We’re (still) on mute
I'm burning to tell you something important.
Having spent January neck-deep in the trends of 2026 (job hugging, AI job losses, workslop, corporate espionage, declining trust) one pattern is shouting at me through the clutter.
Work relationships are in crisis. Breaking down, quietly, systemically, everywhere. Which has inspired me to start a new presentation, working title We Need to Talk. (Do please send better ideas for the title.)
Real conversation, the simple act of talking with a colleague, is rarer than it's ever been. We use 3,000 words fewer a day than we did 20 years ago.
Loneliness and isolation have almost doubled at work within two years (KPMG, US data). More than half of us say we now avoid making friends at all, preferring to keep our personal lives out of work. Only one in five of us says we have a best friend at work.
Last week, someone shared that his boss had bollocked him for "wasting time" interviewing a job candidate with chitchat: “We just need to know if she can do the job”.
Yet the number one professional benefit of close friendships at work is increased productivity and motivation to go beyond job requirements (KPMG data again).
The Problem
We've never had more ways to communicate and never felt less connected.
Driven, inadvertently, by almost every other thing happening at work right now:
The messaging tsunami
Endless video calls
Agile teams
AI answering all questions
Exploding job applications
Hybrid and remote work
Hot-desking
Online training
Mass downsizing (hello Amazon)
Pathological busyness
It shows up as productivity being throttled not by laziness (often the opposite) but by working in isolation and responding more to technology than we do each other.
Like in a global strategy team I worked with a few weeks ago, with eight clever people who were soooooo hardworking. But not talking to each other. In effect, they'd created an eight-way tug of war, where they all pulled in different directions. Of course, all they could achieve was to collectively remain in about the same place. Albeit tired, frustrated and irritated with each other.
The Symptoms
I hear it everywhere:
“Our engagement scores are in the toilet.”
“People aren't bringing their whole selves to work, they hardly know each other.”
“They run out of the door at five, like the school bell's gone off.”
“People are dialling it in.”
“We're losing our culture”
“Our productivity is low so we're tracking everyone to see who's doing what”
As the Gartner global trends of 2026 puts it, “Organizations Face Culture Dissonance Amid Performance Pressure”. Or, as I might put it, our frantic busyness is concealing that we feel lonely AND aren't getting the real work done.
The Outcomes
Whether it's trains, potholes, flooding or healthcare, every problem we face requires groups of people with specialist skills agreeing a goal, organising and turning up to make it happen.
Whatever magic AI can conjure, everything that truly matters still depends on people delivering outcomes we value.
And yet, the way we work too often gets in the way. Leaving organisations paralysed, making crap decisions or no decisions at all.
How not to fix it
Leaders feel it and they want to fix it.
Many hark back to the glory days of their own early careers. When work was buzzy, in spite (maybe because of) the yelling boss throwing sushi across the boardroom. That client meeting when someone left their laptop on the train and we had to do a 60 mile taxi roundtrip to rescue it. When we’d charge into battle for each other, showing off about all-nighters, and celebrate by getting collectively shit-faced at the Royal Oak every Friday.
It's tempting to reach for what worked then.
“Get everyone back in the office five days a week, that'll do it”: only it doesn't.
“Send an email encouraging them to bring their whole selves to work”.
“We'll refresh our values and add the word 'Collaborative'”.
“Launch a monthly pizza and beer night”: but only half the team shows up.
These well-intentioned initiatives don't land. Not because the goal is wrong. But because the culture has moved on and the groundwork isn't in place to give them a chance.
The connection paradox
The Catch-22 is that people who already feel disconnected don’t choose to show up. It feels too scary, too risky. Forced fun makes them want to lock themselves in the toilet. So they retreat into the formal, the semi-hidden online places that are flat and boring but feel safe-ish. Cameras off. Ask the AI rather than a person. As someone said to me yesterday: “I’m working with my friends Claude and Chat.”
The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 has selected “Insularity” as it’s word of the year: “where distrust is our default”. At DAVOS Richard Edelman closed the launch of the Insularity report saying that last year he became more insular. Partly, he says, because he’s Jewish. But, based on the data, this year he is going to change that: to meet new people, read new authors and experience a bigger world.
Rediscovering connection
As he admits, it’s hard to do this for yourself. It’s even harder to do it for your team.
We need to show the benefits of connection personally and professionally. To re-find those missing 50 hours of shared time it takes to move from acquaintance to casual friendship (Jeffrey A Hall, University of Kansas). To bring the humanity, shared intent and, holy moly, even the joy back to work.
The good news is that three quarters of the 33,000 Edelman respondents know that insularity isn’t good and want to change it.
The tough news is that this isn’t a structural job, that can be ordered outwards from the big boss’s office
It’s a micro-level change for every team and its leader. Building time to connect. To talk. Ask better questions. Listen a bit longer. See each other properly. Share a laugh. Be a role model for creating shared wisdom rather than just hurling information around.
It’s precious. Just this morning, I noticed the freshness of a meeting with a CEO where we talked about the crazy rain and roads-as-rivers. Our pain-in-the-arse teens. Brene Brown being complicated and, in the last five minutes, how we’d work together this year. It unlocked ideas in a way that just bashing around objectives wouldn’t have.
Meanwhile, a friend voice-noted me on her way back from a rare off-site with colleagues: “I can’t believe how energised I feel after just one day working with actual people!”. She had to buy herself Percy Pigs and go to bed early to recover.
Maybe it sounds onerous and time consuming and soft. But it’s the opposite.
Bringing people who want to work together to get the work done is the real leadership work. Without which we’re all just responding to the tech, without real thought, direction or coordination. Like sub-par machines waiting to be replaced.
THAT’S what I’m talking about this year. And all the many simple ways we can change. If we choose to. But please do suggest better titles for the talk…
YOUR VERY BEST VERSION OF 2026
On another theme, have you planned your best version of 2026 yet?
Chris and I did our annual escape, this time to a shonky business hotel in Canary Wharf, and planned ours, inspiration on the video if you need it. Plans are in motion, most importantly an October half-term escape to the sun to off-set my gloomy response to the clocks going back.
When you’ve done your home version, why not do a similar version for your team? It’ll make for a great conversation…
Christine
