From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
Companies are spending fortunes on buildings and calling it culture. My guest has led talent and learning transformations long enough to know the difference between a room and a feeling.
The idea
Sotos Poulimenos is a global talent management, learning and transformation leader, and someone who has thought deeply about how work actually functions now. Our conversation began with a claim I have repeated many times since.
“The office cannot be, and never was, a driver of culture. It's the people that make the culture. It's how you feel the sense of belongingness”,
he told me.
A building does not create belonging, people do, and any return to a workplace that relies on pressure will manufacture resentment rather than connection. He has seen the research on strict mandates and the pattern where the people you lose are your high performers, who know they can do their work anywhere.
His alternative is meaning rather than mandates. Make the workplace a hub for collaboration, creativity, innovation and celebration, and design moments people genuinely want, a strategy session followed by lunch, a milestone worth gathering for.
He shared a small example that says it all, choosing to travel to an office meeting with colleagues so they could eat together afterwards, adding weight and meaning to an interaction that could have been yet another call.
He spoke with real feeling about a work from anywhere policy too, describing how a family emergency would once have meant an unpaid leave, and how instead he worked from his home country, spent precious time with family, and told everyone about it, which encouraged others to use the benefit.
Benefits spread, he said, when people hear them working. On rhythm, his rule of thumb is to bring a team together about once a month, with his own pattern sitting at once or twice a week because there is always a reason, a person, a celebration or a workshop.
He also handed me a reset exercise I now use, focusing on one small detail outside your window for a minute or two, which rests the eyes and gives the brain somewhere completely different to go.
What I took from it
Sotos and I connected partly because we both arrived somewhere new and rebuilt a life around the move. When he described going home to Greece during a family emergency because a policy allowed it, I thought about every expat who has faced that moment with no such option.
I also recognised his lunch principle from my own life. The gatherings I remember from years of moving are almost never the meetings, they are the meals attached to them.
His reminder that meaning can be designed, that we can choose the moments that carry weight, is one I carry into every workshop I run.
Three things to try this week
- Attach one human moment to your next in person or on screen meeting, a lunch, a walk or a coffee, and notice how the conversation changes afterwards.
- Find one detail outside your window and study it for a minute or two today, the way Sotos does, to give your eyes and your brain a real break.
- If you lead people, audit your rhythm. Ask what your once a month moment together is, and whether it is something people would choose to attend rather than something they are told to attend.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and listening gives you his examples in his own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Sotos Poulimenos on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
Designing the moments where belonging can grow is the craft at the centre of the Social Health in Professional Leadership Certification . What is one gathering you could add meaning to this month?