At New Relic, I'm also really, really proud to co lead our women at New Relic employee resource group.Given my role that you just heard about, this is probably clear, but I don't write code. My background isn't in engineering, and I won't be talking to you about system architecture today. Sorry. My focus is on the humans who build the software. I spend my time thinking about how we can bring people together, especially when they're miles apart and help them work in a way that actually feels sustainable. We all work in an industry that moves incredibly fast. We're obsessed with being efficient and scalable. But in our rush to build faster, we've inadvertently created what I call a bit of a connection crisis. Think about your typical workday for a minute.

We are digitally reachable all day long. We have Slack and Zoom and Jira pings hitting us from every time zone. We're constantly online, and yet many of us feel more isolated than ever before. In our new hybrid reality, we've lost a lot of those organic moments, the small human interactions that happen when we're just grabbing a coffee. We've often traded human rhythm for lots of digital toil. Now I call this talk the connection cure, but I want to be really clear. I don't think that there's one single magic fix for culture. I wish. Being building a resilient team takes a lot of different tools. But today, I wanna pull back the curtain on one specific tool that I care a lot about and that I think is often undervalued, social impact.

I want to show, you how looking outward and giving back together isn't just charity. It's part of the strategic connective tissue that keeps a global hybrid team from snapping under the pressure of the daily grind. My goal is that you walk away with three things. First, an understanding of how social impact can bridge departmental silos. Second, a few methods for building a social impact rhythm that fits into a tech schedule without causing burnout. And third, some insights into the data backed link between shared purpose and employee retention. So when we talk about culture, we often treat it like something that just happens in the background. But in a hybrid or distributed world, culture has to be architected.

I look at social impact as the connective tissue of a company. In most tech organizations, we're siloed by design. Engineers talk to engineers, sales talks to sales. And as companies scale, or go through organizational shifts, which, let's be honest, is a lot of us lately, those silos can turn into canyons. Social impact can help bridge those canyons in three specific ways. First, it creates vertical connection. It's one of the few places where a junior developer and a c suite executive can stand side by side, whether they're mentoring students or collaborating on a community project and connect as humans first. And it's a really great way to remind everyone that they're on the same team. Second, it can provide stability through change. When road maps shift or projects get canceled, it can feel like the ground is moving under your feet. But a commitment to a community partner, that is a constant.

It gives employees a sense of belonging that isn't tied to a specific sprint. And finally, it replaces culture toil with collective purpose. We've all been to those forced fun Zoom happy hours where everyone sits in awkward silence. That toil. But when you give a team a shared problem to solve outside of their day job, the connection often happens naturally. You're not forcing them to bond. You're giving them a reason to collaborate with purpose and have an impact beyond their day to day job. But here's the catch. Architecture is just the skeleton. To make culture feel alive, it needs a heartbeat. Think of it like this. Architecture is the hardware, but the rhythm is the software that actually runs the system. You can have the best hardware in the world, but without the right software, it's just an expensive paperweight. We need software that makes effective social impact programs thrive.

So how do we incorporate that logic and help impact thrive without burning people out? In tech, we often live and die by our calendars. I know I do. We have sprint cycles, quarterly business reviews, and big release dates. If you try to drop a massive week long volunteer event or other culture initiative right in the middle of a major product launch, you aren't building culture. You're often building resentment. Beyond that, when a team is burnt out, their latency is high. Everything takes longer because they lack the mental energy to collaborate. That's why I advocate for building a social impact rhythm. When planned strategically, instead of treating giving and volunteering as interruptions to work, these programs can work as a reboot that helps employees come back to technical tasks with fresh eyes and perspectives.

At New Relic, we've moved away from ad hoc random acts of kindness toward a predictable cadence that people can plan around. I've seen firsthand how incorporating impact moments strategically can go a long way. Needing to help build some camaraderie and connection amongst a group of new leaders, We recently took some of our highest level folks and paired them up for short impact centered connection activities at the start of an off-site. Suddenly, they weren't just colleagues in a room. They were humans who had found a small unique connection points. They were more likely to show up for each other. They kicked off their day of planning with a totally different energy, ready to have hard discussions and build big things together with new people they now felt connected to. To build an impact rhythm, I like to follow three rules. First, respect the focus time.

There are seasons in tech in the tech calendar where collective bandwidth is near zero. During those times, we don't ask for much. We offer micro impact opportunities, things that take fifteen minutes, up to an hour at most, like digital mentoring sign ups or contributing to a donation matching campaign. It's a low friction way to stay connected to the why without losing focus of the what. The second is aligned with the business cycle. We strategically pulse our higher meaning activities, like our global day of service, during quiet periods after big ship dates. And third, you make it opt in but integrated. We don't want forced fun. It's all optional, but we wanna create a menu of engagement that provides something for everyone everyone and meets people where they are and, you know, matches the capacity that they've got.

Maybe there's a person who's really underwater at work but wants to do something. We've got a two minute click to give campaign that they can participate in. For an employee or a team looking to bond with others, there's a three or four hour volunteer opportunity to get them out in the community and building new connections. And for an individual looking for growth, there's a skilled pro bono project where they get to help a nonprofit optimize their data and use their skills every day for good. When you offer this spectrum of engagement, you stop asking people to find time for social impact, and you start giving them a way to recharge through it. You're essentially providing a mental reset that boosts morale and collective pride exactly when a team often needs it most. Now for many leaders, especially in the tech landscape where every dollar and every hour is scrutinized, the big question is often, what is the ROI?

