Is disconnection costing your organisation?

Last year we published Mind the Gap, a research report in which we asked Chief People Officers what the three biggest challenges were in building a strong and aligned cultures in their organisations.

Five themes came through those conversations: leadership skill and will, the manager factor, skills for today and tomorrow, accountability for values, and disconnection.

At the time, it was tempting to see these as five separate challenges, each requiring its own solution. But as we continued talking to people and thinking about what we had heard, something became increasingly clear.

Disconnection wasn't simply one challenge sitting alongside the other four. It was the thread running through all of them.

Think about it for a moment. Leadership capability matters more when people feel distant from one another. Managers carry more weight when the informal conversations and relationships that used to support them have disappeared. Skills are harder to share when people don't have the same opportunities to learn from each other. And accountability for values depends on whether people trust each other enough to have an honest conversation when something isn't right.

Weaken connection and every one of those things becomes harder. Not impossible, but considerably harder.

That was the reason we decided to go back out and ask a slightly different question this year.

We spoke to senior people leaders across Ireland, in both the public and private sectors and across organisations large and small, and asked:

When it comes to building strong and human connections in your organisation, what are the top three challenges you face today?

What we heard was remarkably consistent and honest.

Building the kind of connection that makes people feel genuinely seen, valued and part of something bigger is getting harder, and it isn't something that is limited to one particular type of organisation.

We wanted candour, so every response is anonymous. No participant and no organisation is named. But every quote you'll read across this series is real and came directly from those conversations.

Connection is not a nice-to-have

There is a tendency to think of connection as one of those softer aspects of organisational life. Something important, certainly, but perhaps something that sits alongside the more serious business of strategy, performance and delivery.

I think that is the wrong way to look at it.

Connection is the infrastructure underneath all of those things.

Trust depends on it. So does collaboration. So does wellbeing, innovation and resilience. It is what allows someone to ask for help, challenge a decision, share an idea or admit that they don't have the answer. It is what turns a collection of people working in the same organisation into a team that actually feels like it belongs together.

And right now, across every sector and every size of organisation we spoke to, those connections are under pressure.

Some are fraying. Some are breaking.

That framing matters because it changes who owns the problem.

If connection is a nice-to-have, then it is easy to leave it to HR. Perhaps it becomes the responsibility of whoever organises the summer barbecue, the next engagement initiative or the latest team-building activity.

But if connection is infrastructure, then it belongs with the people who design how the organisation actually works.

It becomes a leadership issue instead of an HR errand.

The six challenges

Six themes came through consistently. Each organisation experienced them in its own way, but the patterns were almost universal.

Why you can't fix them one at a time

Here is the part that makes this genuinely difficult, and it is why I would rather write eight posts than one.

These six challenges are not a list. They are a system. Relentless busyness stops you from thoughtfully designing hybrid working. Unintentional hybrid working grows silos. Silos, sharpened by digital overload and physical distance, make it harder to bridge generational divides, because the informal learning that used to close those gaps has gone. And where leadership is inconsistent, every one of those gaps widens.

Pick one off in isolation and you will feel busy without getting very far. A new all-hands meeting won't fix a silo built by an escalation process. A better hybrid policy won't survive a manager who has never been shown how to use it.

The good news is that none of these challenges requires unlimited budgets or wholesale transformation. They require intention, focus and a deliberate decision to treat connection as a strategic priority rather than an afterthought that gets left to HR to sort out.

So, what do we do about it?

The answer starts with being more deliberate about the kind of connection we want in our organisations and designing the conditions that make it possible. That might mean protecting time for people to connect, being more intentional about hybrid working, addressing structures that create silos, or giving leaders and managers the skills to build stronger relationships.

The mistake is assuming connection will happen if we simply leave enough space for it. It won't. Culture is shaped by the choices we make every day about how we work, communicate, lead and interact with one another, whether we intend it or not.

The question is whether we're creating that culture deliberately.

Over the next few weeks, I'll take each of these six challenges in turn and explore what leaders can actually do about them. Because if connection is the thread running through everything else, perhaps it's time we started treating it as infrastructure rather than an afterthought.