The science of building connections remotely
Understand the powerful, yet little known, social and evolutionary psychology that makes Welcomepage work
Welcomepage uses powerful relationship science to rethink how to help new hires build relationships remotely. To explain how we do this, let’s review the science of how new relationships are formed, and how joining a team remotely complicates that process. From there, we’ll explain how Welcomepage can support relationship building in a remote-native way.
What happens when we join a new group: how do we decide who might be “our people” that we want to get to know better?
In 2013, Dr. Robert Dunbar - the evolutionary psychologist famously known for “Dunbar’s Number”, or the discovery that humans have upward limits on the size of the social networks we can maintain - published a fascinating study that shed light on this question. Dunbar found that when entering a new group, we subconsciously scan the people we interact with for seven criteria which signal to us whether a person might be a potential kindred spirit. Dunbar, who dubs these criteria the “Seven Pillars of Friendship”, explains the process as follows:
“The criteria you use in evaluating someone’s friendship potential are … a set of seven cultural dimensions that are rather like a supermarket barcode emblazoned on your forehead. Except, of course, that you speak them. Some are about the way you actually speak (your dialect), some are about the things that interest you, others are about your attitudes to life and society in general. In essence, they are who you are culturally... they establish you both as a friend and as a member of a wider community.”
The seven pillars are (in no particular order):
Dunbar and his team found that the more criteria we share with someone, the more time we are prepared to invest in them, and the more emotionally close we feel towards them.
Unsurprisingly, remote onboarding interrupts the natural process of scanning our environment for the people with whom we share the Seven Pillars, and broadcasting our own pillars to the group. In person, this process happens intuitively, as we use all of our senses to explore the people and personalities around us, consuming and projecting the social signals that help us connect. This includes explicit signals like our fashion choices or lunchroom conversations, and more subtle signals like the book we keep on our desk or the photo we choose for our phone’s desktop wallpaper. We use these signals to identify the people we expect to get along with, to find shared interests and to initiate connections and conversations.
In a remote environment, where so much of this context becomes invisible, this process breaks down. Without the richness of the in-person environment, all we have to work with when we join a new team are the names, titles and profile photos of our colleagues - if we’re lucky, maybe we can spot a poster on the wall from somebody’s webcam or a favourite band on their t-shirt. This is hardly the sort of rich information we have evolved to rely on when hunting for the Seven Pillars. Without this context, new hires find themselves searching in the dark, trying their best to navigate a new team but with a dramatically impaired ability to do so.
How can we support our ability to scan our environment for the Seven Pillars in a remote environment? This is the problem Welcomepage is designed to solve.
By creating a Welcomepage, new hires are able to reintroduce the richness of the physical workplace into their remote environment. By sharing their story in their Welcomepage, and exploring the Welcomepages of their colleagues, new hires are able to share more about who they are, and discover points of connection amongst the people they work with - both on their immediate team and across other teams and functions. Because Welcomepage is designed around sharing a personal narrative, rather than filling out fields in a questionnaire, it enables new hires to introduce themselves in a much more natural way, which mirrors how we connect in person. And since Welcomepage enables colleagues to react and comment on each other’s pages, and not just read them, Welcomepage transforms points of connection into moments of connection by making it easy for coworkers to reach out to new hires and connect over shared interests.
In short, Welcomepage uses a deep understanding of the underlying science of relationship-building to recreate the experience of meeting new teammates at the office, but in a new, remote-native way.