Strengthen Your Team by Prioritizing Community Building

The New Year is a time when many people, businesses, and organizations focus on positive changes and brainstorm resolutions for improving life and business practice in the upcoming cycle around the sun. As a mental health counselor and an occupational burnout and traumatization consultant, I often work with people and organizations around this time to develop new habits that support healthy work/life balance, clarify values (both personal and organizational), and create strategies to prioritize those values in ways that support individual or organizational goals. It’s a process that can be incredibly rewarding and illuminating, both for individual workers and for businesses and organizations. With that in mind, I thought I would share one important and helpful strategy that many of us frequently overlook in our efforts to meet our goals because it may seem too simplistic or even counterintuitive, and that is community building.

We as humans are social creatures and as a species tend to exist in relationship with others. For each of us those communities are unique. Some of us are naturally introverted, while others prefer frequent extroverted interactions. Some of us prefer in-person connection, while others revel in the ability to connect virtually with people across the world. Still others prefer tight-knit highly interdependent communities, while others appreciate the flexibility and autonomy of more quietly supportive bonds. Whatever the style and flavor, what remains universal is that relational connection is vital to us as humans, and provides countless benefits to our wellbeing and health - as individuals and also as members of groups. As the Bakken Center’s Wellbeing Model demonstrates, community can provide social support, safety, a sense of belonging, opportunities for healthy engagement and physical activity, and ways to connect with our sense of purpose, all of which contribute to overall wellbeing.

In 2023 Dr. Robert Waldinger and his colleague Marc Schulz released The Good Life, which explores some of the key findings of an 85+ year longitudinal study at Harvard called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The study followed and collected information on individuals throughout their lives to assess factors that might contribute to overall health and wellbeing. It found, among other things, a strong correlation between warm interpersonal connections and higher overall health and wellbeing. Furthermore, the authors suggest that those relationships extend beyond family and intimate partnerships to include a host of different relationships, including those at work. In fact, an influential 2022 Gallup analysis found that people who reported having a best friend at work were not only more likely to be efficient, innovate and share ideas, and engage customers and internal partners, but they were also significantly less likely to leave their job and more likely to express satisfaction with their workplace. All of these factors are both protective against burnout and conducive to employee and organizational health.

So in this new year, if you are thinking about ways to strengthen your team, align with your goals, and grow your organization, you might focus on cultivating an atmosphere that prioritizes interpersonal connection and community building. This might mean setting aside time at the beginning of meetings for brief personal check-ins or being intentional in company communications about the value of friendships at work. It might also mean thinking about workflow patterns and performance expectations, to consider whether they support or hinder opportunities for spontaneous connections. If there aren’t many natural moments, then it might be beneficial to institute periodic planned and impromptu social events where relationships and community can grow naturally. Perhaps most importantly, it means prioritizing the importance of communication, sharing, authenticity, and support in the workplace culture. When team members feel safe to be authentic and to share their strengths, ideas, and voices in an atmosphere of respect and where they know they will be heard and seen, it is difficult not to feel part of a community.