A new body of research should worry every business owner and executive in Tampa Bay, and most of us have not even noticed the problem yet.
A study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science tracked thousands of participants across the United States, Mexico, Australia and Europe from 2005 to 2019, recording random samples of their speech throughout the day. The finding was stark. The average person spoke about 16,632 words a day in 2005. By 2019, that number had dropped to 11,900, a decline of roughly 28 percent. People under 25, who lean even harder on texting over calling, lost words at an even faster rate than everyone else.
That is not a minor cultural shift. That is a generation of your future leaders, salespeople and client facing talent losing practice at the very skill your business depends on most: talking to other humans.
Why This Is a Business Problem, Not a Social One
It is easy to read a statistic like this and file it under lifestyle trends. But talking less has direct implications for how well your people sell, lead, retain clients and solve problems together.
Psychologist Valeria Pfeifer, one of the researchers behind the study, points out that conversation exercises the brain differently than texting does. In a live conversation, you have to hold onto what the other person just said while also forming your own response, all while reading tone and body language in real time. You cannot pause, edit or delete. That kind of mental repetition builds the very muscles your team needs for negotiation, client discovery calls and difficult internal conversations.
When those muscles go unused, they weaken. Pfeifer connects the decline in daily conversation to broader struggles with attention span and the ability to follow a complex, unfolding story, the same skill a salesperson needs to listen through a client’s full concern before responding, or a manager needs to sit with an employee’s real feedback instead of rushing to the next agenda item.
The Weak Ties You Are Losing Without Realizing It
University of Sussex psychologist Gillian Sandstrom has spent years studying what researchers call weak ties, the casual, low stakes exchanges we have throughout the day with people we do not know well. A hallway greeting. A comment to the barista. A quick check in with a colleague from another department.
Sandstrom’s research shows these small exchanges genuinely boost our sense of wellbeing and belonging, even though most of us barely register them as meaningful. Just as important, weak ties are often the bridge to opportunities we never see coming. The referral, the vendor introduction, the new hire, the client who becomes a friend, these rarely start with a scheduled meeting. They start with a small, low pressure conversation that somebody was willing to have.
Remote and hybrid work has quietly stripped many of these interactions out of the workday. A study published in the journal Science found that remote workers spend more time alone during the workday and report more mental distress than in person workers, an effect that grows sharper for people who also live alone. If your company has moved toward distributed or hybrid work, and most have, this is worth sitting with. You may have solved for flexibility while accidentally removing the very interactions that kept your culture, and your people, healthy.
What Leaders Can Do About It
The instinct might be to mandate more meetings. That is the wrong fix. The goal is not more talking for its own sake. It is rebuilding the muscle and the opportunity for real, present conversation, especially the informal kind that cannot be scheduled on a calendar.
Start by noticing where your organization has quietly removed conversation in the name of efficiency. Every app, portal or automated workflow that replaces a phone call or a face to face check in is a trade off, not a pure win. Some of those trades are worth it. Some are costing you more than they save.
Protect unscheduled time. The best ideas and the strongest relationships on your team rarely happen in the structured 30 minute meeting. They happen in the five minutes before or after it. If every calendar is packed end to end, you have engineered those moments out of existence.
Model it yourself. If your own communication has drifted almost entirely to email, Slack and text, your team has learned that this is what is normal and expected. Pick up the phone. Walk over to someone’s desk. Your people will notice, and many of them will follow.
Finally, treat this as a developable skill, not a personality trait. Some of your most talented people were never taught how to build presence, hold a real conversation with a stranger, or turn a passing interaction into a relationship. That is not a character flaw. It is a gap that can be closed with the right framework and the right practice, the same way we would develop any other business critical skill.
The businesses that figure this out first will have a real advantage. In a world where everyone else is quietly retreating into their screens, the leaders and teams who still know how to talk, really talk, will be the ones people remember, trust and want to do business with.
Kinard Robinson is the founder of NEXTKNOWN, a professional positioning and development platform helping leaders and organizations build presence, expand their networks and unlock their full potential. Learn more at nextknown.vip.