Lakshmi has spent 15+ years in the weeds of how people connect — designing environments, testing what works, and building programming that brings people closer together. She started long before connection became a workplace conversation.

In 2009, she began tracking shifts in how people meet — not from the sidelines, but by reimagining singles events, experimenting with how space, language, and social architecture shape conversation and chemistry, and building connection strategies inside companies like Match.com and WeWork. What she found was that dating was one of the first places where our identities split into online and offline versions: and the patterns that emerged there migrated into work, leadership, and how teams relate every day.

That practitioner lens became How to Date Humans, a year-long research project exploring what happened to dating and what it would take to bring it back. It also opened a door to something broader - helping organizations answer two deceptively simple questions: why should we get to know each other, and how will we actually do it?

She calls this Workplace Connection. She helps organizations design the intention, structure, and environments that make real relating possible across roles, hierarchies, and hybrid realities.
Her work has been featured on The Pivot Podcast, Offline with Jon Favreau, The Prof G Podcast, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair.