How cutting down on meetings and ‘intentional serendipity' can improve your team's cohesion

Globe and Mail

18-06-2025

Question: I feel like my team isn't clicking the way we should be. We went through some changes this past year, including a couple of layoffs and a move back into the office three days a week. Now, no one seems very happy to be here. As a team leader, how can I encourage more motivation and cohesion?
We asked Jennifer Moss, international speaker, co-founder of the Work Better Institute and author of Why Are We Here?, to tackle this one:
This is happening all over the place right now. It is very much what I'm hearing from a lot of leaders. When we have been given agency to do things in a certain way and then it is clawed back, our instinct as humans is to hold on to that sense of freedom, even at personal cost. We can be emotionally resistant and it is often subconscious. It's important for leaders to understand and validate that resistance.
I think that we need to have more conversations about it with our teams. Maybe you're not working fully remote anymore, but are there other things that could increase your flexibility? Maybe it's not where you work, but how you want to work. Are there ways to job craft? To use more of your strengths so that you're working on what you love to do? The happier people are at work, the more they are going to get along with other people.
Return to office mandates can actually reduce team cohesion and reduce community. Everyone is saying remote work is creating this loneliness epidemic. I say it's time poverty that is creating the loneliness epidemic. Microsoft reported that there was a 252 per cent increase in time spent in meetings for the average Teams user between February 2020 and February 2022. A 2023 survey by Slack found that more than two hours a day in meetings starts to decrease productivity.
Let's think about how we can increase time wealth. Figure out how to cut down on meeting fatigue and how to create intentional serendipity. We used to have rituals. People thought it was forced fun; they would roll their eyes and say now I have to go into the break room and have this terrible slab cake and celebrate four birthdays. But what happened is it created these ad-hoc chats about the movie we saw last week, and that increased our connectivity with people. Now there's none of that.
There are ways to slowly build morale. Maybe it's 20 minutes once a week of having lunch together. Great research out of Cornell University found that employees having lunch together changed retention, improved well-being and decreased safety risks.
Leaders also need to celebrate more of the small wins every week. We need to get people feeling like, 'Today I did a good thing, this week I did a good thing, this month I did good thing.' And if you are going around and saying, 'This is a cool thing that my team did,' you are also protecting your team from layoffs because you're giving them visibility to the rest of the organization. That provides psychological safety and creates loyalty. The spillover is more cohesion, because when people are feeling good, they tend to be nicer to other people.
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