And How Leaders Must Repair It

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, businesses did what they had to do. We shut down offices. We sent people home. We improvised. It was the right call.

But it came at a cost most of us didn’t fully see until later.

In the rush to preserve safety and continuity, we unintentionally fractured one of the most powerful forces inside our organizations. Not alignment. Not productivity. Not even morale … at least not at first.

We broke our Connectedness.

And connectedness, it turns out, is not a soft metric. It is the glue that holds culture together.

The Problem Was Already There

Here’s something leaders don’t like to hear: the pandemic didn’t create the connectedness crisis. It exposed one that was already building.

According to Cigna’s Loneliness Index, three out of five employed adults reported feeling lonely before COVID arrived. Sixty-one percent of Americans said they sometimes or always felt lonely. Among Gen Z, that number climbed to 79 percent. Among Millennials, 71 percent.

We were already becoming, as I describe it in The Power of Being All In, a nation of outliers, that is, people who feel they stand apart from others, even when surrounded by them. The pandemic accelerated that trajectory dramatically.

Culture is a living ecosystem, fostered by shared identity, vision, direction, coordination, and connection. Notice that last word. When leaders relied on offices, hallways, and physical proximity to do the work of connectedness for them, and then suddenly those conditions disappeared overnight, what remained was the gap between alignment and belonging.

Alignment means people know what the culture is, believe in it, and can demonstrate elements of it. Connectedness means they identify with it, care about it, and feel they belong in it. We had made progress on alignment. We were losing connectedness. And they are not the same things.

Today, only one in four employees reports feeling connected to their organizational culture. Alignment without connection is fragile. People may understand the mission. But they no longer feel they belong to it.

That difference is profound. And the risk to being “All In” is extremely high.

Three Ways Remote Work Broke Connectedness

Remote work did not destroy culture; rather, it exposed the ways we had been taking connectedness for granted.

1. We confused proximity with belonging. Physical presence, such as passing conversation, shared frustration over a deadline, and laughter between meetings, created informal bonds. When we lost proximity, we lost what I’d call productive friction: the unscripted moments that build trust over time.
   In a Culture of Compliance, showing up was often enough. Leaders directed activity in time and space, and presence signaled participation. But in a Culture of Commitment, belonging must be felt, not enforced. Remote work stripped away the illusion that attendance equals engagement. It doesn’t. Belonging must now be engineered, deliberately and consistently.

2. We mistook information for communication. With distributed teams, communication defaulted to digital tools. Emails multiplied. Messages accelerated. Notifications became constant. But as I noted in the previous article in this series, sharing information is not the same as communicating.
   When tone, nuance, and presence disappear from our exchanges, misunderstanding increases. Research cited in The Power of Being All In shows that more than half of all emails and texts are misunderstood. Misunderstanding weakens trust, and trust is the backbone of connectedness. When trust wavers, commitment wavers.

3. We allowed trust to drift through overcorrection. This one is hard to admit, but it’s real. Remote work tempted many leaders, myself included in earlier years when leading distributed teams, to overcorrect.
   We monitored more. We checked in more. We inserted ourselves into more conversations. Insecurity often disguises itself as oversight. But micromanagement communicates something that no amount of good intentions can undo: I don’t believe you can succeed without me. That message fractures confidence. And confidence is the fuel of connection.

The diagnosis is clear. Three forces broke the connectedness in our organizations. Now comes the part that matters most: how to rebuild it.

To read the rest of this article, visit this link.

Enjoy the journey!