We’re sure that someone over the last month has told you to watch Severance.

With an almost inescapable press tour, the sci-fi show follows employees of a shady global company who have had a surgical procedure to ‘sever’ their mind, cognitively separating their work and personal lives. A bit dystopian, right?

So it’s surprising to see the recent data from market research agency Savanta showing that 35% of UK workers would get severed, and a whopping 46% of 18-25 year olds would volunteer for the procedure.

Perhaps this pop culture statistic speaks to another trend. Disengagement has been one of the primary concerns for communicators as Contact Monkey found in this year’s Global State of Internal Communications Report, where 50% of respondents said low employee responsiveness was a major challenge. Alongside this, 54% reported a drop in employee morale in the last year.

However, this isn’t anything new.

Quiet quitting, task masking, severing, every year there’s no shortage of terms for people zoning out of their day-to-day workloads. It’s not a bad thing; some people just want to get on with their contracted work for their contracted hours and that’s it. But with the rise of hybrid and remote working, for many the boundaries between work and home are being eroded; there is no commute (or elevator) to demarcate the day, you can cram a little bit of extra work in before dinner, you can be online all the time.

The issue is not that most people are unhappy at work but that they want to forget work happened altogether.

For communicators trying to reach the ‘wanna-be-severed’ community there’s no quick fix solution. Communication strategies should recognise these concerns in an implicit way. One idea is to weave in a greater narrative of personal development and learning to help people see the personal benefit to the work they are doing.

Communicators play a part in nurturing a culture where colleagues can bring their whole selves to their positions and see the bigger picture of the work they do.