We’ve spent a lot of time making work more efficient.
Questions can be answered in a Teams message rather than a conversation. AI can summarise the meeting we didn’t attend and increasingly help us find information without needing to ask someone else.
In many ways, that’s progress.
Nobody wants unnecessary meetings or interruptions. Few of us are nostalgic for spending half a day travelling to a meeting that could have happened online. And there’s enormous value in giving people more choice over when, where and how they work.
But perhaps there’s another question worth asking.
As we’ve made work more efficient, have we accidentally made some of it less sociable too?
Being connected isn’t the same as feeling connected
There’s some interesting new research emerging around loneliness and relationships at work.
A major 2026 review brings together more than 200 studies examining workplace loneliness, reflecting growing interest in the role social connection plays in our experience of work. Other recent research makes an important distinction between the different types of relationships we build.
Employees can be very well connected functionally, regularly exchanging information, advice and practical support with colleagues, while still lacking meaningful social connection.
Modern workplaces are incredibly good at functional connection. We can find the right person, send the message, get the answer, update the project and move on. What we may be less good at designing is everything that happens around it.
Some inefficient moments were doing something useful
Think about some of the ways workplace relationships develop.
The conversation while waiting for a meeting to start. Asking the person next to you if they have five minutes to help with something. Travelling to see a client together. The chat while making coffee. Walking back from a difficult meeting. Calling a colleague with a question and then spending another ten minutes talking about something completely unrelated.
None of those things looks particularly productive on a workflow diagram.
But perhaps that’s the point.
They create familiarity. They help us understand how someone thinks, what they’re good at and what matters to them. They give us glimpses into each other’s lives beyond the task we’re currently trying to complete.
And those relationships often become useful in ways that are impossible to measure at the moment they’re being built.
The colleague you chatted to after a meeting might be the person you feel comfortable challenging six months later. The person you got to know on a long train journey might become the person you call when you’re stuck.
Not every valuable interaction at work needs to be productive.
What happens when we remove the reason to talk?
Technology adds another interesting dimension to this.
For years, one of the easiest ways to learn something at work was to ask another person, now, increasingly, we can ask AI.
That’s incredibly useful. We can get answers faster, avoid interrupting colleagues and access knowledge whenever we need it. But asking another person did more than give us information. It created an interaction.
Sometimes the answer included context we didn’t know we needed. Sometimes someone else joined the conversation. Sometimes it led somewhere completely unexpected. And sometimes we simply got to know another human being a little better.
The same applies to many of the efficiencies we’ve introduced into work. Meeting summaries mean we don’t have to attend. Asynchronous updates remove the need to get together. Workflow tools reduce the need to check in. Hybrid working can reduce commuting and give people greater flexibility.
Individually, many of these are improvements to employee experience. Collectively, however, they may also remove thousands of small reasons for people to interact. And perhaps we haven’t thought enough about what needs to replace them.
The answer isn’t more forced fun
This doesn’t mean we need more compulsory office days, team socials or organised fun. Nor should we romanticise the old workplace. Being physically together five days a week never guaranteed meaningful relationships, and greater flexibility has made work considerably better for many people.
The opportunity is subtler. It’s about designing connection into the experience of work, rather than hoping it happens around it.
Do people have opportunities to talk when there isn’t an agenda? When teams come together physically, are we using that time for things that benefit from being together? Do new joiners have opportunities to build relationships, not simply complete onboarding tasks? Are managers noticing who might be well connected operationally but less connected socially?
And have we created a culture where spending time building relationships is recognised as part of work, rather than something people should only do when the “real work” is finished?
What are we optimising for?
None of this is an argument for making work less efficient. It’s an argument for thinking more carefully about what we’re optimising for.
Efficiency matters. So do flexibility, autonomy and technology that removes unnecessary friction.
But work is also a social experience. Relationships influence whether we feel we belong, whether we ask for help, whether we share an unfinished idea, whether we challenge something that doesn’t feel right and whether there’s somebody we can turn to when work gets difficult.
Perhaps some of the interactions we’ve designed out of work looked inefficient precisely because their value wasn’t immediate or easily measurable. They weren’t always helping us complete the task in front of us. They were helping us build the relationships that make everything else work better.
So as we continue making work faster, smarter and more efficient, perhaps there’s another design question worth asking alongside:
Are we leaving enough space for people to be people?
