What if you could split your work brain from your real-life brain?
No awkward small talk in the lift. No checking emails at 10pm. No lingering dread about Monday morning while you’re halfway through your Sunday roast.
Welcome to the world of Severance (Apple TV’s darkly brilliant workplace thriller), where employees at Lumon Industries literally sever their work and personal selves. Your “innie” only exists at work. Your “outie” lives in blissful ignorance of what goes on behind the office doors.
Sounds dreamy, right?
No more Teams fatigue. No more remembering your login. No more having to nod politely at Janet from the finance team’s “hilarious” weekend story.
Except… it’s horrific.
Because when you sever, you lose the one thing great comms is built on: connection.
Severed comms = silent employees
If Severance was real, your internal comms strategy would be toast because your people would literally be two people.
- No trust. Your innie doesn’t know your outie. There’s no shared identity, no belonging. All those carefully crafted values? Gone. You’re basically shouting into a void.
- No feedback loop. Your employee surveys? Worthless. The innie can’t speak for the outie, and vice versa. Forget those authentic employee stories you love sharing externally. They don’t exist.
- No advocacy. Your best brand advocates are your people. But if they don’t even know who they are at work, how can they tell anyone else how brilliant you are?
And that’s before we even talk about the ethics of mind-wiping your workforce. (Spoiler: not great for Glassdoor reviews.)
The Severance test: could your comms pass?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: some organisations already feel a bit… severed.
If your employees mentally switch off the second they clock out, if your leaders communicate only in jargon-filled updates, if your people feel like cogs rather than humans, you’re already halfway to Lumon.
Great comms do the opposite of severance:
- They connect the dots between work and life.
- They give people a voice and make them feel heard.
- They build trust so that employees want to advocate for you.
Your people should never need a sci-fi brain surgery to escape their job.
How to avoid becoming Lumon
The antidote to severed comms?
- Talk human, not corporate. Your people are people, not productivity units. Write like you’d talk to them over a coffee.
- Build real dialogue, not just broadcasts. Two-way comms aren’t a “nice to have”, they’re the difference between engaged employees and checked-out ones.
- Connect work to purpose. People want to know why their work matters. If they can’t see the bigger picture, they’ll mentally sever themselves anyway.
Ready to (re)connect?
At Lumon, they severed brains. At Alive, we spark them.
If you’re ready to wake up your comms before your people check out for good, let’s talk.
