Are We Mistaking Communication for Connection? Why Today’s Workplaces Are Talking More Than Ever and Understanding Less 

Communication has never been more frequent in the workplace, yet people have never felt more disconnected from their leaders, colleagues, and purpose. This article explores why volume doesn’t equal connection, and what leaders need to rethink about how they’re spending their time, energy, and attention.

Written by Lyndon Friesen, who leads our Professional Development arm of Outback Team Building, called Ignitor. Over the past 10 years, Lyndon and his skilled team of Facilitators have led over 800 different learning and development events for over 500 different organizations across North America.

The uncomfortable truth is this: we are talking more than ever, but we are understanding each other far less. 

Leaders who dismiss this as a minor inconvenience are missing what’s actually happening: cultural decay, accelerating burnout, and teams that feel invisible, not because they lack information, but because they lack genuine connection. 

The Volume Problem: More Communication Doesn’t Mean Better Communication

At some point over the past few years, we accepted a flawed premise: if some communication is good, more must be better.

The shift to remote work triggered a collective panic about staying aligned. Our instinct was to compensate with volume:

Hold more meetings, invite more people, add more channels, send more follow-ups, and share more updates.

It seemed responsible. Protective, even. But we got the opposite of what we intended.

Here’s what I see constantly across the organizations I work with:

• Employees whose calendars are so full of meetings that they genuinely don’t know when their actual work is supposed to happen
• Leaders who believe decisions are being made simply because discussions are happening
• Organizations where adding someone to a meeting is considered the safest choice, because no one wants to be the person who leaves someone out

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

People sitting through back-to-back meetings with no agenda, no clear outcome, and no explanation for why they were invited

• Cameras off
• Attention split
• Contributions minimal

By the end of the day, they can’t remember half the discussions they attended, but they’re exhausted anyway.

A volume-first approach doesn’t produce alignment. It erodes clarity, annihilates focus, and converts communication from signal into static.

It creates the appearance of collaboration while systematically dismantling the conditions that make real collaboration work.

When “Collaboration” Became Code for “Everyone, Everywhere, All the Time”

Let me be direct about something: we’ve taken collaboration way too far.

During the pandemic, collaboration became the motivational drumbeat of modern work. It showed up in values statements, hallway posters, and leadership speeches.

Companies updated their core values to include it. In fact, I’d say 70% of the organizations I speak with have the word “collaborate” somewhere in their values list.

It was supposed to be our insurance policy against isolation. Instead, it became a reflex.

When I ask leaders what collaboration actually means in their organization, the definitions vary wildly.

But when I peel back the layers of how it’s lived out in practice, I see the same pattern:

Collaboration has been interpreted as universal inclusion. If in doubt, invite everyone. If unsure, widen the circle. If nervous, increase visibility.

Here’s the problem with that: collaboration isn’t supposed to mean everybody, all the time. Rather, collaboration is the intentional exchange of expertise, where leveraging someone else’s knowledge or skills produces a stronger outcome than you could achieve alone.

That’s it.

But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is:

• Leaders defaulting to bigger invite lists because their muscle memory says “more people equals more buy-in”
• Employees sitting in meetings where they have no subject matter expertise, nothing to contribute, and no stake in the decision, but they’re there anyway because someone thought it was safer to include them

I came across a book recently in O’Hare Airport that cited research showing Americans are now working an extra 2.1 hours per day because of our cultural obsession with collaboration.

That’s not a rounding error. That’s a systemic problem masquerading as good leadership. And nobody feels comfortable declining a meeting at risk of being seen as uncooperative.

So, people keep accepting, attending, and multitasking their way through discussions that don’t require their presence because saying no feels like career sabotage.

This isn’t collaboration. This is over-involvement disguised as teamwork.

The Emotional Blind Spot in Digital Communication

Here’s a simple rule of thumb I use with the leaders I coach:

If the conversation is emotional, it should happen in person. If it’s academic, it can happen remotely.

Anything emotional, nuanced, human, or high-stakes simply does not thrive in digital environments.

This includes:

• Performance issues
• Conflict
• Change
• Misalignment
• Hurt feelings
• Even recognition and celebration

These are heart-driven interactions that rely on tone, body language, shared presence, courage, and vulnerability. They shape trust and build culture.

And yet, I see organizations trying to manage these conversations through screens, Slack threads, and quick video calls. The result is misinterpretation, emotional detachment, and superficial resolution.

Don’t get me wrong. The tools we have now for academic, task-based communication are phenomenal. Ridiculously good, actually.

