Anne Jacoby, Founder & CEO of Spring Street - Connection & Inclusion

Anne Jacoby, founder and CEO of The Spring Street Solutions Company, has spent her career helping leaders build connected, inclusive workplace cultures. Before founding her firm, she helped launch Axiom across fourteen offices and led learning and culture at RGP. The conversation centered on what it actually takes to build connection at scale, and how the manager layer either makes or breaks the work.

Connection at work used to be an accident of proximity. Hybrid and distributed models pulled the rug from under that assumption. Now, connection has to be designed. The companies that handle it well treat connection and inclusion as inseparable rather than as parallel tracks.

HR leaders should think about manager training as the highest use move available. Most employees experience the company through their manager. A trained manager builds connection daily. An untrained manager loses ground that even strong programs cannot recover.

Why connection is an inclusion problem

Inclusion without connection is an aspiration. Connection without inclusion is a clique. The two reinforce each other or they both wither. HBR research on psychological safety shows that the conditions that allow employees to speak up are the same conditions that produce a sense of belonging.

The manager layer carries the practice because managers control the texture of daily work. A manager who runs inclusive meetings, distributes airtime, and acknowledges contributions builds connection in every interaction. AllVoices supports the broader system through a DEI solution and a pulse survey product that helps HR see where connection is strong and where it is fraying.

The investment in manager training pays back in retention, performance, and risk avoidance. Employees who feel connected speak up sooner when something is wrong, which gives HR a chance to act before issues become attrition or litigation.

Training the manager layer

What should manager training cover?

Three things. How to run inclusive meetings, how to give feedback that builds rather than depletes trust, and how to recognize and respond to the early signs of disengagement. Each is a teachable skill, not a personality trait.

The training should be recurring, short, and tied to real situations the manager faces in the next thirty days. One off workshops produce one off behavior change. Quarterly check-ins on a single skill produce sustained behavior change.

How do you measure whether the training worked?

Pulse survey items at the manager level give the cleanest signal. Ask employees whether their manager makes them feel included, gives them clear feedback, and recognizes their contributions. Look at the trend, not the snapshot. A manager who improves is doing more for connection than one who started high and stayed flat.

Pair the data with a coaching conversation between the manager and their manager. Coaching at the manager layer is what converts insight into practice.

What actually works

Build psychological safety on purpose

Psychological safety does not appear because the company values it. It appears because managers do specific things repeatedly. Asking for input before sharing their own view, thanking employees who raise concerns, and admitting their own mistakes openly. According to HBR research on boosting psychological safety, the practice is built one behavior at a time.

The behaviors compound. A team that has practiced safety for six months can have conversations a new team cannot. The investment is upfront and the payoff is durable. Inclusion deepens as safety grows.

Do not tolerate bad behavior

Connection cannot survive in an environment where bad behavior goes unaddressed. The single most corrosive cultural signal is a high performer who treats peers poorly with no consequence. Once that pattern is established, every other inclusion investment loses credibility.

The fix is consistent application of standards across performance levels. The company that holds a top sales performer to the same behavior standard as a new hire signals that culture is non negotiable. The company that does not signals the opposite.

Make space for connection in the calendar

Connection requires unstructured time. Distributed teams especially need it scheduled because it does not happen by accident. Short, low pressure rituals like a weekly team coffee or a monthly off topic conversation give people the substrate that work conversations grow from.

The discipline is to keep the rituals optional and not turn them into mandatory fun. Employees can tell the difference. Virtual office practices that respect time while creating room for connection beat heavy handed alternatives.

Where Employee Relations Fits

Even strong manager training cannot prevent every issue. AllVoices supports the harder side through an employee relations function that gives HR a structured workspace and an HR case management product that documents every step.

Why early reports protect connection

The longer an issue sits, the more damage it does to the team's connection. ER teams that intake quickly and resolve visibly protect the social fabric of the team. The blog on de-escalation techniques covers what manager response looks like in practice.

Frequently Asked Questions About Connection and Inclusion

How do you start with a thin manager training budget?

Pick one skill per quarter. Distribute a one page guide. Ask managers to practice it in their next two 1:1s. Cost is low and behavior change accumulates.

What if some managers resist?

Coach once, support twice, then act. Manager development is most credible when it is paired with manager accountability. The two together signal that the standard applies to everyone.

How does this work for distributed teams?

The same principles apply with extra attention to async communication and synchronous rituals. Distributed teams need more deliberate connection design because proximity does not do the work for you.

What about senior leaders?

Senior leaders need the same training, plus accountability for setting the cultural tone. A connected company starts with a connected executive team modeling the practice in their own forums.

What is the biggest risk?

Treating connection as a cultural mood rather than a manager skill. The cultural mood passes. The skill compounds.

What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?

Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.

Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.

Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Anne Jacoby is right that connection and inclusion live or die at the manager layer. The companies that take this seriously train, measure, and reinforce the practice rather than relying on the values poster.

The mandate for HR leaders is to invest in the manager layer with the same rigor they bring to executive coaching. Done consistently, the company gets the connected, inclusive culture it claims to want, and the metrics to show for it.

See how AllVoices helps HR teams build the listening systems that protect connection at scale.