“Their biggest fear is that a couple of their company’s employees end up on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert,” one of us joked in a recent conversation with our publisher. Seth was trying to explain the tepid response from the HR community to our new book, “Social Capital at Work.” “I think they truly are afraid of real human relationships in the workplace,” he continued, “and that’s not a good thing.”
HR leaders are the heart of our audience. We address the business challenge of the all-too-typically disconnected workplace, of organizations where relationships are thin and transactional, and where 42% of employees are lonely. We show this is bad for business and offer a playbook for an HR-driven transformation initiative.
It’s a concept everyone can rally around: Social capital—the value that comes from, and lives within, human relationships. Some from close friendships, some from weaker ties that bridge silos and forge connection across teams and hierarchies. Research shows that social capital is a force multiplier for things we care about: engagement, retention, innovation, collaboration and ultimately performance. Important workplace challenges — completing a large project, bringing a new product to market, addressing a new competitor — all depend on social capital.
As HR professionals know, relationships matter. A simple message, but one that, in a world of endless pings, virtual meetings and AI co-pilots, resonates. We’ve been moved by the response so far. Leaders, managers and young professionals have engaged with our socials, invited us to conferences and pre-ordered the book. We received handwritten notes from the owner of a garbage disposal company who attended a webinar and left motivated to build connection among his drivers. But the response from HR professionals has been underwhelming. There’s a noticeable reticence within the HR community about workplace relationships.
Why is this?
Only 37% of HR professionals told researchers they felt comfortable being friends with employees, and it’s easy to understand why. A majority saw such friendship as an exception to a more general rule. Sexual harassment, favoritism, conflicts of interest — the line-crossing relationship stuff that creates legal liability — are too common even when they are not exposed on a jumbotron. Makes sense.
Now our concern is that HR has become very good at managing the risks of relationships at the expense of cultivating their benefits.
Boundaries
The word boundaries comes up frequently in conversations with HR leaders. It’s front and center in learning and development programs and HR publications. The Society for Human Resource Management offers a continuing education module. A Human Resources department posts that “workplace boundaries are essential for success” and that “communication boundaries” should include “preferred methods of contact, appropriate topics of conversation and the level of personal detail you share.”
The problem is that when many of us hear boundaries, we build walls. “Boundary drawing is often invoked to mean cutting people off,” a New Yorker article warns. Consider this from bestselling boundary expert Nedra Glover Tawwab: “Rigid boundaries are walls that we build to keep people out. … A rigid boundary could be I never become friends with my co-workers and that excludes a lot of people.”
Such misunderstandings have consequences. In the ominously titled “Friends Without Benefits: Understanding the Dark Sides of Workplace Friendship,” management professors Julianna Pillemer and Nancy Rothbard argue that key features of friendship, specifically informality, voluntariness, communal norms and socioemotional goals, conflict with organizational practices like formal roles, involuntary relationships, exchange norms and instrumental goals. We say, “Let them!” It’s precisely the informal, communal and sometimes serendipitous quality of relationships at work — roles not defined by the org chart — that is the wellspring of social capital and the lifeblood of successful organizations.
Distrust of personal relationships has made its way into policy manuals. Some go beyond typical rules regarding romantic relationships and cover all close personal relationships. One defines such relationships as those which involve “extensive socializing outside of work” or “strong pre-existing personal connections.” It fears potential conflicts of interest and requires disclosure when there is “a direct or indirect reporting relationship.”
It’s a good thing Jony Ive didn’t work there. The close personal relationship between Ive, Apple’s visionary designer and iPhone creator, and his boss Steve Jobs created products that made history. Jobs’ wife, Lauren Powell, told his biographer Walter Isaacson that “Jony had a special status. He would come by our house and our families became close.” Jobs called Ive his “spiritual partner.” Isaacson calls them “soulmates,” a word we challenge you to find in any policy manual.
Social Capital Playbook
HR has spent decades protecting organizations from the risk of human relationships. It’s time to start protecting against the risk of having too few. So how do we get the magic of Apple and still avoid that Coldplay moment? Our social capital playbook offers eight plays backed by science. Here are three that HR professionals can start with:
- Let membership matter. Create opportunities for healthy relationships to develop outside workflow. Employee clubs, affinity groups and charity outings create feelings of belonging that accrue value for the entire organization. Reward those who join and connect and give employees “paid time on” for membership.
- Build the bridges you need. Most organizations suffer from hardened boundaries. Silos are the social holes where information, ideas, and culture die. Map workplace connection and create a strategy to build bridges where they are missing.
- Make social capital count. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Survey and track connectedness as well as engagement and reward those who build it.
We challenge you, and we welcome your feedback. We’ve all built up walls, and together we can knock them down.