I had the pleasure of attending CultureCon online this year (and will definitely be back for WorkPossible 2027 next year!) and even though I didn’t get to be in the room, the energy was apparent and the learnings abundant.
Attending CultureCon is an immersive experience where everyone you meet is wrestling with many of the same questions we are at Conello: How do we build workplaces where people can do excellent work without sacrificing their humanity? How do we create connection in increasingly distributed organizations? And what role should technology play in that?
And so, I wanted to share a few ideas in particular that stuck out to me:
1. Empathy is not the enemy of excellence
What stayed with me from this session was hearing about the staggering number of people who have experienced what they describe as an unempathetic workplace, and the burnout, disengagement, and churn that follows that experience.
It was shocking, even though I had lived it. I’ve lived the night and day experience that empathy or lack-there-of can create for a team. On one hand, I felt safe to take bereavement leave when I lost a family member, on the other, I was anxious to take sick leave after a surgery, and ended up leaving the company before that would have been an issue. You don’t want to lose your best people when life comes knocking at their door. Not for their sake, not for your company’s sake. People stay, are more motivated, and do better work when they feel they can trust their peers and management.
This is a big part of why we started Conello. We don’t believe workplace connection is just about making work more fun (though, why not?). But more broadly, we’re interested in what happens when teams actually know one another, build trust, recognize each other’s contributions, and create a culture where people want to participate.
2. The AI question we’re asking ourselves
Another major theme at CultureCon was, unsurprisingly, AI. And it brought me back to a question someone recently asked us about Conello:
“How can you use AI to build a product focused on creating more human interactions at work? Doesn’t that feel antithetical to your mission?”
I actually think it’s a really important question. If your goal is more human interaction, why would you want to put more technology between people? But the more I thought about it— and after this session along with some of the conversations I had at CultureCon— the more convinced I became that the answer isn’t necessarily to use less technology. It’s to use technology to the right ends.
Think of it, there is an enormous amount of work that goes into creating meaningful team experiences that has very little to do with the actual experience itself. You begin to ask yourself an endless list of questions:
- What do we do? What have we done before that people liked or what flopped? How can we make this special and unique?
- When are people free? How can we get people there?
- How do we notify people and remind them?
… And that’s the end of my list for now but only because I didn’t want to spend my whole time writing it down. You get it. But hey, don’t get me wrong, these logistics matter. They’re just not the point.
The point is what happens after all that work is done: the conversation, the laughs, the unexpected thing you learn about a teammate, the moment someone feels seen, the inside joke that sticks around for six months… And eventually, the trust that gets built over dozens of small interactions.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a busy team that’s been on the go for weeks and have tunnel vision for the roadmap ahead. Is it any surprise that these moments can fall through the cracks? So if AI can help us alleviate some of the logistical burden of creating togetherness, that could actually give us more room for the human part.
So to put it concisely: Technology shouldn’t replace human connection. It should make more room for it.
3. Building the future of work together
Lastly, and perhaps the most energizing part of CultureCon was realizing how many people are actively thinking about a better way to do work.
And as a founder, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day: building the product, talking to customers, fixing things that broke, figuring out what’s next.
Events like this give me an opportunity to zoom out, listen, challenge my assumptions, and meet people who see the future of work from completely different angles. And to remember that we’re not building that future alone.
There are HR leaders, People teams, founders, consultants, researchers, technologists, and countless others thinking deeply about how work can become more sustainable, connected, and inclusive.
So that’s what I’m most excited about coming out of CultureCon: not that we have all the answers, but that there are so many smart, empathetic, ambitious people working on this together.
At Conello, we’re excited to be one small part of that movement.
Because we know that the future of work doesn’t have to choose between humanity and performance, connection and productivity, or technology and relationships. And that’s a future worth building toward.
