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Brief interactions can strengthen connection and trust at work.

Employees who feel cared for report a stronger sense of community.

Care is shown through attention, follow-up, and support.

When was the last time you followed up with a colleague about something personal they mentioned in passing? A race they were training for. A book or TV show they were excited about. A weekend that felt big in some small way.

These moments are easy to overlook. Work moves fast with back-to-back meetings and pressing deadlines. Yet when someone circles back and asks, “How did it go?” something meaningful shifts. You feel remembered. You feel seen.

In his widely viewed 2022 TED Talk, Dan Harris describes love as the human capacity to care. He sees it as our instinct to cooperate and our willingness to extend warmth. From an evolutionary perspective, that capacity helped our species survive.

That same capacity shows up in the workplace every day. In our research, one of the strongest drivers of meaning we identified was a sense of community. Community is the experience of feeling known, welcomed, and respected. It reflects whether people believe they matter to the people around them.

One survey question in our study stood out. When employees were asked whether their leader cared about what was happening in their lives outside of work, that single item strongly predicted their overall sense of community.

Care Is Practiced in Small Moments

Care often appears in small acts of attention. It lives in remembering a detail someone shared and asking about it later. It shows up in following through on a conversation or making room for someone’s full life to exist alongside their role.

One misconception we often hear is that caring at work means oversharing, prying, or turning professional spaces into therapy sessions. That is not what this is about. Care is demonstrated through........

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