(The post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)
There’s a feeling many of us carry into work that’s hard to name. A sense that despite the tools, the platforms, the dashboards, and the metrics — something fundamental has gone missing. That we’re busier than ever, but less effective. That we collaborate more and connect less.
The research says we’re right.
The social capital haemorrhage
McKinsey surveyed over 5,500 workers on the state of their workplace networks. What they found was striking: more than three-quarters reported connecting with others less frequently, maintaining smaller networks, and spending less time building relationships than before.
But here’s the detail that matters. Of the connections people still maintain, 57% are for sharing work-related information. 48% for career advice. Only 29% involve any kind of genuine social engagement.
What passes for collaboration in most organisations has become almost entirely transactional. Information exchange has replaced relationship. Efficiency has displaced trust.
And trust, it turns out, is not optional. Research consistently finds that mutual trust, reciprocity, and genuine collegial connection are among the strongest predictors of innovation, knowledge-sharing, and organisational effectiveness.
The silos aren’t a bug. They’re a feature of how we work now.
The most compelling evidence here comes from a 2022 Nature Human Behaviour study of over 61,000 Microsoft employees. When the company shifted to firm-wide remote work, something happened to its collaboration networks: they became static and siloed, with fewer bridges between different parts of the organisation.
The share of collaboration time employees spent with cross-group connections dropped by 25%.
This matters because of what those cross-group connections do. Sociologist Mark Granovetter called them “weak ties” — the loose connections across different teams, functions, and disciplines. They’re not where your most frequent interactions happen. But they’re where new knowledge comes from. They’re the connections that carry different perspectives, unexpected information, and creative friction.
We optimised them out of existence.
High productivity is masking exhaustion
Here’s the dangerous part: standard metrics often won’t show you this is happening.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, covering 31,000 workers across 31 countries, flagged it explicitly: high productivity is masking an exhausted workforce, and shrinking networks are endangering innovation.
A separate study of over 10,000 technology professionals found that after the shift to remote work, hours worked went up, output declined slightly, and productivity fell by 8–19%. More meetings. More messages. More coordination activity. Less actual work done.
More activity. Less capability.
This is what efficiency culture does
This didn’t happen by accident. It’s the predictable outcome of decades of management doctrine that treats organisations primarily as efficiency machines — measuring outputs, eliminating waste, standardising process, and optimising everything that can be quantified.
The problem is that genuine collaboration, learning, trust, and tacit knowledge are hard to quantify. So they don’t show up on the efficiency scorecard. And what doesn’t show up on the scorecard doesn’t get invested in.
UK government research on organisational effectiveness puts it plainly: the literature points to the failures of managerialism and market mechanisms to address complex challenges — and argues that those very challenges require genuine collaboration and inter-organisational cooperation to solve.
We’ve built management systems that are structurally antagonistic to the capabilities we actually need.
What this means for knowledge management
I’ve been making this argument for a long time: knowledge is not a technology problem.
Knowledge lives in relationships. It moves through trust. It surfaces in the informal conversation after the meeting ends, the cross-team question that no one put on a ticket, the senior person who explains the context behind the decision.
None of that is produced by a better platform. All of it depends on social capital — the networks, norms, and trust between people that make knowledge genuinely flow.
And the evidence is clear: that social capital has been eroding, quietly, for years. Not because people stopped caring, but because the conditions for building it have been systematically deprioritised in the name of efficiency.
Knowledge doesn’t walk out the door because of inadequate tooling. It walks out because the human infrastructure that carries it was allowed to decay.
The good news is that this is reversible. But it requires treating human connection, relational trust, and genuine collaboration as strategic organisational assets — not as pleasant by-products of getting the processes right.
Because they’re not by-products. They’re the foundation.
References available on request. Key sources include Yang et al. (2022), Nature Human Behaviour; McKinsey Quarterly (2022); Microsoft Work Trend Index (2021); Gibbs, Mengel & Siemroth (2022), Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.