Love at Work: 10 Ways to Build a More Connected Workplace 

What does it mean to bring love to work?

While the word love isn’t prominent in most factories, offices, or conference rooms, loving behaviors and energy can radically reshape a workplace. Even in the most toxic cultures, individuals and departments flourish when just one person fosters engagement, empowerment, and trust.

Expressing love at work means connecting with care, compassion, concern, curiosity, and kindness. It means creating space for understanding, exploration, and collaboration—where people feel valued, supported, and motivated to do their best work.

I’m confident love already flows in your company—and your life. Here are 10 ways to take it to the next level and build a more connected work-life.

1. Keep the most important thing the most important thing.
   Staying aligned to your organization’s purpose and mission is a must-have if you want to attract and empower top talent. When all players in the ecosystem share an urgent pursuit of the mission and a personal connection to a future everyone can picture, the stage is set for creation, delivery, and progress.
2. Greet people in passing. 
   A simple “good morning,” a smile, or eye contact can make all the difference in creating a culture of warmth and acknowledgment. I vividly remember complaints about an executive who always took the stairs for exercise, but when meeting people in the stairwell, he was either absorbed in his phone or bounding two steps at a time with his head down. Don’t repeat his mistakes. Smile. Look around.
3. Walk around and engage. 
   Step away from your desk and schedule time to connect with colleagues. Use the time when everyone’s gathered around the coffee pot or the 10 minutes before a meeting starts to check in and catch up. If you’re working remotely, get creative about connecting beyond the topic at hand.
4. Learn and remember names. 
   Address people by their names—precisely as they pronounce their names. If you don’t know or can’t remember, ask again and try harder.

   I once attended a training where we had to look someone in the eye and say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t care enough about you to remember your name.” Believe me, you only have to go through this once to realize that a) it’s not that hard, and b) it means a lot when people see, know, and remember us.

5. Always be on time. 
   Show respect for all participants in every scheduled activity by treasuring their time. If you’re going to be late, communicate ahead of time and reschedule proactively. If tardiness is a habit you need to break, create a consequence. Ten dollars for every five-minute delay can fund a nice happy hour for the team.
6. Give feedback as close to the moment as possible. 
   The most valuable feedback you can give is reinforcing strengths and catching people doing things right. The second-most valuable feedback is straight talk when something isn’t going well.

   Peer feedback is a skill worth building; we spend a lot more time working with teammates than we do being watched by our supervisors. Minor adjustments can pay big dividends when it’s safe, and even comfortable, to share insights and observations about behaviors and actions that affect one another.

7. Ask questions! 
   We already know what we know about everything, so suspending our current beliefs and opinions to genuinely understand what someone else sees and feels is the easiest way to find common ground.

   Those of us who are very comfortable with our intuition and “facts” may unknowingly stand in the way of something even better, easier, more efficient, or lower risk.

8. Put time into performance and development conversations and hold them frequently. 
   As an employee, be the CEO of your own life and ask for time to discuss progress, performance, and skill-building if the time isn’t magically appearing in your calendar. As a team leader, supervisor, or executive, block time to think about your team and individual contributions. Prepare for these sessions and invest in the team as you would like someone to invest in you.
9. Celebrate achievements and milestones. 
   From safety records to service milestones, from delivering innovations to owning a failure, pause to see and call out big and small wins. Use communication programs to recognize personal events, such as birthdays, weddings, births, and graduations; it shows that we care about each other’s lives.
10. Treat everyone as adults. 
    We often experience hierarchy in a parent-child, teacher-student, or boss-worker relationship with conscious and unconscious subordination. A little shift from leader-as-boss to leader-as-coach separates responsibilities without implying subordination.

    The best coaches aren’t the best players, and the best players aren’t the best coaches—but a great coach can make the most of a top-talent team, and great teammates treasure a coach with the best playbook and capacity to get more from the group than from individuals.

Small, steady actions win the race 

Bringing love to work isn’t about grand gestures—it’s about small, consistent actions that create a culture of respect, inclusion, and trust. When leaders and teams commit to showing up with love, they unlock greater engagement, deeper collaboration, and lasting success.

Written by Kelly Winegarden Hall.
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