While most companies focus on perks and events to boost morale, the real threat to performance often lies in how connected people feel to each other. Disconnection leads to disengagement, burnout, and even silent resignations.
Our connection platform, powered by Thom, our AI coach, is a new way to use our fair and inclusive insights to create better connections between managers and teams. Driving engagement. Improving productivity.
According to the Gallup 2025 State of the workplace report:
1. Globally, only 21% of employees say they feel engaged. This even drops as low as 13% in the UK and wider Europe. Clearly, most workers don’t feel bonded to the people they work with, which impacts trust, performance, and retention. Disconnection isn’t just emotional—it’s financially damaging at scale. Disengagement cost the world economy $438 billion in 2024. Interestingly, those who work exclusively remote globally report the highest engagement scores. This suggests that engagement is more complex than most think. While most businesses try to solve the dropping engagement rates with going back to the office initiatives, feeling engaged and connected is about more than just seeing each other face-to-face.
2. Manager engagement decreased from 30% to 27% globally, with younger managers (under 35) and female managers experiencing the largest declines. While a drop in manager engagement was the primary cause of the drop in employee engagement, the issue is not going to stop with managers. When managers are engaged, their teams are too. Yet, only 44% of managers say they have ever received any form of management training. While some have a natural gift of inspiring people, most managers don’t. Luckily, effective coaching can be taught. Tools that provide insight in an employee’s preferred work- and communication style, that track employee’s feelings of connectedness, and that show aggregate team overviews in these topics can be of significant support for managers.
Connect focuses on enhancing team collaboration, engagement, and culture by providing tools that help employees understand each other's work
styles and preferences.
Thomas Connect is here to...
- Unlock your team's full potential by understanding, sharing, celebrating, and harnessing differences
View teams
Generate a team profile to identify collective strengths and areas for improvement. It can also run team sessions based on the team profile with easy-to-use guidance.
- Enhance collaboration and resolve conflict by sharing preferred working style insights
Compare colleagues
Compare your work style with that of a colleague for smoother collaboration. To the sides, both aggregate communication styles are summarised. At the centre, under each factor, the platform provides actionable insights that may influence their collaboration. Users are encouraged to also share personal facts about themselves, which are visible in the comparison view as well.
- Achieve strong manager-employee relationships through a fair and balanced exchange of preferred working styles
View colleagues
Provides a summary of an individual’s work style to improve interpersonal communication. Both integrated in the colleague view and featured in a separate tab, all users can access Thom, your personal AI coach. It is designed to enhance user engagement with Connect by providing quick, actionable insights and support.
- Enhance team trust and performance through stronger team member connections built on shared insights
Connection insights
The Connection scores capture the influence of Cohesion, Belonging, Appreciation, Contribution, Trust, and Well-being on someone’s performance. These six specific, evidence-based factors explain how people relate to their role, their team, and the organisation.