From Distant to Dependable
How Growth Circles Changed the Way Inspire-Tech's Teams Work Together
A few years into the pandemic, Sharon Teo noticed something odd about her own company.
Inspire-Tech was hitting its numbers. Projects were shipping. On paper, the hybrid setup was working exactly as it should. But as CEO, Sharon felt something thinning out beneath the operational wins.
The people building the company together weren't really together anymore, not in the way that lets a team catch a problem before it becomes a crisis, or lets someone offshore admit they're stuck before the deadline passes. Time zones didn't help. Neither did the usual fixes (a retreat here, a Friday happy hour there), which gave everyone a nice couple of hours and then wore off almost immediately.
"How do you help teams feel supported, understood, and connected, especially when they're
no longer physically together?" is the question Sharon kept coming back to.
She didn't book another team-bonding day. Instead, she brought in Growthbeans to run something with more staying power: Growth Circles, small facilitated group sessions, every week, for two years and counting.
Why a one-off event wasn't going to cut it
Sharon's reasoning came down to three things:
01
Pace
A weekly rhythm
builds culture. An annual retreat only gives it a spike.
02
Reach
Joinable from a laptop or a phone, anywhere. Offshore staff get the same seat at the table.
03
Safety
Structure and repetition, not just an ask to "open up", is what makes candour feel safe.
The first was pace. A retreat gives people one good memory a year. Culture isn't built in that one memory. It's built in the ordinary Tuesday. Growth Circles gave Inspire-Tech a weekly rhythm instead of an annual spike.
The second was reach. Inspire-Tech has people scattered across offices and time zones, and a lot of well-being programming quietly assumes everyone can show up to the same room at the same time. Growth Circles run on a platform employees can join from a laptop or a phone, wherever they are, which meant an offshore hire
had exactly the same seat at the table as someone at HQ.
The third was harder to solve with logistics alone: safety. You can't just tell a team to "open up" and expect candour to follow. For most people, that instruction alone makes a room feel less safe. What actually helps is a structure, a facilitator, and enough repetition that trust has time to build. That's the part Growthbeans' facilitators (Marc Lansu, an ICF-credentialed coach, and Shane Yan, an IHRP-certified People practitioner) are there to hold each week: keeping the space consistent enough that people stop bracing themselves before starting to speak.
What happens in a Growth Circle
It helps to be clear about what these sessions aren't. They're not status updates with a nicer name, and they're not icebreakers where everyone shares their favourite holiday spot. A Growth Circle is a small group, a facilitator, and real time given over to listening: to a colleague's workload, a personal stretch they're going through, a frustration they haven't had anywhere else to put.
Do that consistently for two years and the way people talk to each other at work starts to shift in ways that show up outside the sessions too. According to Inspire-Tech's team, the change wasn't dramatic or sudden.
It was more that, gradually, defending a position in a meeting stopped feeling necessary, because someone was more likely to build on what you'd said than pick it apart. Questions that used to surface three weeks into a project, once the misunderstanding had already cost time, started surfacing on day one instead. Feedback got easier to both give and receive, because it was landing on top of trust that had actually been built, not assumed. And people in one department started understanding, in a concrete way, what their colleagues in another department or another country were actually dealing with.
What it looked like for the team
Ferdinand joined Inspire-Tech's offshore team during the pandemic, at a moment when building relationships with colleagues he'd never meet in person felt close to impossible. "During COVID times, I didn't have close connections at first, but through these sessions, I was able to build relationships," he told Growthbeans. "I'm grateful for the experience."
Mark, from Inspire-Tech's Business Development team, put it slightly differently: for him, the shift was less about who he knew and more about how he read them. "It changes the way that I look at interacting with my co-workers," he said. "It provides us with a space that allows more transparent communication, understanding the context behind most actions that my co-workers make." Knowing why someone is short in a meeting, or slow to reply, turns out to remove a surprising amount of friction on its own.
And Rostina, from the Marketing team, noticed the effect creeping into meetings that had nothing to do with Growth Circles at all. "I realised our conversations weren't just becoming more open, but they were becoming more productive," she said. "We spent less time defending ideas and more time building on each other's."
The part that matters to a CEO
None of this stayed a soft, feel-good side effect. Active listening, emotional agility, the ability to sit with someone else's perspective before responding to it: these are the exact muscles that get exercised in
a Growth Circle, and they're also the muscles a sprint planning meeting or a leadership decision needs.
Inspire-Tech's experience is a fairly direct rebuttal to the idea that "soft skills" and business performance
live in separate columns. Teams that trust each other surface problems earlier, argue less defensively,
and make decisions with more of the picture in view. That isn't a coincidence. It's what two years of
weekly practice looks like once it compounds.
If you're wondering whether this would work for your team…
