At one point, many of the relationships that held teams together developed almost incidentally.

People arrived at the same workplace, sat near one another, walked to meetings together and had conversations while making coffee. They noticed when a colleague seemed unusually quiet, heard about the problem someone was trying to solve and picked up information that would never have warranted a formal meeting. These interactions were rarely designed as part of a team effectiveness strategy. They simply happened as a consequence of people spending time together.

For many teams, that environment has changed. Hybrid and distributed work have brought enormous benefits, including greater flexibility and access to talent, but they have also changed the way workplace relationships form and are maintained. At the same time, many organisations are operating through sustained periods of change, increasing workloads and competing demands. When time is scarce, relational activities are often the first things to disappear.

At our recent High Performing Teams in Times of Change event, Hayden Fricke captured the shift simply:

“The old, ‘I’ll just bump into the water cooler’ doesn’t sort of happen as much anymore.”

His broader point was that leaders can no longer assume connection will take care of itself. Increasingly, teams need to design connection deliberately into how they work.

Connection Is More Than Getting Along

Workplace connection can easily be dismissed as a softer element of team performance. It can become associated with social events, team lunches or whether colleagues enjoy spending time together. Those things can contribute to connection, but they are not the whole story.

From an organisational psychology perspective, our relationships at work influence how we communicate, seek help, share information, respond to pressure and interpret one another’s behaviour. When people know their colleagues well enough to understand how they work, what pressures they are experiencing and where they may need support, coordination becomes easier. Connection also creates context.

An unanswered message from a colleague we barely know can be interpreted as disengagement or poor communication. The same behaviour from somebody we understand may be interpreted differently because we know they are managing a significant deadline or dealing with an unusually demanding week. Those small differences in interpretation matter. Over time, they influence trust, collaboration and the quality of relationships across a team.

This is one reason connection should not be treated as separate from performance. It forms part of the social infrastructure that allows people to work effectively together.

The Architecture of Work Has Changed

The challenge is not that hybrid work automatically produces disconnected teams. Many hybrid teams have exceptionally strong relationships, while teams sitting in the same office can be profoundly disconnected. The difference is often intentionality. When people work together physically, opportunities for informal interaction are built into the environment. In distributed teams, those interactions need to compete with calendars, deadlines and task-focused meetings.

The result can be an increasingly transactional pattern of communication. People join a call to discuss a project, resolve the issue and move to the next meeting. The work gets done, but the small interactions through which relationships develop gradually disappear.

Hayden described the leadership challenge this creates:

“Whatever your mixture of in-person versus hybrid, you have to think about how you’re going to create those joyful moments and those connections.”

The emphasis here is not on recreating the office virtually or filling calendars with compulsory social activities. It is about recognising that the design of work influences the quality of relationships within it. Leaders have a role in shaping that design.

Connection Becomes More Important Under Pressure

The instinct during busy periods is often to strip work back to what feels essential. Meetings become shorter. Informal conversations disappear. Development is postponed. Leaders focus attention on deadlines, deliverables and immediate problems. Operationally, this can seem efficient. Psychologically, it can remove some of the very conditions that help people cope with pressure.

When workloads are high, people benefit from knowing they are not carrying the challenge alone. They need colleagues with whom they can test ideas, ask for help, share concerns and redistribute work when capacity becomes uneven. They also need opportunities to make sense of what is happening around them.

A well-connected team has more pathways through which that support can occur.

A disconnected team can leave individuals managing pressure largely by themselves, even when they are surrounded by capable colleagues.

This becomes particularly important during organisational change. Change often creates uncertainty at precisely the same time that workloads and emotional demands increase. If the relationships within the team are weak, people have fewer trusted channels through which to process that uncertainty and seek support. Connection does not remove pressure. It can, however, change how people experience and respond to it.

Wellbeing and Performance Are Not Competing Outcomes

Claire Spencer’s reflections at the event brought this connection between team effectiveness and wellbeing into sharp focus. She described a period in which a number of senior team members were “really close to burnout” before their team development work began. Reflecting on what might have happened without that investment, she believed some of those leaders could have ended up “deep in burnout.”

Importantly, Claire also described the team as becoming “much more connected and supported by their colleagues around them.” 

That relationship between performance and wellbeing deserves attention. Organisations sometimes treat wellbeing as something that sits alongside the work: an initiative, benefit or resource designed to help people cope with the demands placed upon them. Those interventions can be valuable, but sustainable wellbeing is also influenced by the conditions under which people work. Workload matters. Role clarity matters. Leadership behaviour matters. Team norms matter. The quality of relationships between colleagues matters.

For this reason, Steople’s approach to sustainable high performance focuses on changing the conditions behind how people work together so that performance and wellbeing reinforce one another, rather than treating them as competing priorities. This is also reflected in our High Performance Teams approach, where factors including Trust, Communication and Interdependency sit alongside Direction, Clarity, Balance and Commitment.

A team should not need to sacrifice wellbeing in order to perform. Equally, supporting wellbeing should not mean lowering expectations for meaningful performance. The stronger objective is to create conditions where people can sustain both.