AI can capture meeting notes, spit out action items, and track decisions in real time. For left-brain, step-by-step work, technology has made us more efficient than ever.

But digital tools are terrible at holding emotion.

Leaders who don’t distinguish between the two end up communicating constantly but never actually connecting.

Here’s where it gets tricky:

Even that rule of thumb—emotional conversations in person, academic conversations remote—gets complicated when you factor in the real lives people have built over the past few years.

When the pandemic hit, and remote work became an option, something shifted. People stopped asking “where do I want to work?” and started asking “where do I want to live?”

And they built entire lives around that question.

An employee who moved to the suburbs during the pandemic didn’t just change their address. They established daycare, found their new favorite restaurants, got their kids involved in activities, and found the dog park they love.

They created a meaningful life in a place they chose because work was no longer tied to geography.

So now, leaders are stuck in a no-win situation.

They know certain conversations need to happen face-to-face. But they also know demanding that from every employee creates a fairness problem they’ll never solve.

And most organizations respond by defaulting to policy: two days a week in the office, or three days, or whatever compromise makes the fewest people angry, instead of doing the harder work of asking what actually serves their people and their customers.

The Loudest Alarm Bell in Modern Work: Leaders Are Communicating Tasks, Not Developing People

Here’s what alarms me more than the sheer volume of communication: it’s what all this activity has displaced.

Leaders today excel at communicating expectations, priorities, timelines, and deliverables. That box is checked.

What’s missing is coaching, mentoring, observation, and meaningful investment in helping people grow. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that attending meetings equals professional development. It’s the opposite.

I hear variations of these phrases constantly from employees:

• “I haven’t had a real coaching conversation in over a year.”
• “My leader is too busy to train me, but not too busy to assign more work.”
• “I’m part of every discussion, but I don’t feel any closer to mastering my role.”

When I facilitate professional development sessions, I’ll pose a straightforward question to participants:

When’s the last time your leader observed you in action, on a call, in a meeting, working through a problem, and then gave you specific, actionable feedback to help you improve?

The reaction I get is revealing. The majority can’t remember when that last occurred. Some estimate 18 months. Others say it’s never happened.

When I ask leaders the same question, they’re candid: “I don’t have time to do that. I’m in meetings all day, just like everyone else.”

Here’s what makes that response so jarring to me: when I was coming up in my career, someone was coaching me for at least an hour every single day. A leader would sit in on a customer call I was making or observe me in a live meeting for 35 to 45 minutes.

Then they’d spend 15 minutes giving me targeted feedback: what worked, what didn’t, what to adjust.

The next week, they’d follow up to see if I was improving.

That went on for 15 years. An hour a day of real development.

When I describe that to people now, they look at me like I’m describing a fantasy.

“Who had time for that?” they ask. And my answer is always the same: that was the work. If you’re a leader and you’re not spending your time developing your people, what’s your daily work look like?

Think about that for a second.

Leaders are paid to develop their people, but they have no time to develop their people because they’re too busy being in meetings and communicating.

So, are we pigeonholing them into an execution role with a leadership title?

I had a CEO call me last week and ask if I could coach seven of his people. When I asked why he couldn’t have his leadership team do it, his answer was blunt: “They don’t have time. Can we pay you to do it instead?”

That should alarm us. More and more often, we’re outsourcing leadership development to people who don’t know the business because the people inside the business are too overwhelmed to lead.

Most leaders today define leadership as productivity:

• How much are people getting done?
• How many tasks are being completed?

But that’s low-skill work. Anyone can tell people to do more. The hard skill—the actual work of leadership—is equipping people to be effective, efficient, and impactful. That takes time, observation, coaching, and genuine investment in someone’s growth.

Communication without equipping is just pressure, and pressure without support creates burnout.

The Cost Nobody’s Talking About: Corporate Culture Is Disappearing

Culture used to be built organically. It lived in shared spaces:

• Overheard conversations
• On-the-fly problem solving
• Spontaneous celebrations
• The energy of being around one another

You learned how decisions got made by watching them happen, and you understood company values by seeing them lived out in real time.

Now, in many organizations, culture exists only as an idea. It’s something referenced in slide decks and onboarding materials, but not felt in daily work.

I spoke with one executive recently who put it bluntly:

“We have no culture left. Our people don’t know each other. They just know their tasks.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. His team had been remote for three years. They did their jobs effectively enough, but there was no shared identity, no camaraderie, no sense of belonging to something bigger than a paycheck.

New employees struggle with this the most. They have no organic exposure to how the company operates, how relationships function, or how problems get solved informally.

Everything is formal, transactional, and fragmented.

