01
New Starter Circles
Start with relationships beyond the immediate team.
Bring new colleagues together across the organisation through a guided Kindred circle.
The relationships your org chart can’t create.
Kindred helps the people who should know each other at work actually get to know each other.
Your organisation already has the expertise. The problem is that the people who need it don’t always know the people who have it.
Kindred creates those missing relationships.
6 colleagues
Across the organisation
One guided circle
6 colleagues
4 weeks
1 circle
Six colleagues
Different parts of the organisation
One circle
Six people · Four weeks · One deliberate circle
The organisational gap
Your organisation is designed in teams. Relationships don’t always follow the same lines.
L&D can deliberately develop skills, capabilities and leaders. Organisations deliberately design teams, functions and reporting structures.
But who people know beyond those structures is often left to chance.
That can leave colleagues working for the same organisation, sometimes on closely related problems, without ever developing a meaningful relationship.
The org chart
Who formally works together.
The white space
People across teams, functions and locations who have little reason to get to know one another.
Kindred
A structured way to bring some of those people together.
Kindred gives L&D a practical way to work on the relationships the organisational structure doesn’t naturally create.
For L&D leaders
You develop people. Kindred helps you develop the connections between them.
Kindred isn’t another employee social network or a community people are expected to keep checking.
You choose the population and the reason for bringing them together. Kindred creates small circles and guides the relationship journey.
Then we deliberately step away.
New starters
Help people beginning in the organisation get to know colleagues beyond their immediate team.
Across teams
Bring together colleagues from parts of the organisation that rarely interact naturally.
Across locations
Create relationships between people who share an organisation but not necessarily an office.
Why it matters commercially
What those missing relationships are actually worth exploring.
Your organisation invests heavily in recruiting, developing and retaining capable people. Yet employees can only easily access a fraction of the knowledge, experience and perspective already inside the organisation — because much of that access depends on who they know and who they feel comfortable contacting.
When useful relationships exist across teams, functions and locations, three practical things become possible.
01
Find knowledge
Know someone outside your immediate team you can approach for experience or perspective.
02
Ask for help
Turn a name on an org chart into someone you would actually feel comfortable contacting.
03
Make connections
Create relationships that can carry introductions, information and opportunities across organisational boundaries.
Our first question isn’t whether Kindred increases productivity. It’s whether the relationships Kindred creates actually become useful. That’s what a pilot is designed to measure.
You choose who should know each other. Kindred helps them get there.
- 01
Choose the population
Start with the people you want to bring together, whether across teams, locations or a particular organisational moment.
- 02
Form the circles
Kindred creates small groups designed around the programme.
- 03
Guide the relationship
Prompts, participation and shared moments give people reasons to move beyond introductions.
- 04
Get out of the way
Kindred is not the destination. The aim is for participants to continue the relationships independently.
Not another room full of people to network with. Six people to actually get to know.
The circle stays small deliberately. The same people interact repeatedly, giving familiarity an opportunity to develop over time.
- A stable, recognisable circle of six
- Asynchronous participation around the working day
- Text or voice, so people can respond naturally
- Submit-to-unlock reciprocity before answers are visible
Aoife
Risk
Daniel
Technology
Priya
Marketing
Seán
Operations
Lena
Finance
Tom
People
Week 2 of 4Your circle
What is something your colleagues might not guess about the work you do?
Write or record a voice note
Share yours to unlock responses from the other five people.
Programmes
Two ways to begin.
02
Connection Circles
Create connections across organisational boundaries.
Bring together colleagues from different teams, functions or locations who would otherwise have little reason to get to know one another.
Circle composition
Aoife
Risk
Daniel
Technology
Priya
Marketing
Seán
Operations
Lena
Finance
Tom
People
A controlled first experiment
Don’t start with an organisation-wide initiative. Start with 60 people.
Choose an organisational boundary where people have reason to know one another but currently don’t.
Then test something concrete: can Kindred create new cross-organisational relationships, and do employees subsequently use those relationships to access people, knowledge and help they couldn’t easily access before?
60
employees
One cohort, drawn from across the organisation
10
circles
Each one deliberately mixed
6
people per circle
The same six, week after week
4
weeks
A guided beginning and a clear end
The question we’re testing
Can Kindred create meaningful cross-organisational relationships that would not otherwise have existed?
This is the hypothesis the pilot is designed to test, not a result.
Do the relationships Kindred creates become useful after Kindred steps away?
The four weeks
Week 1
Introductions
Colleagues meet their circle and share a first prompt.
Week 2
Beyond job titles
A prompt about the work itself, answered in text or voice.
Week 3
Common ground
Shared experience outside immediate teams.
Week 4
A clear ending
The circle decides how it wants to stay connected.
Evaluation journey
Baseline
Four-week programme
Immediate post
30-day follow-up
Outcomes are reported against the Relationship Formation Threshold, a participant-level measure. A participant counts only when all three are true: they met someone they would not otherwise have known, they are comfortable contacting at least one circle member directly, and they intend to stay in contact.
Measure the relationship first
Don’t just measure whether people connected. Measure what the connection enabled.
Kindred does not need to promise productivity, retention or performance improvements to run a commercially meaningful experiment.
First prove the mechanism: did new cross-organisational relationships form, were they independently activated, and did anything useful move through them?
Proposed pilot evaluation questions
- 01
Reach
Did your useful internal network expand beyond the people you already knew?
- 02
Access
Do you now know someone outside your immediate team you would feel comfortable contacting?
- 03
Activation
Did you independently contact anyone from your Kindred circle after the guided experience?
- 04
Utility
Did the relationship help you access information, expertise, perspective, an introduction or practical help?
- 05
Reciprocity
Did you provide useful help, knowledge or an introduction in return?
- 06
Persistence
Are any of those relationships still active 30 or 90 days after Kindred steps away?
The current programme measures relationship formation at the end and continued contact at 30 days. Questions about activation, utility, reciprocity and a 90-day check would need to be agreed for a pilot; they are not existing report metrics.
The hypothesis a pilot would test — not an established result
- Kindred
- New relationship
- Independently activated
- Knowledge / help / introductions
- Observable organisational behaviour
Privacy stays with the people in the circle.
Employers see programme-level aggregate outcomes only. They never see private circle responses, voice notes, reactions or attributable survey answers.
Results are withheld when too few people have responded to report them safely.
Example reporting view
Kindred 60 · Programme report
Programme-level aggregates only. Small response groups are withheld.
Baseline
—
Before Week 1
Immediate post
—
Awaiting responses
30-day follow-up
—
Awaiting responses
Relationship Formation Threshold
— of —A participant reaches the threshold only when all three conditions are true.
- 01Met someone they would not otherwise have known—
- 02Comfortable contacting at least one circle member—
- 03Intends to stay in contact—
No names, private prompt responses, voice notes or identifiable survey answers appear here.
The relationships your organisation needsshouldn’t be left to chance.
Your organisation already has the knowledge, experience and capability. Kindred helps create the relationships that make more of it accessible.
You choose where stronger connections are worth creating. Kindred brings the people together, guides the relationship, and then gets out of the way.