Is this just about brand sentiment, or does it actually move the needle on our culture and our bottom line? The data tells us that it's a strategic necessity. Recent studies by Deloitte and Gallup consistently show that purpose isn't just a perk. It can be an important performance driver. First, let's talk about retention. We all know the cost of losing a senior engineer or key product lead. It's not just the recruitment fee. It's the lost institutional knowledge. Research shows that companies with high engagement impact programs see up to a 52% reduction in turnover. Why? Because people don't quit a purpose. They quit a grind. When you give them a reason to stay that is bigger than their salary, they are often more likely to stay through a rough patch. Second, let's consider the talent pipeline. We know that the next generation of women in tech is looking for more than a paycheck.

73% of Gen z and millennial workers, the people people we're all trying to hire right now, often look at a company's social impact record before they even apply. And finally, let's look at inspiration. We often talk about burnout, but sometimes burnout isn't just about working too many hours. It's about working too many hours on things that don't feel like they matter. Over 90% of employees who feel their company has a strong sense of purpose report feeling more inspired daily. Inspiration is the fuel for innovation. You can't scale innovation if your teams are running on empty. I often think about a senior engineer who I know, who was hitting that five year itch, feeling a bit done with routine, burned out, thinking about moving on to something else.

She signed up to lead a pro bono project with one of our annual cycles, helping a global health nonprofit optimize their data ingest with New Relic. For a few for three weeks, she wasn't just fixing bugs. She was the architect of a system that had an immediate impact. When she finished, she didn't just stay at the company. She came back with a renewed sense of leadership. But more importantly, she had built what I call relational equity with people across the business she never would have met otherwise. That network helped her feel like part of a broader team ecosystem. She realized the skills she used every day had superpowers in the real world. Things like that are how you reduce turnover by 52% by showing people that their work has value far beyond the day to day. That is the resilience ROI.

It's the ability for a team to bounce back not because they are efficient, which is important, but because they are anchored. So we've looked at the data and the rhythm, but now we have to talk about how we actually share these stories with employees. In the tech world, there's often a very low tolerance for anything that feels performative. We've all seen corporate posts that feel a bit too polished, a bit too PR heavy. If your impact storytelling feels like a marketing campaign, your employees will tune out or worse, they'll become cynical. To move past some of that performative philanthropy, I follow three rules for authentic storytelling internally. First, we try to lead with the why over the what.

It's not enough to just say we donated x amount of dollars. A tech audience wants to know what was the technical challenge? Why did this specific nonprofit need our help? What impact did we have? When you focus on the problem solving aspect, you're speaking the language of your engineers and product managers. You're turning a charity project into a bigger mission. Second, we embrace radical transparency. Real impact is messy. Sometimes a volunteer project doesn't go as planned. Sometimes the micro impact campaign we work on doesn't get the engagement we hoped for. When we share those learnings alongside the wins, we build trust. It shows our teams that we aren't just looking for a photo op. We're looking for a real long term partnership and engagement.

And finally, and I think often most importantly, it's important to prioritize employee led narratives. The most powerful stories don't come from my department or they're not messages from me. They're coming from the people who are doing the work. When we create the space for employees to tell their impact stories, it resonates so much more deeply with their colleagues than anything I could post. An engineer sharing in Slack about how they use their volunteer time off to help a local school kick off their first coding club inspires other employees to think about what they could do where they live, facilitating an ongoing cycle of impact. So as we start to wrap up today, I want to leave you with something practical. We've talked a little bit about ROI, storytelling, and the importance of a strategic rhythm.

But for individuals on your teams and for you, the most important part of this is a mental reset. In tech, we spend so much of our time looking at the what, the code, the tickets, the metrics. It's very easy to lose sight of the why. Social impact is a great shortcut to reconnecting with that why at work. I encourage you to look for low friction, high meaning opportunities. This can start with micro impact moments. It could be as simple as a thirty minute virtual mentoring session for a student who wants to be where you are in ten years. To you, it's another Zoom call. To them, it can be a life changing interaction. And to your brain, it's a total cognitive switch.

It pulls you out of the toil of day to day and reminds you that your skills have power. When you introduce these moments into your team's rhythm, you aren't adding to their plate. You're giving them a way to recharge. You're giving them a reason to say, I love where I work, not just because of the tech stack, but because of who I work with and the impact we get to have together. I don't wanna leave you here thinking that you need to build a massive complex department. You can start this on Monday morning with what I call the three step social impact triage. Step one, identify a quiet period on your calendar. Open your team's product road map. Look for a twenty four or forty eight hour window immediately following a major release or a quarterly milestone.

This is a great spot for an impact opportunity. Don't fill it with another meeting. Protect some of that time for collective reset. Step two, crowdsource the why. Instead of picking a cause yourself, drop a note to your team. Ask, if we had two hours to support a nonprofit next month, what could we tackle? When the teams pick the cause, they own the connection. You're just a facilitator, and they feel bought into what you're working on. Step three, share the story. After you do it, don't let it be just a memory. Share lessons learned or a quick photo of the team in action. Tell the story of the human impact, and this is how you start building that broader network and team connection that I mentioned earlier. You start small. You make it low friction, but you make it consistent.

Because when we build a culture that looks outward, we build a culture that is strong enough to handle whatever comes next.