Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
- Social Muscle Atrophy (SMA) is eroding workplace trust and communication, costing companies $500B annually in lost productivity.
- Traditional fixes like happy hours and team outings fail to address the root cause of SMA, which requires consistent, intentional social skill-building.
- Successful companies treat connection as a business strategy, redesigning meetings and assigning “Social Architects” to bridge silos and boost engagement.
Imagine walking into a workplace where employees avoid asking each other for help, meetings feel transactional, and conversations rarely go beyond the task at hand. Sound familiar?
A groundbreaking new study by Pryority Group and The Center for Generational Kinetics reveals that this isn’t just a workplace annoyance — it’s a crisis.
Social Muscle Atrophy (SMA) — the gradual weakening of interpersonal skills due to lack of use — is silently eroding trust, collaboration, and innovation in organizations nationwide.
The Cost of a Disconnected Workforce: A Bottom-Line Threat
This problem isn’t theoretical or unimportant. It’s quantifiable — and very expensive.
- $500 billion*: The estimated annual loss in productivity due to poor workplace communication.
- $21,000: The potential yearly cost of one disengaged employee’s lost productivity
- 30% of employees would rather clean a toilet than ask a coworker for help — a staggering statistic that reflects eroding communication, psychological safety, and trust.
This avoidance is a huge red flag. When employees lack the social muscle to communicate effectively, companies face:
- Skyrocketing Turnover: Employees disengage and leave when they don’t feel connected to their teams.
- Innovation Roadblocks: 43% of executives in our study report “false self-sufficiency,” meaning they avoid collaboration, stifling creativity and problem-solving.
- Lower Resilience in Change: 84% of workers say strong social skills are critical for adapting to disruption, but 56% say they prefer to work alone instead of with coworkers. Despite knowing better, most still default to isolation.
Why Are Traditional Fixes Failing?
Most companies attempt to solve workplace disconnection with happy hours, team outings, or forced bonding exercises. While well-intentioned, these approaches fail for three key reasons:
- They don’t address the root issue. You can’t “network event” your way out of a culture of avoidance.
- They lack consistency. Social muscle, like any other skill, needs regular exercise — not sporadic social events.
- They ignore workplace design. Hybrid and remote work demand new systems for building real, sustained connection.
Right now, companies are unknowingly optimizing for efficiency at the cost of connection. Meetings are rigid, digital tools replace human touchpoints, and informal learning is disappearing.
We feel connected technologically, but we don’t actually feel connected socially.
The result? More silos, more disengagement, and more quiet quitting. But the companies that act now to rebuild workplace connection will win in the future of work.
What Actually Works? A Smarter Approach to Workplace Connection
If traditional solutions don’t work, what does?
The best organizations don’t leave connection to chance — they design for it. The Pryority Group study showed research-backed strategies that can help companies reverse SMA and create more engaged, high-performing teams.
1. Treat Social Skill-Building Like a Business Strategy
Before lifting heavy weights, you warm up. Before a big speech, you rehearse. But when it comes to social interactions, we expect people to just figure it out in real time. That’s unrealistic.
Instead, organizations need to embed deliberate practice into their operations, like:
- “Request for Help” Huddles, where employees practice asking for assistance in low-stakes environments.
- Micro-Disagreement Drills, which are quick exercises where teams navigate small conflicts or practice engaging in productive dissent, so they’re better prepared for real ones.
- Bad Idea Brainstorms, or sessions where teams deliberately pitch “bad ideas” to reduce fear of failure, encourage risk-taking, and spark unexpected creativity.
2. Redesign Meetings to Encourage Ongoing Dialogue
Traditional meetings follow a rigid script: start, discuss, wrap up. But real relationships aren’t built in structured time slots.
Instead, leading organizations implement:
- Unfinished Meetings, ending discussions with an open-ended question to spark informal follow-ups.
- Floating Topic Boards, where employees drop discussion points for ongoing, organic conversations.
- Cross-Team “Thought Partner” Sessions, where employees workshop challenges without pressure to solve them immediately.
The best part is that these small tweaks don’t require additional time or budget — just a mindset shift in how meetings are structured.
3. Assign “Social Architects” to Bridge Silos
Most companies have HR teams tracking engagement, but few actively design for connection. That’s where a Social Architect role comes in.
A Social Architect:
- Maps out silos and creates intentional bridges between disconnected teams.
- Pairs socially disengaged employees with high-engagement mentors.
- Proactively moderates social friction before it escalates into retention issues.
When connection is someone’s job, it stops being an afterthought and becomes woven into the fabric of the company culture.
The Future of Work Belongs to Companies That Prioritize Social Muscle Strength
Right now, workplaces are at a crossroads.
Companies that continue to optimize for efficiency over connection will see disengagement, turnover, and declining innovation, but those that intentionally strengthen social muscle will future-proof their workforce.
The data is clear: SMA is not solely an employee problem — it’s also an environmental problem.
Leaders who wait will struggle to retain top talent.
Leaders who take action now will gain a competitive edge in a workplace that values connection.
My advice? Don’t wait until your best employees leave.
* David Grossman’s “Cost of Poor Communications” report (The Holmes Report) – Found that companies with 100,000 employees each lose an average of $62.4 million per year due to inadequate communication. SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) – Estimated that smaller organizations (100 employees) lose around $420,000 per year due to miscommunication. Extrapolated industry-wide estimates – When you scale these losses across all U.S. businesses, the impact reaches into the hundreds of billions annually, with some estimates reaching up to $500 billion in lost productivity.
