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How do you maintain a strong company culture and team commitment as your organisation scales?
In the third and final part of this series, Professor Robin Dunbar sits down with host Susannah de Jager to explore how social science can provide the answer. Robin explains that maintaining deep relationships with your core team is a huge "time burden" for leaders, but it is essential for fostering trust and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
The conversation delves into the historical context of community-building in business, referencing the practices of 19th-century founders who built social clubs and community centres for their workers. Professor Dunbar highlights the importance of social engagement, from feasting and singing to the simple act of having a pub on-site, as a way to create a powerful sense of belonging. He argues that HR departments should focus less on legal issues and more on creating opportunities for social engagement to cultivate a committed workforce.
In the third and final part of this series, Professor Robin Dunbar sits down with host Susannah de Jager to explore how social science can provide the answer. Robin explains that maintaining deep relationships with your core team is a huge "time burden" for leaders, but it is essential for fostering trust and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
The conversation delves into the historical context of community-building in business, referencing the practices of 19th-century founders who built social clubs and community centres for their workers. Professor Dunbar highlights the importance of social engagement, from feasting and singing to the simple act of having a pub on-site, as a way to create a powerful sense of belonging. He argues that HR departments should focus less on legal issues and more on creating opportunities for social engagement to cultivate a committed workforce.
- (00:00) - Welcome to Oxford+
- (01:10) - Social Layers and Business Relationships
- (01:49) - Time Investment in Relationships
- (03:26) - Challenges of Management and Social Relationships
- (06:40) - Historical Perspectives on Workforce Engagement
- (08:36) - Modern Examples of Building Community
- (10:17) - The Role of Social Activities in Organisations
- (13:12) - Hybrid Working and Social Cohesion
- (15:44) - Retaining Talent and Alumni Networks
Professor Robin Dunbar: A renowned professor who invented Dunbar's number, the concept that humans can only meaningfully connect with approximately 150 people. As a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, his research explores the behavioural, cognitive, and neuroendocrinological factors that influence social bonding. His work in evolutionary psychology and anthropology provides unique insights into how human dynamics influence group sizes and social structures in both historic and modern contexts, including business.
Connect with Robin on LinkedIn
Susannah de Jager: Susannah is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in UK asset management. She has worked closely with industry experts, entrepreneurs, and government officials to shape the conversation around domestic scale-up capital.
Connect with Susannah on LinkedIn / Subscribe to the Oxford+ Newsletter for exclusive content
Oxford+ is hosted by Susannah de Jager and supported by Mishcon de Reya and Oxford North.
Produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford.
Creators and Guests
What is Oxford+?
Welcome to Oxford+, the podcast series that explores the myths and truths of the Oxford investing landscape hosted by Susannah de Jager. Since moving to Oxford, Susannah has collaborated with experts, entrepreneurs, and government to shape the conversation around domestic scale-up capital. Oxford+ aims to inform, inspire, and connect. We'll talk to Founders, investors, academics, politicians, and facilitators and explore how Oxford is open for business.
[00:00:01] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford+. The podcast series for innovators and investors brought to you in partnership with Mishcon de Reya. Hello and welcome to a slightly different format for Oxford Plus. We had the pleasure of interviewing Robin Dunbar, and it was such a long interview that we've split it into three parts. The third and final part is going to be about how we keep team commitment and culture as companies grow.
Robin, you and I also spoke when we had our pre-call about the time and the cost that founders put into networking for investors, networking for partnerships is a huge part of business. And I was really, wanting to dive into what, from your work, the received kind of cadence, tempo, time that you need to spend with people. Because we think of these as social norms that you've studied, but actually they are, from what you said, entirely transferable into business relationships and the world of work.
[00:00:58] Robin Dunbar: I think that's absolutely right. What defines these layers of our social world, as it were, the sort of layers of friendship are also part and parcel of the world of business, the world of any kind of organisation.
