The Cost of Disconnection

When the space between performance and care goes unaddressed, disconnection grows – between leaders and employees, between teams, and even within individuals who start to feel unseen or unsafe to speak up.

This disconnection rarely happens all at once. It builds quietly through missed check-ins, assumptions about someone’s behavior, or the belief that personal struggles should stay out of the workplace. Over time, it shows up as burnout, disengagement, absenteeism, and turnover – outcomes that carry significant financial and cultural costs.

When employees lack trusted spaces for honest conversation, small challenges grow into crises. Disconnection shows up not only in absenteeism or turnover, but it also quietly erodes engagement, collaboration, and trust. A Gallup study found that employees who feel cared for by their peers are significantly more likely to report high engagement and lower stress levels. Conversely, a culture of isolation – where people “tough it out” alone – can amplify burnout and disengagement.

But beyond the numbers, the deeper cost is human. When people feel they must hide their pain, they lose trust in the systems around them – and in themselves. The workplace becomes a place of performative wellness rather than where people genuinely experience it.

HR leaders know these realities firsthand. You can have the most comprehensive benefits plan or the most generous EAP, but if employees don’t feel safe reaching out early, those supports go unused until people are already in distress. That’s where peer support bridges the gap.

Peer support fills the space between awareness and action, between policy and practice. It’s not a wellness add-on – it’s a people strategy that makes mental health support part of everyday organizational life. It’s how care becomes culture – and where performance and compassion finally meet.

Here Is the Overlooked Truth

Over time, workplaces have developed policies, programs, and referral pathways to connect employees to expert care. That is genuine progress. But in doing so, something deeply human has been overlooked, something that has always been part of who we are as people: our natural ability to support one another.

Every organization already has on its payroll the human capital to do this work. It is rare to find a workplace without people who have experienced hardship, mental health struggles, or substance use health challenges in their own lives. Most of these individuals are not only willing to support others, but they already possess many of the skills needed to do so. All they need is to be recognized, trained, and empowered by their organization.

When organizations start to crowdsource human benevolence, they unlock an untapped source of resilience. By empowering employees to support each other through structured peer support, they prevent small problems from becoming larger ones and ensure that recovery is not left to happen in isolation.

In North America, many of us have been socially conditioned to believe that once someone is referred to a clinician, recovery will naturally follow. The reality is far more complex. Sustainable recovery requires connection. The evidence is clear that without social support, recovery is harder and often less enduring.

“When organizations start to realize that compassion is not a nice-to-have or a soft skill, but an essential part of a healthy culture, everything starts to change. And when business leaders begin to see people who have lived through mental health challenges not as a liability but as an asset that makes their organization stronger from the inside out, that is when real transformation happens.”  – Stéphane Grenier, Founder of Mental Health Innovations

The Business Case for Human Connection

As workplaces evolve, so must the definition of leadership. The future of HR and organizational development will depend on leaders who can balance results with relationships. Human connection might sound like an abstract idea, but its impact is measurable – and it’s quickly becoming one of the most reliable indicators of organizational performance.

High-performing teams are not built solely on metrics or management systems; they’re built on trust, empathy, and shared purpose. When leaders approach performance through the lens of care – listening deeply, recognizing individual needs, and fostering belonging – they create the conditions where people thrive. This is not about being “soft;” it’s about being strategic.

Embedding connection into how teams operate recognizes that culture, trust, and mental health are performance multipliers, not distractions from productivity. The strongest organizations are those that design care into their systems – treating connection as infrastructure rather than an afterthought.

Implementing a peer support program is one of the most effective ways to put this philosophy into action. From a leadership and HR perspective, peer support operationalizes connection – turning the idea of “caring for people” into a structured, measurable component of workplace culture. By training and empowering employees to support one another, organizations create shared responsibility for wellbeing and performance.

This shift moves HR from being primarily reactive, addressing burnout, conflict, or disengagement after they occur, to being proactive in building resilience, trust, and communication across teams. Leaders who champion peer support signal that empathy and accountability can coexist- that care is not separate from performance, but essential to it.

Organizations that embed peer support and connection-based approaches often see measurable improvements in:

• Engagement: Employees who feel cared for are more motivated, creative, and aligned with organizational values.
• Retention: When people feel supported, they stay. Peer support reduces turnover costs and preserves institutional knowledge.
• Psychological Safety: Teams that normalize openness build trust faster and communicate more effectively.
• Early Intervention: Challenges are identified earlier, preventing burnout and performance decline.

In other words, connection is not the opposite of performance – it’s what makes performance sustainable. Where performance meets care, organizations find their real competitive advantage: people who feel valued, trusted, and empowered to do their best work.

From Questions to Confident Implementation

It’s natural for HR leaders and managers to have questions about introducing peer support. How do we ensure clear boundaries? How do we maintain confidentiality? How do we integrate this with our existing resources without blurring professional roles?

These questions are not obstacles – they are opportunities to design peer support thoughtfully and sustainably. Join our upcoming conversation with Stéphane Grenier, Founder of Mental Health Innovations, and Mike Skrypnek, Founder of the UNLimited WORTH Project, to explore how organizations are successfully embedding peer support programs, what policies and structures set them up for success, and how this approach strengthens both culture and performance.

We’ll take a look at how to integrate human connection safely and effectively into organizational mental health strategies. We will discuss how human connection-based approaches can reduce stigma, encourage early help-seeking, and build the structures that make this both safe and sustainable.

Because in the end, it is human connection that sustains recovery, performance, and trust.