Esther Perel has spent her career exploring the complexities of human relationships. Her seminal book, Mating in Captivity, examined the tension between love and desire.
Now, the psychotherapist is shifting her attention to the workplace, where AI, hybrid working, and declining engagement are reshaping how colleagues connect.
Europe has the lowest employee engagement of any region in the world at 12%, according to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. This compares with the global average of 20% that is itself at its lowest point since 2020.
Perel believes this is a symptom of the slow, invisible erosion of everyday human contact that used to hold organizations together. This is social atrophy and Perel says most leaders don’t yet have a plan for it.
“I think what’s happening in our personal lives is mirrored in the workplace,” Perel tells Fortune. “We expect something different from a business leader than from a parent or a partner, but the underlying shift is the same: there is a general state of social atrophy creeping up on us and we don’t even notice it. There’s a pervasive sense that we’re living through a period of crisis rather than a period of abundance.”
Social atrophy in the workplace
There are several factors contributing to this disconnect, according to Perel. Remote and hybrid work is reducing the physical proximity that scaffolds professional relationships, while distributed global teams are making it more difficult for colleagues to build rapport.
Blurred Zoom backgrounds are a particular bug bear for Perel. “In the early days of video calls, people were unintentionally visible in each other’s homes, which paradoxically created more intimacy than the polished, decontextualized version we have now,” she says. “You go on Zoom, nobody says hello, everyone’s pretending to do something else while they wait so it doesn’t look like they’re just sitting there. Then you launch straight into ‘what’s on the agenda today.’ The moment the task ends, the meeting ends.”
This pattern is unsustainable. “You can only handle difficult and important conversations as a leader if you’ve built up a foundation of small, insignificant ones first,” she says.
Exacerbating this is a climate of economic anxiety. Rather than exploring new roles, employees are staying put out of fear, “job hugging instead of job hopping,” Perel says, which flattens the social risk-taking that once came with switching jobs, meeting new teams, and building a professional network.
“The capacity to connect with people, sit through awkward small talk, or simply show up in person is a muscle that needs to be practiced, otherwise it weakens,” Perel says. “We’re oriented around comfort, ease, and frictionless living — everything from food delivery to AI assistants are designed to remove friction.”
Without smaller inconveniences, people are less prepared to handle the larger challenges that inevitably arise in the workplace.
Leadership must respond — and AI isn’t the fix
Perel calls on bosses to stop turning a blind eye to these challenges and become part of the change. Leaning further into automation and technology efficiencies, she warns, may not be the answer.
“I think AI is absorbing time that used to be spent with other people. Asking a chatbot a quick question instead of asking a colleague doesn’t just remove that one interaction, it removes all the important conversations that follow.”
Three in 10 employees say they have less patience for small talk, more difficulty reading colleagues’ emotional tone, higher anxiety over spontaneous phone calls, or a decline in their ability to resolve conflict without digital mediation, since AI was introduced in their workplace, Workday’s The Human Connection Workplace Index found.
Increased adoption of AI has also been used to justify sizable layoffs at companies including Oracle, Amazon, and BT.
Perel claims that many companies seem “thrilled” to be able to make cuts. “I was at a major business conference recently where everyone kept talking about reducing hiring for entry-level roles and all the ways AI was reshaping headcount,” she says.
However, when Perel encouraged the conference attendees to stop referring to Gen Z and instead say ‘our children’, attitudes started to shift. “Now you feel it in your gut, because it’s the kid living at home who hasn’t been able to go outside. We have not begun to reckon with what the pandemic did to young people.”
The routine tasks that are now being automated by AI were once effective ways for entry-level workers to hone their skills and begin forming workplace relationships. By eliminating these roles, companies also risk removing traditional paths into professions. Left unaddressed, this could lead to a severe talent pipeline gap, Perel warns.
Contain the anxiety. Drop the ‘family’ talk.
Gen Z employees are the least connected among all generations in the workplace, according to a report from Workday. And they’re 12 times more likely than their Gen X colleagues to feel completely disconnected from their co-workers.
Perel compares the moment facing today’s executives to the one facing a parent with a frightened child. “You don’t say ‘everything’s okay.’ You don’t do pep talks,” she says. “What you need to do is create a container for the anxiety, because if you don’t, people start to disconnect. Without a safe space where people can talk about what’s actually happening in their lives, that anxiety has nowhere to go.”
She encourages managers and business leaders to ask basic questions such as, “How are you doing?” or “What’s happening in people’s lives right now?” rather than skipping straight to the meeting agenda.
A common refrain in corporate culture-building is the idea that a company is like a family, bound by loyalty and shared purpose. But leaders need to recognize that belonging to a team is not the same as belonging in a family, Perel says. Basing a culture on this idea tends to backfire the moment a company faces challenges.
“Stop calling your team a family. It’s not true,” she says, “and it sets people up for disappointment. Family members compensate for the weaknesses, absences, or incompetence. A team is not organized that way. Nobody is structurally expected to step in for the incompetence or the absence of a colleague the way family members are for each other.”
At a time when executives are grappling multiple workforce challenges, Perel says the instinct can be to rely on better tools or shorter meetings. But these are merely operational tweaks. The real solution, she says, requires cultural change and rebuilding people’s patience for each other, in workplaces increasingly designed to minimize personal interaction.
“A big question for CEOs is how they’re going to deal with the fact that other humans are imperfect, unpredictable, and messy,” Perel says. “The caretaking, the bumps, the stuff you don’t get through a screen. That, to me, is the interesting frontier for businesses: what happens to our expectations of each other once frictionless, disembodied interaction becomes the default?”
Written by Sam Birchall for Fortune as “Esther Perel has a warning for executives: your workforce is suffering from social atrophy and AI is making it worse” and republished with permission.
