Social Capital Dies in the Silos

The Tea on Tulsa

In 2018, the George Kaiser Family Foundation began offering $10,000 to remote workers willing to relocate to Tulsa for at least a year. As of the end of 2025, just under 4,000 people have come through the program, generating over $622 million in direct employment income. Eighty percent are still in Tulsa two years after their move.

The 2024 economic impact report is worth a read—the 2025 report is due out in a few weeks—and the numbers earned coverage in the New York Times. But the metric Justin cares about most now tells a different story.

Members who built deep relationships stayed; those who moved on had shallower ones.

Justin realized early that Tulsa Remote had evolved from a relocation program into something more consequential: a social integration system. That pivot eventually led to Experience Tulsa, now a citywide umbrella of seven brands designed to engineer belonging for anyone arriving in the city, not just remote workers who took the grant.

Bonding vs. Bridging

When I sat down with Justin recently, he introduced me to a framework from Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone that reframed how I think about social capital at work.

Bonding capital is the deep trust that forms between people who are similar. Same team, same background, same worldview. It creates belonging and psychological safety.

Bridging capital forms across lines of difference: departments, income levels, career stages, life experiences. The research cited in the “American Dream” article shows that bridging capital drives mobility, opportunity, and innovation in ways bonding capital alone cannot.

Early Tulsa Remote created mostly bonding capital. A tight cohort of remote workers who found each other. Powerful, but incomplete.

The economic impact accelerated when Experience Tulsa began systematically engineering bridging capital. Remote tech workers were introduced to longtime Tulsans. Entrepreneurs were paired with civic leaders. They designed environments where cross-sector relationships form by design rather than chance.

When Justin put it that way, I saw an immediate corporate parallel.

Most companies invest almost entirely in bonding capital. Team offsites, department all-hands, functional retreats. The interventions are real and they matter. They just rarely cross the lines (e.g., with rotational programs) where actual innovation and organizational mobility live.

Silos persist because nobody designed for bridging.

Arrival is Designed

The most instructive thing about Experience Tulsa is not the incentive to move. It's the infrastructure built around what happens after someone arrives.

That infrastructure begins with a front door. Find Your Tulsa is a new, monthly orientation to the city, connecting newcomers to ambassadors, to each other, and to the broader community. It is the moment someone goes from being new in town to being in the system.

Most corporate onboarding programs have a version of this. The difference is what comes after.

Justin brought in partner Darcy Marie Mayfield, a consultant who scaled Airbnb Experiences to 40,000+ hosts worldwide, to help design arrival as a practice. Her framework for hospitality as social technology is worth the read: arrival is designed, hosts make meaning, orientation creates safety, connection is intentional, and departure points forward.

How many of those principles does your onboarding program deliver?

The Operating Model

At Tulsa Remote, Justin and team created a role called the Member Integration Specialist. Think account manager crossed with community builder: caseload-based, proactive, focused on relationship mapping. Success gets measured through touchpoint frequency, event participation diversity, cross-member collaboration instances, and retention rates correlated with integration scores.

Their job is relational acceleration, not event logistics.

This made me recall the Community Managers from my WeWork days. The great ones were hospitality-trained, endlessly energetic, and extraordinary when given the agency to act.

Thinking about connection was their full-time job, full stop. The moment other responsibilities crept in, the magic went with them.

Justin built the Member Integration Specialist role with the same instinct, but with more structure and longitudinal data to back it up. Curated small-group events create structured bridging opportunities. Coworking access builds ambient weak ties. Slack functions as a connective operating system rather than a chat tool. Professional development builds identity-based cohesion that outlasts any single gathering.

Volume of programming matters far less than density of connection. Justin put it plainly:

Social capital dies in the seams between functions.

The Experience Tulsa advantage is a single longitudinal view of a member from application to multi-year resident. Something no siloed team can produce alone, and the thing most corporate functions, by design, never try to.

What Companies Are Getting Wrong

In his recent Fortune piece, Justin wrote that remote critics are right about the problem but wrong about the solution. Isolation, eroded connection, and lost belonging are real. Mandating presence as the answer is a real estate response to a relational deficit.

People return to the building and sit on Zoom there rather than Zoom at home.

The companies making progress are solving the relational problem with relational infrastructure. The challenge is structural rather than intentional.

The people who care about connection exist inside most organizations, e.g.:

• Engagement survey specialists
• Workplace strategists
• Digital collaboration architects

They just get swallowed by the silos above them. 

Comp season arrives and engagement work pauses. A building project finishes and the designer loses budget. IT has an outage and nobody asks whether Slack is actually functioning as a social layer.

When Justin read about the Chief Work Officer concept, he recognized the parallel immediately.

Experience Tulsa runs integration, community, data, events, and professional development as one system with a shared mandate. Silo those functions, and the math changes fast.

Nobody optimizes relationships.

Justin tracks retention, self-reported belonging, work satisfaction shifts, cross-member collaboration, and civic participation. His animating question is deceptively simple: are people embedding their lives here? Companies can ask for an equivalent one.

Are people embedding themselves in each other's work?

Organizations that develop systematic ways to answer it will finally have evidence for what their culture strategy is actually worth.

What Can You Do on Monday?

Tulsa didn't engineer belonging by accident. They made deliberate structural choices, funded a dedicated role, and measured outcomes that most organizations don't even name. You can start smaller, but you do have to start.

• Audit your social infrastructure. Map where you have bonding capital and where you have bridging capital. One will be stronger. The weaker one is where the work is.
• Name someone accountable for relational acceleration as a sustained role, not a side project during onboarding season. If the answer is murky, that is the gap.
• Design one intervention explicitly for bridging, not bonding. One cohort, one event, one onboarding moment structured to connect people across teams, backgrounds, or tenure. Then measure whether the relationships outlast the moment that created them.

That is the question Tulsa has been asking for seven years.

It turns out companies need to start asking it too.