Most companies today are over-optimizing for efficiency at the cost of cohesion—and the impact often isn’t visible until performance begins to degrade.
For the past decade, we’ve been told that work is becoming more efficient, more distributed, and more digital. That’s true. The tools are better. Workflows are faster. The distance between people has, in many ways, collapsed.
But something else has quietly eroded at the same time: a shared sense of belonging.
Most organizations don’t notice it at first. Productivity may even increase in the short term. Meetings get shorter. Communication becomes more transactional. But over time, something harder to measure begins to slip: trust, cohesion, and ultimately, commitment.
That’s because belonging isn’t a soft concept. It’s an operating condition.
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A moment that clarified this for me came during a period when we were scaling a fully distributed team across multiple client projects.
At the time, we made a deliberate decision to optimize for speed and efficiency. We streamlined communication into shorter, more transactional exchanges, reduced non-essential meetings, and leaned heavily on digital tools to keep everything moving quickly.
On paper, the system was working. Output increased. Projects moved faster. Responsiveness improved.
But over time, something else started to shift.
Collaboration became narrower. Teams began operating more independently, but with less alignment. Small misunderstandings started compounding into larger coordination issues. More decisions required rework. And perhaps most importantly, people became less willing to take ownership beyond their immediate scope.
What initially looked like a productivity gain was, in reality, a gradual erosion of cohesion.
The issue wasn’t visible in metrics right away. It showed up in how people interacted—less trust, less initiative, and a growing sense that everyone was optimizing locally rather than collectively.
That was the moment I realized we hadn’t improved the system—we had changed what the system was optimizing for.
We had optimized for efficiency, but at the cost of connection.
And once connection weakens, performance eventually follows.
Research supports this. A BetterUp study found that employees with a strong sense of belonging show a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% reduction in turnover risk, and a 75% decrease in sick days. Yet Gallup reports that only about one in five employees globally are engaged at work, highlighting a widespread disconnect between people and the organizations they’re part of.
Across both of my companies—Meetingmax, which supports large-scale global events, and Ingenuity Live, which works with creators and media brands—I’ve seen that the strongest businesses are not just built on strategy or technology. They’re built on what I call “tribes”: groups defined not just by shared work, but by shared identity, trust, and a sense of mutual commitment that persists beyond any single task.
Tribes have signals. They develop shared language, rituals, and ways of operating that reinforce a sense of “us.” That’s what creates durability—not just alignment in the moment, but cohesion over time.
In an increasingly digital world, building that kind of connection requires more intention than ever.
The myth of fully digital connection
There’s a prevailing assumption that digital tools can fully replace in-person interaction. That if we optimize Slack, Zoom, and async workflows enough, we can recreate everything we need.
In reality, most companies are over-rotating toward efficiency while underinvesting in cohesion. Digital tools make work faster, but they don’t automatically make teams stronger.
In practice, digital connection is highly efficient but often emotionally thin. It’s very good at maintaining relationships. It is far less effective at creating them.
When people meet for the first time over a screen, they tend to stay in a role. Communication becomes functional rather than personal. You get alignment, but not necessarily trust. You get output, but not always loyalty.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reflects this tension: while flexible work has increased autonomy, many employees report feeling less connected to their teams and company culture over time, particularly in fully remote environments.
In contrast, when people spend time together in person, even briefly, relationships form differently. Context fills in. Nuance appears. People remember each other as humans, not just job titles.
That shift is subtle, but it changes how teams operate long after the interaction ends.
We see this clearly in the event world. A single in-person experience can compress months of digital relationship-building into a few hours, creating a shared reference point that continues to pay dividends long after everyone goes home.
The same principle applies inside organizations.
Belonging is not culture – it’s infrastructure
Many companies treat belonging as part of “culture”—something abstract, owned by HR, or expressed through values on a wall.
However, belonging behaves more like infrastructure. It either supports the system, or it doesn’t.
You can think of belonging as an invisible operating layer inside the company. When it’s working, decisions happen faster because people trust intent. Cross-functional collaboration improves because teams assume alignment. Disagreements stay productive because there’s a baseline of mutual respect.
When it’s failing, the opposite happens. Decisions stall. Communication becomes guarded. People optimize for their team instead of the company. Leaders often misdiagnose this as a process or performance issue, when really it’s a breakdown in trust and connection.
When this layer weakens, organizations don’t fail immediately. They slow down, fragment, and begin to misdiagnose the problem as execution rather than connection.
You can’t fix that with better software.