When communication becomes purely task-based, employees stop feeling like part of a unified whole. They feel like isolated contractors who happen to work for the same company.

That’s the hidden cost of communication without connection.

The Three Lenses Leaders Need To View Communication Through

I spent two hours on a call recently with a president and CEO who was wrestling with all of this.

He was trying to figure out how to bring people back to the office in a way that didn’t destroy morale, but also didn’t destroy his company’s ability to serve customers or maintain any semblance of organizational culture.

What impressed me was his framework. He said every decision about communication, work format, and expectations needed to be filtered through three intersecting lenses:

1. Human-Centric: What’s best for our people, given the real lives they’ve built? Their families, commutes, caregiving responsibilities, financial pressures, and well-being?
2. Customer-Centric: What do our customers actually need from us to be served well? Does this communication approach help or hurt our ability to deliver value?
3. Culture-Centric: Does this decision strengthen or weaken our organizational identity and the connections between our people?

Here’s what struck me: most companies aren’t asking these questions.

Too often, decisions are being made out of habit, personal bias, or convenience, not intention. And then leaders wonder why their policies feel hollow or why resistance is so strong.

He also said something I think more leaders need to hear: “None of this is going to feel fair to everyone once we’re done. And that’s okay.”

That takes courage, but it’s the truth.

The Fairness Trap in Modern Organizations

Fairness is a mirage in this conversation.

No communication structure, whether remote, hybrid, or in-person, will feel fair to everyone.

Fairness is subjective, and circumstances, lives, and roles differ. Trying to create a policy that satisfies everyone produces watered-down decisions that exhaust everyone and satisfy no one.

Clarity beats fairness. Intention beats consistency. Human honesty beats policy perfection.

If a role truly requires in-person collaboration to serve customers well, say that. If another role doesn’t, say that too. But stop trying to make everyone happy with blanket policies that ignore the actual work being done.

The Emotional Weight We’re Not Addressing

There’s a human reality underneath all of this that we’re not talking about nearly enough: the modern employee is carrying a heavier load than many leaders realize. They’re often:

Stuck in meetings all day and expected to complete deliverables at night

Juggling caregiving, commutes, rising costs, and collapsing boundaries between work and life

You can’t just tell people to work harder or manage their time better.

The problem isn’t effort. The problem is volume.

It’s that we’ve built work environments where success requires being in seven hours of meetings and then doing a full day’s work after hours, and we act like that’s normal.

Communication overload isn’t just a productivity issue. It’s an emotional issue. And emotional issues are leadership issues.

The Biggest Question Leaders Need to Sit With

I’m not going to end this article with a tactical checklist. That’s not what leaders need right now. What they need is honest reflection.

The question is straightforward, but uncomfortable: Are we communicating in a way that builds connection, or are we just creating more communication?

When leaders wrestle with that question genuinely, change follows. Priorities realign. Calendars get restructured. Expectations shift. Culture evolves. Most critically, people move from feeling overwhelmed to feeling understood.

Sometimes the most productive leadership question isn’t “How do I fix this?” but “What am I doing that’s making this worse?”

What Reconnection Actually Looks Like in Practice

Connection isn’t built through volume. It’s built through intention.

It’s built when leaders:

• Distinguish emotional work from informational work, matching the medium to the message, defaulting to face-to-face for the conversations that actually matter, and stopping the attempt to resolve conflict through Slack
• Reduce meeting quantity and increase meeting quality, ensuring every meeting has a clear outcome, a defined purpose, and only the people who need to be there, so declining a meeting isn’t seen as insubordination but as good judgment
• Shift from communicating tasks to equipping people, observing, coaching, mentoring, and spending meaningful time helping their teams grow instead of just assigning more work and expecting people to figure it out
• Ask what their people are experiencing, not just what they’re producing, protecting time, attention, and mental space rather than filling every gap with another update, channel, or initiative
• Make decisions based on what serves humans, customers, and culture, not what’s convenient, habitual, or politically safe

Communication becomes connection when people feel seen, supported, trusted, valued, and equipped. Everything else is just noise.

The modern workplace doesn’t need more communication. What it needs are leaders willing to examine what they’re communicating, why they’re communicating it, and how those decisions shape the emotional reality of the people they depend on.

That’s uncomfortable work. It demands honesty, courage, and a willingness to question assumptions that feel safe but serve no one.

But it’s the real work of leadership today. And it’s work worth doing.

Help your team get reconnected.

Get in touch with our Employee Engagement Consultants today to learn how you can support stronger communication and team dynamics in your organization.

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