What they essentially say these sort of layers at five, fifteen, fifty, a hundred fifty, is that you can only manage a certain number of relationships at a given level of, well, let's call it emotional intensity, because that would be the everyday experience. So you have this inner core of five people, so you have these very close emotional relationships with your best friends and family members. In those terms, the relationship is very different to the kind of much more casual relationship you have with the people in the outer layers of the 150 as it were. And a lot of that is dependent on the time you invest in them.
So your emotional closeness to an individual is dictated by how much time you actually spend with them and the time burdens are very heavy.
I mean, to maintain somebody in that inner core of five best friends and family requires the investment of 40% of our total social effort. The next 10 people that make up the 15 layer consume an additional 20%. So in real life, 60% of our time and effort and emotional capital is devoted to just 15 people and the rest out there get decreasingly small quantities.
That's what sets these layers up and that transposes itself directly into any kind of management structure because it says, look, there are only five people that you are going to have a deep enough personal understanding of. At this point, it's not so much an emotional relationship as a kind of understanding of how they tick and whether you can trust them. Are they on the samepage as you in terms of how the organisation should work and these kinds of things that, that allow any organisation to function.That's very limited and you have to choose those people very carefully to make sure they're the right one. It's not necessarily your golfing buddy. It's the person that is the finance manager or whatever it might be, whom we need to worry about. You need to have somebody there who really works inclose harmony with how you do it. But then, below them the same problems arise. They also have to have the next layer down below them, and those layers then create your secondary layer that you're investing in.
But it means that the time cost, you actually have to spend as, let's say, a CEO, is really pulling you very hard in two completely opposite directions because you would really like to spend your time thinking about strategic matters. But on the other hand, the organisational structures are pulling you to spending time, investing time, in what's effectively building social relationships. That's what makes a CEO type position or any higher management position extremely difficult to do. And of course, you do have these things called families that drag you in yet a third direction, and you would dearly enough to have fourth directions, a little bit of time sailing the Mediterranean just to relax for a change.
Time pressures drive a lot of the problems, and you have to find very carefully managed solutions It just underlines, I think the fact that managing these super large organisations that we have now, whether it's a government department or amultinational is just the sheer scale of the thing that's the problem. And we are not really designed to handle that number of individuals. The only way we can do it is to devolve responsibility and trust. But that requires usdevelop these levels of trust and personal engagement with the people immediately below us in, in the layers.
[00:04:53] Susannah de Jager: It's really interesting hearing you talk about that kind of the effort and the cost to founders, CEOs, managers, because even in a relatively small organisation, you've got investors, who might be trying to fundraise, you've got existing board members, and then you've got your key team.
When you look at the problem for slightly smaller, but still too many to manage on an individual basis and the emotional kind of weight and burden that you've touched upon of keeping those people close. Do you see a sort of, a split for sort of inward and outward facing senior management. So you know somebody that's a great storyteller who's got the culture of a business through their bones that they should be outward facing, and then somebody else that almost sort of holds the team internally?
[00:05:44] Robin Dunbar: Maybe this is the kind of solutions we should be looking at and I suppose to some extent we already do this in that we divide up the kind of major tasks in a large organisation between different departments. So we have somebody in charge of HR. We have somebody in charge of finance. We have somebody in charge of sales, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. To try and devolve those kind of responsibilities and capitalise on expertise as it were. Because obviously nobody can be super competent at all these different subfields.
But I think there is a case for arguing that large organisations in particular need to pay much more attention to building a social and psychological atmosphere among the wider workforce. And I make two observations in this context. One is a historical one.
If you think about how the entrepreneurial founders of our big multinationals, the Leverhulmes, the Cadburys, the Mars, all these people at the end of the 19th century looked at their organisational structures the one thing they did was recognise that having a workforce that was engaged, educationally, emotionally, socially, whatever. They saw that as very important. So when, Leverhulme built his extraordinary housing estate for his workforce. He put a community center there where they could have, not only, communal mealsbut also rooms where they could have debating societies and people come and give lectures and these kind of things. Food for the mind and the body. And every factory had a social club or a sports club, particularly tennis. Tennis was very popular then. And the famous ones were the railway clubs. All over the world, wherever the British built railways they always had a railway club. Every station, every factory, that made the carriages and what have you and everybody belonged. It wasn't a hierarchical thing. The manager to the person who swept the floor, you're automatically a member and if you go along and socialise and play tennis, and get to know the other members ofthe community that you are involved in. And that all got all swept aside, sort of sometime around at the end of the second World War, I think, and people are looking for reducing costs, they went, oh, well, it's very difficult to put this kind of stuff into spreadsheets and look at income outcome balances, so we'll get rid of it because obviously not very important.
