Editorial
On my seventh day in Japan, I was huddled around a barbecue with a designer from Denmark, a financial adviser from Singapore and a content creator from Finland, swapping ideas on social video strategy between bites of lobster. We’d met only days earlier.
It made me wonder: why is it that a group of strangers can build genuine connection in days, while so many organizations struggle to achieve the same after years of all-hands meetings and engagement campaigns?
I’m here as part of a digital nomad program — a month-long experiment that brings together remote professionals from around the world to live and work side by side in Nagasaki, Japan’s old port city.
By day, we each run our own businesses and client projects. By night, we share ideas, meals and music. Within a week, 10 strangers had become something resembling a team.
That speed of connection made me think: what’s happening here that all of the tools, channels and engagement strategies in organizations can’t seem to replicate?
The Paradox of Connection
It’s one of the great contradictions of modern work. Organizations spend millions on engagement platforms, employee apps and culture programs — yet remote and hybrid workers report feeling more isolated than ever. Meanwhile, groups like ours, made up of freelancers, founders and consultants with no shared boss, Slack channel or corporate intranet, manage to forge genuine community in a matter of days.
Some of that, of course, comes down to proximity. Sharing a kitchen, swapping playlists or figuring out which shop sells decent coffee goes a long way. But it isn’t only that.
As Ryo Osera, the Nagasaki Nomad Program's founder, told me, “Because we can work from anywhere, we value the scarcity of being together and use it to spark in-person conversations and new ideas.”
The connection feels deeper, born of shared curiosity, mutual support and the awareness that we’ve all chosen to be here.
When traditional employment is fragmenting and more people are working freelance, hybrid or on temporary contracts, that sense of voluntary belonging might hold the real key to engagement. Because belonging can’t be mandated; it has to be built, sustained and reciprocated.
That sense of belonging isn’t just a nice-to-have. Connection and engagement correlate strongly with productivity, innovation and retention. Teams that feel aligned and trusted work faster, collaborate better and create more value — the things every organization says it wants, but few manage to engineer.
What Makes Nomad Communities Work
Watching this community form has been like seeing connection on fast-forward. On day one, polite introductions over lunch. By day three, shared projects and inside jokes. By the end of the first week, we were making dinner together and talking politics over wine.
What makes it work isn’t structure or hierarchy; it’s a handful of simple, unmistakably human ingredients.
Shared Purpose
Everyone here arrived for their own reasons, but we’re united by curiosity: about Japan, about our work and about how to live differently. That shared intent gives the group a palpable energy.
Rituals and Rhythm
There’s no HR policy dictating team-building, but community emerges through repetition: morning coffees, coworking sessions, communal dinners, weekend trips. These organic small rituals create a rhythm that anchors people in place.
“Our weekly Tuesday evening gathering creates a reliable habit loop that integrates the group and strengthens connection,” said Ryo.
Stories
Everyone’s open to sharing who they are and how they got here — how they became nomadic, what they’re building, what they’ve learned. Those stories slowly reveal a rich picture of people. It’s informal, but these stories become glue, creating empathy and shared identity.
Christina Doukouziani, a marketing coach specializing in short-form video strategy, said connection for her started “on the first night, over dinner and a deep, personal conversation about our backgrounds and experiences.That openness immediately made me feel connected.”
Trust Without Hierarchy
No one’s in charge, yet there’s accountability. People show up for each other, share advice, lend chargers and shoulders in equal measure.
What strikes me most is how intentional it all feels. Not in the corporate sense of a planned culture initiative (thank goodness!) but in the human sense of everyone recognizing that connection takes effort. There’s no one tasked with “engagement,” but everyone contributes to it.
But as Eden Lerer, a digital marketing consultant from Israel, told me, showing up and opening up can take courage — especially when you’re far from home or navigating cultural and personal differences.
“Being treated simply as a human being is, unfortunately, no longer something I take for granted. My nomadic lifestyle now carries an added layer of defensiveness or ‘caution’ before I feel comfortable opening up,” she said.
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For some, belonging requires a conscious lowering of defenses. And that very act of vulnerability often becomes the bridge to building trust.
It’s worth saying that this kind of emotional openness doesn’t (and shouldn’t) scale exactly as it appears in a small nomad group. What does scale, though, is the underlying principle: an attitude of curiosity rather than judgement. People here don’t need to share everything; they simply stay open to each other’s backgrounds, perspectives and stories. That kind of psychological openness — not oversharing — is what creates trust, and it’s something teams of any size can design for.
The Lessons for Organizations
Watching this play out has been a reminder that connection doesn’t depend on org charts or office layouts. It depends on design. Not in the brand sense, but in the human sense: creating the conditions for trust, belonging and purpose to emerge.