You fix it by creating environments where people feel genuinely connected—to one another and to the work.
At Meetingmax, for example, belonging is not aspirational. It’s operational. Our core purpose is “helping people find their people,” and we believe that in order to power live events that bring tribes together, our own team has to feel like they’ve found theirs first.
That starts with our five core values: Make It Fun, Own It, Passion for People, Ingenuity Everywhere, and Thirst for Learning. These are not decorative. We hire and fire according to them.
For a fully remote team, that clarity has to be reinforced consistently. Every morning, we hold a 10-to-15-minute team huddle, each one anchored to a different core value. Team members share how they’ve seen or demonstrated that value in their work. We’ve been running these huddles for close to two decades. They’re not a program; they’re part of how we operate.
We also run a quarterly “BRAGS” award, where team members nominate peers who have exemplified one of our values, followed by a team-wide vote. It keeps recognition peer-driven and directly tied to who we are, not just what we produce.
This approach was a contributing factor in Meetingmax being recognized with Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Culture award. But more importantly, it’s what makes the company function day to day. When belonging is embedded in daily rhythm rather than left to chance, you don’t have to hope people feel connected—you build the infrastructure for it.
The role of “tribe” in modern organizations
In both the creator economy and enterprise environments, we’re seeing a shift from audience to community, from reach to retention.
The same shift is happening inside companies.
Employees don’t just want to be part of an organization. They want to feel like they belong to something with a clear identity—a group with shared language, shared experiences, and a sense of “us.”
That’s what I mean by tribe.
It’s not about exclusivity. It’s about clarity and connection.
At Ingenuity Live, we see this with creators who build durable businesses. The ones who succeed long-term aren’t just producing content; they’re cultivating communities that feel personally connected, both to them and to each other.
At Meetingmax, we see it at large-scale events. The most successful events aren’t just well run; they create a sense of shared experience that people want to return to year after year.
Freeman research reinforces this: 77% of consumers say their trust in a brand increases after interacting with it at a live event, underscoring the power of shared, in-person experiences to build lasting connection.
The takeaway for leaders is simple: belonging doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be designed.
Why in-person still matters
In-person interaction is not about nostalgia. It’s about formation.
This is where digital and physical balance becomes critical.
Digital tools are powerful for scaling communication and maintaining connection. But they work best when layered on top of a foundation built in person. Without that foundation, everything starts to feel transactional.
Digital and in-person environments don’t compete; they compound. The role of in-person interaction is to create relationships. The role of digital tools is to scale and sustain them. When you reverse that order, you get coordination without connection.
In-person experiences—whether offsites, team gatherings, or larger events—create the emotional context that digital tools can then carry forward. They establish trust, shared memory, and a sense of identity.
Importantly, they don’t have to be large or expensive to be effective.
What matters is intentionality. Leaders should ask:
• Are team members given space to connect beyond their roles?
• Are there moments of shared experience, not just shared information?
• Does the environment reinforce a sense of who we are as a group?
When those elements are present, even small in-person interactions can have an outsized impact.
Designing for belonging in a hybrid world
The question for most leaders isn’t whether to be digital or in-person. It’s how to design the right combination of both.
A few practical principles have proven effective:
Use in-person time to build identity, not just alignment.
Don’t spend valuable time replicating status updates. Create shared experiences that deepen relationships.
Let digital tools maintain momentum.
Once the foundation is built, digital platforms can extend it and reinforce connections.
Be intentional about moments that matter.
Not every interaction needs to be high-touch, but the ones that are should be designed with purpose.
Think in cycles, not one-offs.
Belonging is not created in a single moment. It’s reinforced over time through repeated, meaningful interactions.
The long-term advantage
As AI continues to automate more aspects of work, the human side of organizations will become more, not less, important.
Execution will get faster. Information will get cheaper. But trust, identity, and belonging will remain differentiators.
The companies that understand this will build teams that are not only more productive, but more resilient. Teams that can adapt under pressure because they are anchored in something deeper than process.
Technology will continue to reshape how we work. But it won’t replace why people choose to stay, contribute, and care.
That still comes down to a simple question:
Do people feel like they belong?
Because when they do, companies don’t just move faster; they hold together under pressure.
Contributor:
Jeff Duncan is the founder and CEO of Ingenuity Live and CEO of Meetingmax, operating at the intersection of talent, technology, and large-scale live experiences. He advises creators, platforms, and global brands on building resilient, long-term businesses in a rapidly evolving digital economy.
