Your Team Would Trade 20% of Their Salary for This

Most leaders treat relationships as the expensive extra: nice when deadlines allow, first to disappear when budgets tighten.

KPMG’s Friends at Work 2025 data offers a sharper reframe: 57% of employees would trade 20% of their salary for close work friendships. Connection isn’t soft. It’s the asset your strategy runs on.

The cost of ignoring it is visible. Forty-five percent report feeling isolated and alone at work, at least sometimes. Gallup finds employees with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged. With global engagement near 20%, low engagement drains roughly $10 trillion in productivity worldwide.

Notice

Isolation rarely announces itself. It looks like silence, overwork, guarded updates, or the person who stops asking for help.

• Notice who is consistently left out of informal conversations.

• Ask, “Where are you carrying more than people can see?”

• Use David Rock’s SCARF model to examine status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

Invest

Relationships need more than good intentions. They need protected time and repeated signals that people matter.

• Build five-minute connection moments into meetings.

• Pair people across roles to share knowledge, not just tasks.

• Model appropriate vulnerability; Paul Zak’s neuroscience of trust research shows why recognition, autonomy, information-sharing, and intentional relationship-building strengthen performance.

Collect

Return on Relationship is not measured by how many social events you schedule. It shows up in what becomes possible afterward.

• Track whether people speak up earlier.

• Review collaboration, retention, workload, and recovery: not engagement scores alone.

• Celebrate the relationships that help teams solve hard problems and stay well.

That is the heart of Return on Relationship coaching: helping leaders create resilient, authentic teams where connection supports superior performance.

What would your team say is missing from their relationships at work?

Where could you make connection a leadership practice this week?