variation is directly linked to how many times the team has connected face-to-face.

Offsites allow teams to enhance their communication skills, build trust, and ultimately, cultivate strong relationships with their team members.