Weekend Reads | Why We’re Lonely at Work

According to a recent Gallup poll, one-fifth of employees worldwide feel lonely at work. This weekend’s read is an article in the Harvard Business Review looking at who those lonely workers are, why they are lonely, and what employers can do about it.

The authors, a pair of business school faculty members at Boston University and New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, studied 1,000 knowledge workers across a range of companies and industries who cover the spectrum from “highly lonely” to “minimally lonely.” They present their main findings as a series of four myths, which in turn they debunk.

The first myth is that remote work is the main culprit for loneliness. While they found that remote work can be isolating and workers who are fully remote are often lonelier, they found no correlation between loneliness and whether someone is in the office part-time or full-time. Further, they found that other factors were more significantly linked to loneliness.

Second myth: Simply placing people on teams reduces loneliness. On the contrary, the researchers found that it can make employees feel even more lonely to be on a team if the team isn’t close. It isn’t enough to form teams; those teams need to build mutual respect, trust, and interdependence.

The third myth is that lonely employees are “needier,” socially, than other workers. This goes hand in hand with a prevailing narrative that millennial and Generation Z workers have higher social needs (and demands) in the workplace. The researchers found that this was not the case, and workers at all ages fall across a natural variation in what social scientists call their “need to belong.” Further, they found that there was no correlation between the need to belong and worker loneliness. They also discovered that introverts are more likely to be lonely at work than extroverts, even though introverts tend to need less connection to others.

And the fourth myth is that loneliness at work is a personal problem, not an organizational one. Many of the employees in their study described being lonely at one job but not at all in another; the job changed, but the worker didn’t.

They conclude from this that anyone can be lonely at work regardless of age, personality, how often they work in the office, or their position in the office hierarchy. The researchers recommend several actions that companies should take to help reduce the number of lonely employees in their office; I won’t list them all, but here are three notable ones:

• Measure loneliness. They can’t tell how much of a problem they have, or whether they are making progress in addressing it, if they don’t quantify it.

• Keep social activities simple. A survey of the employees in the study asked them to rank potential at-work social activities they would like to see. The three that almost universally ranked highest were free communal lunches, meetings that devote time to personal chit-chat, and happy hours. That suggests that employees don’t need complicated, structured, highly choreographed activities and programs in order to reduce loneliness.

• Build connections into both in-office and remote work. The researchers note that devoting a slice of meeting time to personal chit-chat is something that works with remote meetings as well as in-person ones. They suggest some options: Organizers can integrate online games into meetings, and employers can encourage social channels online, such as a Slack channel for informal employee chatting.

Countless studies have shown that happier employees tend to be more productive — and they also tend to stay at the company longer. That’s plenty of incentive to try to reduce the number of workers who feel lonely at work. But according to this research, doing so requires an organizational culture change, in which we stop blaming workers for their loneliness and instead create more work environments that allow those workers to get to know and appreciate each other. 

We’re Still Lonely at Work