Much of what I’ve observed happens at a team level — small groups forming trust and rhythm fast. But organizations are made up of teams, and this is where connection really lives. In the debate about remote and hybrid work, we sometimes forget that the goal isn’t togetherness for its own sake, but to design connection that serves a purpose: alignment, learning and momentum.
Here’s what organizations could borrow from the nomad way of working:
1. Start With Purpose, not Place
Every community needs a reason to exist. For us, it’s the shared intent to work differently, learn from each other, from the city we’re in, and explore a new culture. That same clarity of purpose often gets lost in translation inside organizations, replaced by slogans or vague mission statements. Internal comms can reconnect people to why their work matters, not just what they do or where they sit.
2. Design for Lightweight Rituals
Nomad groups build connection through small, repeatable acts: shared breakfasts, WhatsApp check-ins, Friday dinners. Organizations can build comparable rituals — regular rhythms that create continuity and familiarity, especially across hybrid teams. These don’t have to be grand gestures; even a short “what we learned this week” post can reinforce collective identity.
3. Enable Peer-to-Peer Connection
Our group thrives because everyone’s a contributor, not an audience. The most energizing moments come when someone shares a skill or helps another solve a problem. Too often, corporate comms still flows one way: from leadership down. The real engagement happens sideways — between colleagues swapping ideas, solving problems and telling stories that feel authentic.
“Trust builds best in smaller groups — ideally up to eight people,” said Christina. “Shared activities like cooking a meal together or collaborating toward a specific goal create connection more easily.”
Even in the largest organizations, genuine connection happens in small units first. Big cultures are built from the bottom up: micro-teams, project groups and communities of practice that develop trust through shared work and repeated, meaningful interaction. Companies don’t need everyone to bond with everyone — they need to create the conditions for these smaller, high-trust clusters to form and flourish.
4. Honor Transience
Nomad communities are temporary by design, yet they leave behind lasting networks. Companies could learn from that too. In an era of fluid careers and contingent workers, connection shouldn’t end when someone leaves. Alumni networks, project communities and ongoing learning spaces can extend belonging beyond tenure (and see people boomerang back).
“You have to be active,” Eden told me.“Don’t wait for others to reach out — take initiative and show interest first.”
None of this requires another platform or campaign. It requires intention — a shift from trying to deliver engagement to enabling it. The tools already exist; it’s how we use them that matters.
Why This Matters Now
Work is becoming more fluid, fragmented and flexible. Around the world, more people are freelancing, contracting or working hybrid than ever before. Even within organizations, teams assemble and dissolve around projects, not departments. The boundaries between “inside” and “outside” the company are blurring as work is delivered by collectives of employees, contingent workers and suppliers.
That’s why how we build connection, and who we build it with, matters more than ever. Organizations can no longer assume belonging comes from an email address ending in @company.com. It has to come from purpose, trust and shared experience.
The nomad community offers a glimpse of what that future might look like: a networked model of belonging, built not on employment contracts but on mutual support and shared curiosity. These aren’t just lifestyle experiments; they’re prototypes for the next chapter of work.
If organizations can learn to nurture connection that’s chosen rather than enforced, fluid rather than fixed, they’ll be better placed to thrive in an era where engagement isn’t a metric — it’s a mindset.
For communicators, that means designing not just messages, but moments — opportunities for people to connect through shared experience rather than shared location.
When Community Outpaces Corporate Culture
A few nights ago our group gathered to see the twinkling lights of the Nagasaki skyline, laptops away, drinks in hand, someone queuing up music on a portable speaker. The conversation drifted from algorithms to travel plans to whether we’d ever see each other again. We probably will. These fleeting communities tend to find ways to stay in touch, long after the suitcases are packed.
That, I think, is the real lesson. Connection doesn’t have to come from permanence; it comes from intention. From showing up, listening, sharing stories and creating small rituals that make people feel seen.
If 10 strangers can build belonging in a week without an org chart, an intranet or a corporate mission statement, then there’s hope for the rest of us. We just have to design work — and communication — that starts with what makes us human.
Editor's Note: For more thoughtful takes on improving workplace design for humans:
- Work Design Is How Performance, Engagement and Well-Being Scale — When leaders organize work around how people actually collaborate, they'll drive performance and help workers finish their days with energy, not exhaustion.
- The New Playbook of Employee Experience — Organizations that treat engagement as an outcome of good design, not a program to fix, will build meaningful employee connections.
- Employees Crave Connection. Here's How to Build It — Connection at work can be both emotional and intellectual. Understanding what kind of connection you're trying to build is the first step.
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