How to cope with loneliness at work

A recent report from Gallup found that one in five workers across the world said they feel lonely at work.

Feeling lonely at work leaves employees feeling bad about their jobs, their companies and themselves, says Constance Hadley, an organizational psychologist with the Institute for Life At Work, a research group focused on finding ways to improve work life.

“We just know from research that people don't do their best work when they're feeling lonely and disconnected from others,” Hadley says. “People often quit their jobs if they feel socially disconnected.”

Loneliness at work can also affect people’s health, causing more absenteeism due to illness and higher health care costs for the employer, Hadley says.

“ Well, I think remote work's been scapegoated. We can't blame loneliness on remote work for a few reasons. One is that loneliness was increasing at work prior to the advent of many, many people working remotely prior to the pandemic. So that can't be the only cause.

“The other thing that I find has happened more recently is that companies are, I think, trying to take the easiest pathway towards building connections among their community. And they seem to think that if they just bring people back to the office, we'll all remember how to socially bond.

“But a lot has changed, you know, even since the beginning of the pandemic. I mean, there's some sense of atrophying social muscles that people have experienced, so it may not happen naturally.  And that's one of the reasons that Sarah Wright and I, in our recent Harvard Business Review article, tried to say, you need to actually do stuff when people are on site, to encourage those kinds of social connections, like offering regular social opportunities that are accessible to everyone and done during the day where people are paid for them.”

"It's tough. I agree, but it's not impossible. And I think companies have given up on optimizing remote work for social connection too soon. For example, one of our key findings was that people really enjoy having structured time in meetings to just chit-chat with each other. Five or ten minutes can do a lot. Sometimes people want to have a prompt. Sometimes people want to play like a little game. Some people want to do show and tell. There are lots of ways to use that small amount of time and it's easily done remotely. Most of our video conferencing tools have all these extra bells and whistles that aren't optimized, but they could be really helpful.

“So in my classroom, for example, we use the chat, we use polls, we did a whole bunch of embedded things.  So I would say do more remotely before you give up on it.”

“ I actually think the reason technology more directly has caused higher levels of loneliness is because all of the new productivity possibilities it has brought. In my research, what I see, it's one of the big barriers to social connection is just the pace and amount of work and so people just don't have enough time to even go to lunch with someone.

“When they don't have any time, there's this constant pressure for like using every second to its maximum potential and I think because now we can work 24 hours a day and we work across the world and we have systems [like] AI [that] can compute stuff and do things even faster, it's like this whirlwind, and so I think that's crowded out what we consider almost unproductive time, which is actually talking to people.”

“It's because when we talk to people in an open-ended manner — the old way before we had a scale like this was you'd try to get an interview with somebody and try to actually get them to open up to you, usually a complete stranger.

“But eventually, people did like to talk and they would say things like, ‘I feel invisible and, or I feel like nobody really notices me. Nobody knows who I am.’ And then in terms of having your back, sometimes what people are looking for in terms of social connection, it's not like, ‘Oh, I have somebody to share a joke with’ or ‘I have somebody to go to lunch with.’ It's like, ‘I just want to know I'm not alone in this because things are going to get tough.’”

“First, I would try to evaluate your particular situation to understand why you think you're lonely. So, are you new in the job? I always say to people, when you're new, you get like six months to a year, you know how you have like that long to write your thank you notes after a wedding? Well, you've got six months to a year to tell everybody in your organization that you're new and you'd love a 15-minute coffee with them, virtually or in person. So first of all, sort of think back, like what are the aspects that I think are driving this particular loneliness?

“Maybe it's something about the way your team works. I met with an executive who said, ‘I moved to this new company and nobody puts their camera on during our meetings and I find it very strange.’ And so maybe that's a conversation you can have with your team and say, ‘Hey, can we set some norms where at least once a week we turn our cameras on so we can see each other?’

“You’ve got to do a little bit of diagnosis on your situation. But there are a lot of things that you can do and I would say the overall advice I would give to any individual is that don't think about this like it's your particular problem, like you're the one who's unlikable or has poor social skills or is just too introverted. Look at those statistics. You're not alone. One in five of your colleagues is probably feeling this way too. So don't think about this as just your problem.

“Second of all, know that people are usually much more receptive than we anticipate. In fact, we found that people are very receptive to social overtures. They really tend to respond very positively. And even just having a short conversation with someone not only helps you and you feel more connected and happier, but it actually usually helps the other person too. So you can also think about the outreach that you make, not being just for you, but to help other people in the organization, which hopefully will also give you some more motivation.”