Opening
People rarely leave a job only for the money in the job description. They leave because the days feel anonymous, or they stay because the people do not feel like colleagues so much as company.
Robin Dunbar has spent a career explaining why that feeling is measurable, and why the wisest employers design for it.
The idea
Dr Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, known for Dunbar’s number, the layers of five, fifteen, fifty, and 150 that describe how many stable relationships we can hold. In our second conversation we applied his work to organisations. History supplied the example.
The Victorian industrialists built villages for their workforces with libraries, halls, and clubs, because a workforce with a social world was a workforce that stayed.
He pointed to W L Gore, which caps its factories at around 150 people in buildings of two storeys, so that everyone knows everyone and titles dissolve into relationship.
He made the case that the real work of people leadership is creating a sense of belonging, which in turn reduces the conflict, sickness, and turnover that fill the calendar. People, he noted, would take less pay to work in a congenial environment.
On the question of what actually builds bonding, he was specific. Choirs work extremely well, which he calls the icebreaker effect, and so do eating, dancing, and moving together. What never works is a gathering that mentions work.
He said:
“You have to provide the possibility for people to create a social world at work.”
Rhythm matters as much as numbers. Bonding requires a dependable beat of singing, eating, and moving together, because the numbers alone do not make people gel.
What I took from it
This conversation gave me language for something I had felt in every workplace I have joined. The teams I stayed loyal to were the ones with a rhythm, the shared lunch, the Friday wrap, the walking meeting.
In my own corporate career I helped build a wellbeing initiative that began with two people and a bit of HR budget, and it worked because it created a beat people could rely on. What I remember most is his insistence that bonding needs a beat, not a budget.
Three things to try this week
- Pick one weekly rhythm your team can rely on, a shared lunch or a short walk, and protect it in the calendar for a full month before judging it. Announce the rhythm once, clearly, then simply keep it without ceremony. Ask afterwards what people noticed, and let the answers shape the next one.
- Check the size of your closest working group. If it sits above five, watch how the conversation splits in the next meeting and notice who drifts. If nobody drifts, you have the size right. If someone does, consider splitting. The drift is information, not failure, and it points to the design.
- Thank one colleague publicly this week for something only a close working relationship would make visible, such as an unspoken habit that saves everyone time. Gratitude said in public teaches everyone listening what the culture values. Naming a habit makes it visible, and visible habits are repeatable.
Watch and go deeper
The conversation with Robin is embedded below. Watch it for the Victorian villages and the Gore Tex story. Connect with Robin through LinkedIn.
Explore Dr Robin Dunbar on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks, and you can subscribe at the Rediscovering Connection channel.
Close
Workplaces that feel like villages are not nostalgia. They are design choices about size and rhythm, made by people who decided the social world of work was worth building on purpose. Explore the research, then sit with the question this article closes on.