"Before we go to the value, what's the cost of NOT bringing people together?" Cristina Apple Georgoulakis

At the Shifting Cultures panel in Confluencer Con 2021, Christina Apple Georgoukalis and Daniel Liebeskind were asked "what is the value of bringing together people in terms of present events and/or in business?" in relation to the concept of confluence. Georgoukalis considered first what it would mean to not create technology or spaces for people to come together, especially in the ongoing pandemic.

Research continues to show that loneliness is becoming something that is impacting more and more of us. 15-30% polled of the general population fell chronic loneliness, that's something that is not trending to get better right now. So I think the cost is high when we're not bringing people together.[1]

Continuing this train of thought, Georgoulakis said that the value of confluence now becomes more apparent as more people are finding that we need to find alternative (and increasingly online) ways to gather, commune, and celebrate even as preventative measures for Covid keep us physically apart.

When we think about it in a bigger form, and what's happening in our world today, I think Covid forced a lot of people who would not seek community online to really jump in and dive into what that looks like. I'd say it's the late majority users are now starting to find the value and purpose of community online.

Leibeskind added to this by pointing out that:

Even pre-pandemic, it's important to point out that the problem of "how do you bring together your distributed community?" has been a problem for a long time.[2]

By this, he meant that businesses that have a distributed workforce have always had to address the implicit imbalance of employees who work in the main office versus those who choose not to or are not able to.

A classic example is if you're in the San Francisco tech headquarters, you get access to the executives, happy hour, the random connection points in the hallways, water cooler time. And if you're in Atlanta office or the St. Louis office, you are not considered a "tier one" employee, you're not part of that core community. So how do you actually have employee engagement? How do you bring them together as a community?

He asserted that businesses needed to be able to address and find solutions to these problems as remote work will not be removed when the pandemic ends; in fact, it will just continue to accelerate. To be able to do this, companies need to put focus on shared experiences; that is, giving as much thought and effort into "remote play" as they do remote work.

If we go 10 years without people actually being a community with each other, we lose part of the kernel of what's really awesome in working with other people. It's the ability to have that serendipity, have that fun.. having that context is the foundation of real friendships. Just meeting in one person at a time meeting space is not the same as making really good friends or becoming a community.

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