Esther Perel warns AI is weakening workplace connections
The psychotherapist says hybrid work, anxiety and AI are eroding everyday colleague ties as surveys show low engagement and rising disconnection.
By Hana Yoshida · Markets Reporter
3 min read
Psychotherapist Esther Perel is urging executives to treat weakening workplace relationships as a business problem, not a soft concern. In an interview with Fortune, she said AI, hybrid work and economic anxiety are cutting into the routine human contact that helps colleagues trust each other.
The warning comes as employee engagement remains weak. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found Europe had the lowest engagement of any region, at 12%, while the global average stood at 20%, its lowest level since 2020.
Perel, known for her work on relationships and her book Mating in Captivity, told Fortune that the same changes affecting personal relationships are showing up at work. She described the problem as “social atrophy,” a gradual loss of the small interactions that once helped organizations function.
Hybrid work and thinner daily contact
Perel told Fortune that remote and hybrid work have reduced the physical closeness that supports workplace relationships. She also said global teams spread across locations can make it harder for people to build rapport.
Video meetings have changed as well, she said. Perel told Fortune that early video calls often gave colleagues accidental glimpses of one another’s homes, while today’s polished calls can strip away context and move quickly from agenda to exit.
That matters for leadership, Perel said, because hard conversations depend on a base of easier ones. She told Fortune that leaders can handle difficult discussions only after building enough everyday connection through smaller exchanges.
Economic anxiety is adding pressure, according to Perel. She told Fortune that some employees are “job hugging instead of job hopping,” staying in place out of fear rather than seeking new roles, which reduces the social risk-taking that can come with meeting new teams and building broader networks.
AI may remove useful friction
Perel also warned that automation can reduce human contact by replacing quick questions to colleagues with chatbot queries. She told Fortune that those small exchanges often lead to other conversations, and losing them can weaken ties inside a company.
Workday’s Human Connection Workplace Index found that three in 10 employees reported less patience for small talk, more trouble reading colleagues’ emotional tone, more anxiety about spontaneous phone calls, or a weaker ability to resolve conflict without digital mediation since AI entered their workplace.
Perel also raised concerns about AI’s effect on entry-level work. Fortune reported that companies including Oracle, Amazon and BT have used rising AI adoption to help justify large job cuts.
Perel told Fortune that a recent business conference she attended included repeated discussion of reducing hiring for entry-level roles as AI changed staffing plans. She said that when she asked attendees to think of Gen Z workers as “our children,” the discussion shifted.
Routine tasks now being automated once gave early-career workers a way to develop skills and form workplace relationships, Perel told Fortune. If companies remove those roles without creating new paths in, she warned, they risk damaging future talent pipelines.
What Perel says leaders should do
Workday’s report found Gen Z workers are the least connected generation at work and are 12 times more likely than Gen X colleagues to feel completely disconnected from co-workers.
Perel told Fortune that leaders should create room for employees to talk about anxiety rather than move straight into tasks. She urged managers to ask basic questions about how people are doing and what is happening in their lives.
She also advised executives to stop describing companies as families. Perel told Fortune that teams and families operate under different expectations, and that calling a workplace a family can set employees up for disappointment when business pressures arrive.
Perel said the response cannot be limited to better tools or shorter meetings. She told Fortune that companies need cultural change that rebuilds people’s patience for one another in workplaces increasingly designed to reduce personal friction.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.