Social Wealth Expert, Shelley Doyle

As a natural extrovert who has a high happiness set-point, I was blessed to attract and build strong friendship groups at my schools in England (UK), and Melbourne (Australia), and in my work and travels around the world. Yet, when I returned to a new workplace after my first child, I sat in a large office of hundreds, but my team was remote. It was a lonely experience.

It wasn’t until I began voicing my interest to launch a Wellbeing Employee Resource Group (ERG) that I found others – who were equally passionate about this topic. We came together and pitched the idea to HR – and to our amazement, secured a 10,000 GBP budget with ease, as though they were just waiting for someone to lead on this initiative.

We launched the Wellbeing ERG six months before the start of the pandemic.

We could not have known what was coming, but the initiatives led by our ERG helped a lot of employees over the coming 18 months, and employee engagement rose. We rolled the ERG out across our European offices, offering virtual yoga, happiness at work workshops, meditation, drawing classes – all sorts! These people – the facilitators – were my people, and we brought others together to find theirs.

18 months into the pandemic, I left this organization and emigrated to Canada – returning to University for a Master’s. Six months after arriving, we were back in lockdown, with no support for our children and no end in sight. It was then that I realised how disconnected I had become from many of my cherished friends and family around the world.

I had been so busy focusing on my career and my young family, that I had stopped nurturing the relationships I had spent my life building. I stopped posting on social media, feeling as though my connections didn’t care the know what I was up to.

It was then, in the depths of disconnection that I heard my soul calling – “to help people feel connected”. Which was ironic, given how I felt at the time.

I knew that to start this mission, I had to begin with myself.

I began inviting friends back into my life – in small group virtual gatherings. Sending invitations felt weirdly vulnerable, but when the gatherings came around, the interactions were everything I needed.

Friends would share intimate things about themselves, that they would never have picked up the phone to tell me, or sent in a group WhatsApp chat. Why haven’t we been doing this!?! I wondered aloud, when I reconnected with a group of friends I had studied with in Melbourne 20 years earlier. Even though decades had passed, at the core we were still friends, and cared about each other’s journeys.

I began building community close to home, hosting weekly gatherings, and joining groups. Some would stick, some I would drop – but every one of these interactions offered me something – a new friend, a realisation, a learning.

As entrepreneurs, we spend our lives networking inside communities, attending masterminds, and having virtual coffees with strangers, when the people we know and love, may be waiting for our call.

I now understand the true value of this work.

Research tells us that social connectedness, aka “social wealth” or “social wellbeing”, has a huge impact on employee engagement. The oppositive of course is loneliness – an emotion that arises when there’s a gap between our social needs and our reality. Loneliness leads professionally active individuals to be inefficient at work, experience burnout, be regularly absent and have frequent thoughts about changing jobs.

There is much that we can do to elevate our social wealth.

I have learned the hard way, and now passionately take my workshops “Beyond Screens” into businesses – particularly those struggling with employee engagement after shifting to remote or hybrid working, to help their teams reconnect with each another, and provide tools and strategies to elevate their social wealth – outside of work.

I also work 121 with clients who may be materially wealthy, but feeling out of the loop, misaligned, or overwhelmed by the number of people they “should” be keeping in touch with, to help them elevate and sustain their social wealth – online/offline, everywhere!

Everyone’s social needs and digital limitations are different, which is why we do the work to establish what yours are, and then intentionally design a life for manageable, sustainable, social wealth.