But actually what you're investing in is the long-term future of the organisation keeping this sense of belonging as it were and we might do well to rethink that and find appropriate ways to do it. And there are examples of that being done more recently.
I mean, the big example we used in our book, is SAB Miller, the South African beer brewing giant, because they put a pub, literally a pub in the foyer of every factory site they had. And people went and after work they called in, had a beer, went home,They didn't stay there all night, but they would go and socialise with each other and people like Sam Rocky, one of my two coauthors on the Social Brain book, who worked for them at one stage. She says,the Facebook groups that were set up on the basis of these friendships are still going strong 30 years later, despite the fact that everybody's scattered all around the world. They created that sense of belonging. They certainly created a sense of commitment to the organisation.
So, there are ways of doing it. They will be very specific to the kind of organisation it might be choirs, singing groups, all these kind of things. They produce this sense of community and belonging and therefore a sense of obligation and trust. Everybody's more trustful of everybody else. So that's one kind of lesson we might look back to and see how it could be reinvented in a way more appropriate to the modern world as it were.
[00:09:49] Susannah de Jager: And you gave some examples when we caught up before this recording about other things. You've touched there upon activities and having a pub, which I love. But you also spoke about feasting more broadly, singing, laughing, storytelling. I love the idea of sort of karaoke. Again, it's one of those things, but you don't know why it's so good for the kind of social fabric. I'd love you to explain a little bit more.
[00:10:17] Robin Dunbar: So the secondtheme as it were that one might draw out of this is that the way you build this sense of belonging, in any organisation, is actually to engage in social activities. It doesn't come from flip charts and boring lectures on finance and the like. It comes through actually allowing people to engage socially with each other. If they engage socially with each other, they know each other and things will work much more smoothly because of that person to person knowledge.
The question is how you do it. The previous time we tried hybrid working, which was back in the nineties, which was mainly the big multinationals with very large rental footprints in London. But I remember being at a meetingworkshop on this and one of the advisors saying, you're going to be saving a large amount of money, but you have to accept that if you want your company to survive, you need to spend a good chunk of that saving on creating a kind of virtual village. you've got to bring all these people together face-to-face once in a while at some kind of social events. No pie charts, no lectures about the company. It has to be social.I remember another meeting where one of the very big multinationals, couple of the senior management were talking about their attempts to build a new headquarters campus and they did the usual thing, save money by making it smaller. Everybody can go home and work at home andjust come in when they need to. So there would be no big plush offices for the senior management. There would be hot desking for everybody. But they provide beautiful facilities, Michelin star restaurants and boutique shops and gyms and all these kind of things. And they said they completely misjudged the reaction of their workforce to these proposals.
They thought the new graduate employees would jump at the opportunity and the old lags would complain bitterly, they said it was absolutely reversed. But the key here was the response they got from the youngsters. The 20 somethings they all went, what do you mean stay at home? The only reason we come into work is to see our friends. This is our social life. You're trying to wreck our social life.
the lesson here is, or my lesson, I probably had a lot of trouble for saying this, but the HR departments, which are mostly focused on legal issues these days and enforcement. Should probably reduce that very considerably and have half their staff, not more staff after the original staff actually managing social engagement and being party organisers. Building this culture of belonging and wanting to be there.
What will get you out of bed in the morning to struggle through the commuting traffic because you're desperate to see the people you work with because they're such fun.
