I used to fly three times a year, on a global funds manager’s dime, purely to sit in the same room as colleagues based in overseas offices. Not for a project. Not for a deal. Just to be in the room with them. To share ideas, to learn from each other, and ultimately build relationships so that when I got back to Sydney, it made it easier to work together from afar.
It was one of the smartest things that company ever did for its culture.
I think about that a lot right now, because I’m watching a genuinely odd contradiction play out with almost every leadership team we work with. People are pushing back on return-to-office mandates, and the argument nearly always comes wrapped in the same logic: “I don’t need to be in the building to do my job well.”
And in almost the same breath, a lot of those same people are telling their leaders they feel isolated, and wish their team collaborated more.
Both of those things are true, for the same person, at the same time. That’s the part worth sitting with.
The problem: “I don’t need to be there” and “I feel disconnected” are both true
Ask most people why they’re resisting a return to the office, and the case is usually built on logic. My output hasn’t dropped. My commute is too long. For a lot of individual, heads-down tasks, these are genuinely fair points.
But ask the same person, in a different conversation, how connected they feel to their team, and a different answer tends to show up. A bit isolated. Wishing there was more collaboration. Not quite able to name what’s missing, but aware something is.
Leaders are hearing both of these things from the same people and treating them as two unrelated issues. They’re not. They’re the same problem, wearing two different outfits.
That’s the tension leaders actually need to solve. Not “how do we get people back in the building,” but “why are the people most confident they don’t need to be there often the people feeling the most alone.”
Why this is happening: we have more devices, and less connection
Part of the answer is that “I don’t need to be there to do my job” is measuring the wrong thing. It’s measuring task completion, not connection.
We have never had more ways to “connect” with each other. Slack, Teams, email, a dozen apps that ping us constantly.
And yet, so many leaders are telling us their people have never felt more disconnected.
The honest answer is that the human brain doesn’t experience a message thread the way it experiences a room.
Go back far enough in evolutionary terms, and being the only one standing alone on the savannah facing a predator was a genuine safety risk. Humans who stuck together, who read each other’s faces and body language in real time, survived. Humans who didn’t, generally didn’t.
That wiring hasn’t updated just because we invented video calls.
Different brains want different amounts of social interaction, and that’s completely normal. But the underlying wiring is the same for all of us: we’re built to want some real connection with other humans, not just proximity to a screen that has other humans on it.
The mirror neuron system is a big part of why that flight three times a year mattered so much. Being physically in the room with someone activates a level of connection and rapport that a screen simply can’t replicate, however good the video quality is.
Add in the fact that video calls are full of ambiguity and distraction. Someone’s on mute, someone’s multitasking, someone’s cat walks across the keyboard. It’s far easier to accidentally erode a relationship on a screen than it is to build one there.
The comfort trap: just like we don’t have to move, we don’t have to connect
Here’s an analogy I keep coming back to with clients.
We don’t have to move our bodies much anymore. We don’t need to hunt or gather, food gets delivered, groceries get delivered, and most of us could quite comfortably go a whole week without walking further than the front door.
But we all know that just because we don’t have to move, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. Now we call it exercise and we’ve invented places like gyms that humans can go to in order to give their bodies the same results as hunting and gathering.
The same logic applies to connection. Technology means we probably don’t need to leave the house, or even leave our desk, to get most of our work done. But just because we don’t have to, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
For the average human, comfort tends to beat discomfort. That’s exactly why so few people exercise religiously, and it’s exactly why so many people would rather send a message than walk over and have the actual conversation.
The longer we go without either, the harder both become to restart.
This is where the individual productivity argument gets interesting. People often report feeling more productive working from home. That may well be true at the individual level. But the supporting evidence for that same productivity lift showing up at the company level is a lot less convincing.
An individual can feel like they’re flying while the collective – well more the like engines are spluttering.
What leaders can actually do about it
This isn’t an argument for dragging everyone back to a joyless office five days a week. If your culture is already toxic, more days in that building will do more harm than good.
It’s an argument for being deliberate. A few things we’re seeing work well with the leaders we coach:
- Design time in the office around connection, not attendance. Badge swipes don’t build relationships. Shared lunches, project huddles, and genuine social time do. If people are only coming in to sit on the same video calls they’d take from home, you haven’t solved anything.
- Protect a small number of in-person moments and make them count. It doesn’t need to be five days. It needs to be the right days, used well. Even a well-run quarterly gathering can rebuild more trust than a joyless daily commute.
- Model it from the top. If senior leaders only show up for their own meetings and disappear, the message people receive is that presence is a compliance exercise, not a genuine investment in the team.
- Give people a reason to talk to each other that isn’t a status update. Connection tends to form sideways, in the five minutes before or after a meeting, not inside the meeting itself. Build a little more slack into the day for that to happen.
- Remove the friction of going into the office – Make it easy for people to find a desk or a quite space that people can concentrate in if they need to. They will still get the serendipitous conversations as they move around the office, and to the kitchen for snacks. Not everyone’s role requires interaction with people every minute of the day.
Notice who’s going quiet. Isolation is often silent.
Why solve this now
This isn’t a problem that eases with time. The more comfortable we get with screens standing in for real connection, the harder real connection becomes.
Employees who feel connected at work are willing to work considerably harder for their organisation than those who don’t, with one large-scale study finding 74% of non-lonely workers say they’d go the extra mile for their company, against 63% of lonely workers (Cigna, 2025).
That’s not a small gap. Multiplied across a workforce of a couple of hundred people, it’s the difference between a team that’s merely present and a team that’s genuinely pulling in the same direction.
Meanwhile, RTO mandates are only getting firmer across the market, which means more people are going to be sitting in your building whether they want to be there or not. That’s either an enormous opportunity to rebuild real connection, or an enormous missed one, depending entirely on what leaders do with it.
Go build the room worth showing up for
Getting people back into a building was never really the goal. Getting people to genuinely connect with each other again is.
Just like it makes good business sense to encourage your people to move their bodies, it makes equally good business sense to encourage them to reconnect with the humans they work alongside, even when technology means they technically don’t have to.
The organisations that figure this out won’t just have better engagement survey results. They’ll have people who actually want to be in the room, and who do better work because of it.
We work with leadership teams to build genuine high performance culture, connection included, so their people can do their best work without burning out.
If you’d like to talk through what this looks like in your organisation, book a Performance Call.
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