Employees care less and less about workplace relationships, new research finds

In a recent episode of Apple TV+’s Severance (spoiler alert), the innies participated in a two-day "Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence” (ORTBO), an activity their employer, Lumon, designed in response to the disastrous “Overtime Contingency” at the end of the previous season.

“I almost had a hard time laughing at it, because it’s, like, so close to what I’ve seen so many companies do,” said Glassdoor’s new chief worklife expert, Adam Grant. “Like, ‘We’re gonna go [to] an off-site and do trust falls.’”

The Severance episode comes as new Glassdoor research finds employees are deprioritizing workplace relationships, potentially impacting their own well-being and productivity. Work has long been a place where adults seek and nurture relationships, but a survey of 800 US professionals in January suggests workplace connections are waning.

“People don’t have a lot of places to build meaningful relationships as adults,” said Grant, an organizational psychologist. “It used to happen in places of worship, and organized religion has rapidly declined…With the decline of bowling leagues, book clubs, and…other third places, people weren’t finding these avenues outside of work. That kind of left the workplace as the default option for people to find belonging and community and connection.”

Now that coworker relationship is fading as well.

“People seem to be both less interested in [building] that in a hybrid and remote world, and also struggling more at it,” Grant said. “Work is the last remaining place where you can meet people as an adult, and that’s not even happening now.”

We’re (not) all one big, dysfunctional family. Grant pointed to a number of contributing factors that have diminished the human connection at work.

He suggested American work culture is itself an issue. Many Americans come to work ready to tune out social and emotional cues and leave meaningful relationships for home life.

“There’s [also] been a significant erosion of trust in the employment relationship,” he said. “If you go back a generation or two, there was an assumption that if you were loyal, that would be reciprocated. And now you might get downsized anyway…Do you want to invest a lot in your coworkers who might be fired tomorrow?”

And while research shows being in the office at least half the week mitigates most negative effects on coworker relationships, many workplaces do not execute hybrid and virtual work policies to focus on relationship building, Grant said.

“The way we do virtual interaction is a real impediment, because people tend to bond much more in one-on-one interaction than they do in group interaction,” Grant said. “How many Zoom and Teams meetings have you ever been to at work where people do breakouts?”

Cost of disconnection. “One of the most robust predictors of job satisfaction, and engagement, and well-being at work is having strong ties with people,” Grant said.

For employers, retention “may be the most obvious” organizational causality related to coworker relationships, since relationships are a major contributor to job embeddedness.

“People share more information with their friends. They’re more candid with their friends. Both of those things mean they’re less likely to fall victim to groupthink when they have a real relationship, so you get more thoughtful dissent, more constructive debate, on average,” he said. “That leads to better decision-making. It can fuel creativity and those are all performance relevant. People also work harder for their friends. You don’t want to let the person that you have a real connection with down.”

What’s HR to do? Don’t organize an ORTBO! Grant instead recommended programs that allow employees to choose their own relationship-building experiences, pointing to programs that have worked at other businesses, such as pairing up employees for company-paid lunches or employer-funded learning opportunities for groups of two or more.

“If you gather two people together in similar roles, and they end up learning from each other and exchanging tips. They make each other better. This is a no-brainer for HR,” Grant said. “We should be pairing people up for lunch and paying for it. Whether they talk about work or not, catalyzing those connections is probably a net positive.”

HR Brew previously reported that remote-first compliance software company Ethena repurposed its office budget to support an HR program offering employees up to $100 a month to hang out with their coworkers.

He added that these programs pay for themselves and can actually generate revenue.

Toxic tonic. Grant told HR Brew that research reveals nearly all contributing factors to a toxic workplace can be impacted by employee interpersonal relationships: disrespect, exclusion, abusive behavior, cutthroat behavior, as well as unethical behavior (which Grant said can sometimes be related to relationships).

“Organizations, leaders and managers, [and] HR ought to be paying a lot more attention to building good relationships, or, at minimum, rooting out bad ones, than we currently do,” he said.