Belonging Changes How People Participate

Connection also influences whether people feel that they genuinely belong within a team. Belonging is more than being included in meetings or copied into communications. It involves feeling recognised as a legitimate and valued member of the group, someone whose contribution matters and whose presence is noticed. That experience can shape participation.

People who feel connected to their team are more likely to have established the relationships that make asking for help, sharing an unfinished idea or challenging a colleague feel possible. They understand more of the social context around the work and have greater confidence in how their contribution will be received.

When that connection is absent, participation can become more cautious. This is particularly relevant for new employees, people working remotely for much of the week, or individuals whose roles naturally place them at the edge of established team networks. They may receive all the formal information required to perform their job while still missing the relational context that helps them become part of the team.

Leaders therefore need to pay attention not only to whether people are communicating, but also to who is connected to whom. A team can have excellent formal communication systems and still contain people who feel professionally isolated.

Creating Connection Does Not Mean Creating More Meetings

Deliberate connection is sometimes interpreted as another demand on already crowded calendars. It does not have to be. In fact, adding more meetings without changing their quality can compound the problem. A calendar full of highly transactional meetings can leave people with less time and energy for meaningful interaction.

The more useful leadership task is to examine the moments that already exist. A team meeting can begin with enough space for people to understand what is happening across the group before moving into the agenda. A leader can make time during a one-to-one conversation to understand how someone is experiencing their workload rather than focusing exclusively on outputs. Teams working across locations can make deliberate decisions about which interactions benefit most from being face-to-face and which are better handled asynchronously.

Leaders can also create norms that make support easier to access. People can be encouraged to signal capacity constraints before they become crises. Teams can discuss how they want colleagues to ask for help, how they will respond when someone is under pressure and how workload will be redistributed when circumstances change. These practices may appear small, but connection is usually built through accumulation.

It is rarely one significant event that creates a strong team relationship. It is repeated evidence that people notice one another, respond when support is needed and make space for relationships alongside delivery.

Joy Has a Place in High Performance

One of the more interesting ideas Hayden raised during the event was the role of joy.

“Leaders need to be deliberate about the way they create joy and connection between people.”

In a discussion about performance, pressure and organisational change, joy can initially sound like an unusual leadership responsibility.

Yet teams are human systems. Shared humour, celebration, informal conversation and moments of enjoyment contribute to the relationships people draw upon when work becomes difficult. They create positive shared experiences that exist alongside deadlines, conflict and pressure. This does not require leaders to manufacture fun or force participation in activities people do not value. Artificial attempts at connection can have the opposite effect, particularly when employees are overloaded and the activity simply feels like another obligation.

The stronger approach is to understand the team. Different groups will connect in different ways. What matters is that leaders pay attention to whether the way work is organised leaves enough room for relationships to develop at all. High performance should contain space for people to enjoy working together.

Leaders Need to Notice What the Team Cannot See

One of the risks of disconnection is that it can remain invisible for a long time. The team continues delivering. Meetings continue happening. Messages continue being answered.

From the outside, everything can appear functional. The warning signs are often subtle: the same people dominate discussions, colleagues stop seeking one another’s input, informal collaboration declines, people solve problems alone that could have been shared, or somebody gradually becomes peripheral to the team’s work. By the time the impact appears in engagement, wellbeing or performance data, these patterns may have been developing for months.

Leadership therefore involves noticing the quality of connection, not simply the quantity of communication. It means understanding whether people have relationships they can rely on, whether support moves across the team and whether the team’s ways of working create opportunities for connection or systematically squeeze them out. That is particularly important for leaders themselves. Senior roles can be isolating, and leadership teams are not automatically support systems simply because their members meet regularly.

Claire’s observation that her senior team became more connected and supported illustrates what deliberate team development can create. The value was not only better relationships. Those relationships became part of the team’s capacity to navigate pressure together.

Connection Should Be Designed, Not Left to Chance

The workplace has changed, and many of the informal mechanisms that once supported workplace relationships can no longer be assumed. That does not make hybrid work the problem, nor does it mean organisations need to return to old ways of working to rebuild connection.It means leaders need to become more deliberate.

Connection needs to be considered alongside workload, communication, decision-making and team norms as part of the environment in which performance occurs. Leaders need to understand where relationships are strong, where people may be becoming isolated and whether the team’s operating rhythm creates enough opportunity for people to know and support one another.

The objective is not simply a happier team. It is a team with the relational strength to communicate honestly, share pressure, ask for help, solve problems together and sustain performance when conditions become difficult. Connection is no longer something leaders can assume will happen around the edges of work.

It is part of the work.

Build the Conditions for Sustainable Performance

Steople’s High Performance Teams Survey™ helps teams understand the conditions influencing their performance, including Trust, Communication, Interdependency, Direction, Clarity, Balance and Commitment. Our broader High Performance Teams approach then combines these insights with evidence from the team’s real work to identify where changes to team habits, workload, leader behaviour and shared norms can strengthen both performance and wellbeing.

If your team is navigating sustained pressure, hybrid work, significant change or signs of disconnection, the starting point is understanding the conditions shaping how people are experiencing and performing the work.

Talk to Steople about building a team where connection, wellbeing and performance reinforce one another.