[00:13:12] Susannah de Jager: I think there's another theme here that working from home and actually the return to work after COVID has really flushed out, which is that young people do want that social cohesion. Then there's a sort of middle cohort often who have young children for whom working at home, they've maybe learned their trade, they're pretty good at operating independently. They have other, as we alluded to earlier, social burdens on their time that are priorities but are still very good units of production. But perhaps less engaged in this fabric, and then there's an older cohort who are maybe through that stage, maybe semi-retired, but very valuable. Again, units of production. And I keep wondering in my private moments why there isn't more being done to bring those twoends of the bell curve together. Because it serves both of those groups exceptionally well to go into offices and to make concessions, allowances, or just to acknowledge that there is a group in their middle stages of their life who may have different wants and needs. But the danger often is that middle group end up dictating the structures for the other two because it serves them.
[00:14:26] Robin Dunbar: I think that's very true, yes. But it's very clear thathybrid working is a boon and a godsendfor people at a certain stage of their life, and that certain stage is always associated with issues of childcare and the like. You know, you could have a system which is much more flexible in its ability to get the best out of different age cohorts. In these terms, there is a sense in which we are in grave danger by our employment practices of wasting a lot of beneficial talent.
So there's a tendency to see old folk, as you can't get them out of the door quick enough into retirement and be gone. In many of these cases, you are wasting huge quantities of just knowledge about how the system works and what's happened in the past, and probably making more effort to keep these kind of people, even if they're going voluntarily as it were, and they want to spend more time climbing mountains or playing tennis or whatever people do in their retirement. Keeping them engaged as part of the system and as mentors. And by the same token, people leave because they get a better job opportunities somewhere else. So you put them under all sorts of embargoes that they're not allowed to do things and you never speak to them again. But actually what you should be doing is cultivating those links with them, elsewhere now that they've gone. Because very likely in five or 10 years they'll be back again applying to you for jobs and they won't come back to you if you haven't kept those links going. They will go somewhere else. You've invested all that time and money training and you just thrown it away. Whereas if you took just a little bit of trouble and had an HR subunit, which was a development office in that kind of sense, that kept these people in the loop and said, no, you're all still part of the family. You may be working with somebody else now, but you're really part of our family. When they get fed up with, where they're working and go, I think I'll have a change of things. What should happen is, the first thought is, I wonder if this is a slot in that lovely old place I used to work for, because we all see the past as rosier and greener than...
[00:16:43] Susannah de Jager: I used to have a very similar theme, which is that, when I was running a fund and I was responsible at one early stage in my career for the fundraising, but looking after the investors generally, and when somebody was divesting from the fund, I used to say, you need to be able to deal with it so graciously that at the moment they underinvest they can't quite work out why they did it and you leave the door wide open for them to come back.
If you ever get somebody to reinvest, that is the biggest proof of your skill, quite frankly, in that moment that might be available. So yeah, I completely agree. How you look after people on the way out of an organisation in any guise is often by far the best marker of the caliber of the organisation.
[00:17:28] Robin Dunbar: Yes, there are two ends here of this. It's how you look after them when they come in, whether they're the new graduate employees or shop floor employees and how you look after them at the other end when they leave for whatever reason that they might be leaving.
But it also highlights the importance of the incoming end as it were, how you create this sense of belonging. And again, the last thing you want is flip charts and PowerPoint projections ofprofits and losses and all these kind of things. It's a social issue. I just highlight the way the All Blacks rugby team from New Zealand. Here's this tiny little country which has dominated world rugby for this last century since internationalgames were held in it and nobody can understand why.
And the answer's very simple. When you look at their practices, every new player that's awarded a cap, as it were to play for the All Blacks, gets taken around the boardroom where they've got pictures of all the previous teams going back to 1903 or something like that, and they're introduced to them. This is your family, this is your ancestors, be part of the family andwe don't take that kind of, trouble in creating that sense of belonging in most organisations. But it, pays enormous dividends. You have people who are very, very committed to what they're doing.
[00:18:57] Susannah de Jager: Robin, thank you. I could keep going and we could make four podcasts, but in the interest of time, I'm just going to say thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversation and I hope that those listening find it equally useful and interesting as I did.
[00:19:12] Robin Dunbar: Well, thank you very much. Been great fun to do it.
[00:19:14] Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+, presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website, oxfordplus.co.uk and sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford+ was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four.