The Cult of Busy Is Costing You Belonging

We don’t set out to make our teams feel isolated. Yet in many organisations, the drumbeat of back-to-back meetings, blinking notifications and relentless delivery quietly pushes leaders toward a transactional style: get through the list, keep work moving, reply fast. Helpful, until it isn’t.

At Mantle, we hear versions of the same story from senior leaders across New Zealand and Australia: “I’m always on. I’m responsive. But I’m not as present as I want to be.” Presence is the first casualty of overload. And when presence goes, belonging follows.

Busy ≠ Effective (especially for humans)

The research is pretty blunt: high “busyness” cultures dampen connection, weaken engagement and increase the risk of turnover. In BetterUp’s 2025 workforce connection report, 43% of employees say they don’t feel a sense of connection at work, and a majority want employers to do more to foster it.

Harvard Business Review commentary echoes the pattern: when busyness becomes the norm, engagement drops and absenteeism rises, eroding culture and productivity.

Why? Hustle norms crowd out the “small human moments” that knit teams together—spontaneous check-ins, decompression between meetings, generous listening. In always-on environments, people skip breaks, reduce informal interactions, and feel pressure to appear constantly occupied.

The result is more transactional work and less relational glue.

The costs aren’t soft. Belonging is strongly associated with higher performance, lower turnover and fewer sick days. (Multiple longitudinal studies and meta-analyses point to this; for example, one synthesis reports a 56% lift in job performance, 50% lower turnover risk and 75% fewer sick days when belonging is strong.)

What overload does to leaders

Chronic busyness pulls leaders into reactivity. Attention narrows to tasks, visibility and throughput; coaching, listening and emotional availability slip down the priority list. Teams experience the leader as less accessible, trust dips, and psychological safety thins out.

Over time, decision fatigue sets in, foresight declines, and the “emotional infrastructure” (empathy, trust, support) that enables innovation starts to atrophy.

Put simply: busyness trades the conditions for performance (connection, clarity, safety) for the appearance of performance (activity, speed, volume). That’s a bad bargain.

A leadership reset: from activity to availability

If you recognise yourself in any of this, here’s the good news: relatively small shifts—designed as systems, not heroics—reliably move the needle.

1) Design your week for presence, not just throughput.

• Convert two status meetings into async updates; spend those minutes on two coaching 1:1s. (You’ll likely recover clarity and discretionary effort.)
• Institute “office hours”: a fixed 60-minute block each week where anyone can pop in (physically or on Zoom) for quick sense-making.
• Create a margin ritual: finish meetings at :25 or :55 to protect decompression and prep for the next conversation.

2) Slow the conversation by one beat.
Adopt “two beats slower” in meetings: pause, paraphrase, probe. It signals respect, reduces misalignment, and helps people feel seen. Over time, it’s a flywheel for trust.

3) Make recognition specific and social.
Replace generic praise with the “Thanks + Because” pattern: “Thanks, Moana—because your stakeholder map surfaced the roadblocks early.” It strengthens competence signals and belonging in one move.

4) Protect deep work—and name it as a team norm.
Agree windows where Slack/Teams goes quiet. Leaders who model deep work and boundary-setting make it safer for others, lifting quality and morale.

5) Replace convenience with connection where it matters.
Self-service tools are great—until they strip away human moments that build context and trust. Add useful “people friction” at key handoffs: e.g., a 5-minute kick-off call for complex work, a rotating buddy for cross-team tasks, or a fortnightly “customer of our work” roundtable. (A small investment; outsized clarity and goodwill.)

Culture moves: make connection the default

Leaders set the weather, but systems sustain it. Three shifts that stick:

• Rituals: Short, predictable touchpoints—weekly learning huddles (“what I tried, what I noticed, who helped”), monthly retros, and a standing “showcase” slot in team meetings. These rituals convert connection from “nice-to-have” to “how we work.”
• Roles: Introduce a rotating Connection Steward (per sprint/quarter) to orchestrate intros, shout-outs and cross-team joins.
• Signals: Publish norms for response times, meeting hygiene, and “ask for help” etiquette. Clarity reduces anxiety and frees people to be generous with each other.

Crucially, measure what you value. Alongside delivery metrics, track simple connection signals: 1:1 cadence, peer recognition frequency, “help offered/asked,” and short pulse items on belonging and psychological safety. The literature is clear: connected leadership correlates with higher engagement, stronger resilience and healthier, more sustainable performance.

“But our world is genuinely busy…”

Of course it is. The point isn’t to be less ambitious—it’s to be more human while you pursue ambitious goals. Even in high-tempo environments, intentionally disrupting busyness culture by modelling presence and prioritising meaningful work pays off in morale, creativity and resilience.

And if you’re looking for a soundbite to take to your exec table: belonging is a performance strategy, not an HR extra. When leaders create conditions for connection, organisations see better work and better wellbeing.

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