Six Senses Laamu Leads the Maldives as Eco-Resort of the Year

Building Social Capital in a Hybrid World By Arianna Huffington - CEO Thrive Global

In May of 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that we should “be on the lookout for what is lost” as people around the world began working from home. “What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after,” he said. “Maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote.”

So as we move forward into a hybrid world, we need to find ways to rebuild the social capital that we accrued more naturally in the in-person prepandemic world. Human beings are hard-wired to connect. If anything, our collective need to tap into the treasures we all have — our empathy and creativity, our capacity for intimacy and collaboration — by connecting with others and by connecting with ourselves has only grown stronger.

A Work Trend Index report by Microsoft shows that, as workers went remote during the pandemic, interaction and connection within immediate teams or close networks was strengthened, but interactions outside of those teams and networks was weakened.

“Remote work makes for more siloed teams,” the report states. “Leaders must look for ways to foster the social capital, cross-team collaboration and spontaneous idea-sharing that’s been driving workplace innovation for decades.”

So how can companies continue to build social capital, nurture connection and collaboration and drive innovation among employees working remotely? By replacing the serendipitous connection with new, intentional rituals. As forward-thinking companies are showing, to create building blocks of social capital in a hybrid world, we need to be much more intentional about the ways we interact — from onboarding to the use of technology.

Thrive Reset is one of these hybrid tools — it’s based on neuroscience that shows that we can coursecorrect from stress in just 60 to 90 seconds. We have produced over 100 Thrive Resets to choose from on themes like gratitude, movement, mindfulness and reframing problems, and each Reset includes a guided breathing bubble that helps you inhale, exhale and interrupt stress before it can become cumulative, overwhelming and damaging to our health. You can also create your own personal 60-second Resets by selecting images, quotes and music that bring you calm and joy.

Reset activates our parasympathetic nervous system, lowering our levels of the stress hormone cortisol. By lowering our stress levels, Reset allows us to move out of survival mode, access our empathy, and be more fully available to connect with others and collaborate on a deeper level. And the personalized Resets are even more powerful as builders of social capital. At Thrive, we’ve brought Reset into our meetings, beginning each of our All Hands with a different member of our team sharing their Reset with the rest of the company. Instead of launching straight into updates and announcements, we get an intimate glimpse of our colleagues by being brought into their world — photographs of places they’ve traveled, cute pets, passions and talents we’d otherwise never know about. It’s amazing how much we can learn about each other in 60 seconds. Sharing Resets in meetings, within teams or across teams, is a way to break out of the silos of the hybrid world, create moments of serendipity and connection and build social capital.

Creating your own personal Reset is now part of onboarding at Thrive. Onboarding has never been more important than it is now in our hybrid world. And a powerful onboarding ritual we’ve implemented at Thrive is the Entry Interview between the new hire and their manager. The first question is: “What’s important to you in your life outside of work and how can we support you?” Answers can involve responsibilities, like childcare or elderly parents, but also whatever gives you joy in your life that you want to make time for. The Entry Interview is all the more important when, as is often the case, the manager has never met the new employee. And to keep their connection strong, managers and employees revisit this initial Entry Interview conversation during their regular one-onones.

Shishir Mehrotra, Coda’s CEO, has compiled a great list of rituals for our hybrid world. Obviously not all of these rituals will feel right for all companies. The key is to find the rituals that match your own culture.

At Gusto, for example, offer calls are turned into mini-parties in which team members jump in to say positive things about the new hire.

At the online book club platform Fable, CEO Padmasree Warrior has introduced a Swedish ritual called “fika.” Each week a new question is posted on Slack. For example, “What true crime story do you obsess about?” And “If you could live in any fictional world — which one and why?” Whoever posted the topic acts as host. As Warrior put it, “When you share a great story with a friend or coworker, you forge stronger connections as you discover new characters, places and ideas together — an idea that’s at the heart of Fable.”

At the email client company Superhuman, there are Friday Tweet Readings where founder and CEO Rahul Vohra re-enacts positive tweets that customers have posted that week about Superhuman team members. However you do it, the key to creating new rituals to build social capital is to be intentional. It might seem paradoxical to be deliberate about creating serendipity, but this is the only way to create the space and seed it with elements that can spark human connection. And the stakes are high. As the Microsoft report concludes, “The data shows that rebuilding social capital and culture isn’t just nice to have — it’s a business imperative.”

The pandemic has given us a once-in-ageneration opportunity to transform how we work. By creating new rituals of connection, we can create a more human workplace, no matter where we are located.

Six Senses Laamu Leads the Maldives as Eco-Resort of the Year

Tourists visit the Maldives to experience diverse coral reefs, outof-the-ordinary marine life and beautiful palm-fringed beaches. When a business relies on natural assets, like Six Senses Laamu does, environmentally-responsible operations that conserve them are a must. What the resort does on land is just as important as what it does on and under water, and that is why MATATO (Maldives Association of Travel Agents and Tour Operators) has named Six Senses Laamu the Leading Eco-Resort at the Maldives Travel Awards.

Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas operate with the philosophies of wellness and sustainability at their core. These values permeate through all areas of resort operations and into its local community outreach programs as well. An extensive list of corporate sustainability guidelines keeps properties on target to optimize energy efficiency, reduce water consumption, limit chemical usage, increase garden and food production, source locally, recycle materials, treat people equitably, give back to local communities and protect ecosystems.

A Booking.com survey on travel trends found that 86 percent of global travelers are interested in offsetting the environmental impact of their stay. Six Senses Laamu seeks to raise awareness among tourists to be environmentally-conscious, both on holiday and when they return home.

Six Senses Laamu produces as much as possible onsite, to reduce emissions from long-distance transport and works towards zerowaste operations by recycling materials into new and useful products. The resort sustainability manager works with all departments on ways they can be more efficient, less wasteful and in the long run achieve greater cost savings. Here are some of the highlights: Water - Low-flow fixtures installed on taps and showers helped to reduce water consumption by 25 percent and grey water was recycled for landscaping. Waste - Six Senses has announced that the company will be plastic-free by 2022. By bottling our own desalinated water in reusable glass bottles, we avoided 226,600 single-use plastic bottles this year. Plastic-Free - Fifty five reverse osmosis water filters were donated for all 21 schools and pre-schools in Laamu Atoll, as well as 30 households in L.Maamendhoo. 3,949 students and families now have access to safe, reliable drinking water. Composting - Organic waste from landscaping is processed in a wood chipper machine and combined with food waste to be composted into organic soil for the gardens. Leaf Garden – Six Senses Laamu produced 16,424 pounds (7,450 kilograms) of more than 30 different varieties of organic herbs, salad leaves, microgreens and sprouts for kitchens and bars, as well as more than 20 kinds of chillies and two varieties of mushrooms. Kukulhu Village - 51 hens and four roosters now call Kukulhu Village (chicken farm) home. The flock produced a total of 1,750 eggs in their first eight months on the island. Sustainability Fund – Point five of one percent of total resort revenues, 50 percent of water sales, and 100 percent of soft toy sales are allocated towards local projects that benefit the surrounding environment or communities. Six Senses Laamu spent USD 204, 556 in 2018 on research and conservation, education and outreach, and community development in Laamu Atoll.

“Being named Maldives’ Leading Eco-Resort is an amazing achievement, but sustainability is always a work in progress,” Marteyne van Well, general manager, said of the award. “We are constantly learning from our peers and improving service in order to stay competitive and we readily share our knowledge with others so that they too can create a positive impact with their business.”