Social isolation and loneliness impact many facets of life — home, family, friendships and more — and they are not always temporary feelings. Similar to other conditions, loneliness can become chronic. And in an increasingly remote-first world, workers have become more prone to the condition.
Explore the impact of loneliness on workforce productivity, including how worker loneliness can impact organizations and new strategies to help.
The impact of loneliness on the workforce
Work can become very lonely. More than half of today’s entry-level workers feel like they don’t have anyone to turn to on the job, and 56% of senior executives feel there’s no one they can talk to. These feelings can impact workforce productivity. Notably, feelings of loneliness contribute to elevated absenteeism and reduced performance.
Absenteeism
When you’re wrestling with loneliness, it can be difficult to engage in everyday life — no matter how much you might want to. To this end, research has looked at the relationship between employee loneliness and absenteeism. In fact, Cigna found that employees who feel lonely or socially isolated miss work twice as often as non-lonely workers. This adds up to 9.5 days! Profound loneliness is draining, so lonely employees miss more days of work because of stress.
Lower performance
Loneliness can impact mental and emotional health, so managing these conditions while also staying committed to work responsibilities presents a challenge. Workers who are lonely have lower motivation levels, so their effort and performance ratings also suffer.
And it’s not just job competency. When someone is struggling, everyone — not just supervisors — notices. Coworkers perceive lonely employees as distant and less approachable, whether work is done in an office or virtually. This has a domino effect, causing a lack of workplace relationships and lack of inclusion in the business.
How to combat loneliness and boost workforce productivity
The good news is that organizations can reduce worker loneliness. Helping team members commit to the organization and their coworkers depends on the type of workplace you cultivate. These strategies can make a difference in your workforce productivity:
Improve workplace emotional culture
“Workplace culture” amounts to more than what builds belonging in your organization. You also have to factor in the emotional culture you create and promote. That means certain norms and values guide which emotions are OK to express in the work domain.
Your organization might fall into one of two emotional culture extremes: companionate or hostile. Hostility fosters irritation, frustration, anger and annoyance, strengthening loneliness and weakening organizational commitment. The most extreme manifestation is a toxic work environment in which negative, antagonistic or bullying behavior is baked into the culture. In a toxic work environment, employees are stressed, communication is limited, blame culture is rife and people are rewarded (tacitly or explicitly) for unethical, harmful or nasty attitudes and actions.
But there’s a more positive way forward with a culture of companionate love, which fosters affection, caring, compassion and tenderness among employees. This type of culture reduces loneliness and strengthens organizational commitment.
Encourage connections
Making friends at work isn’t the most important thing, but developing some form of connection with colleagues can make a difference. In fact, interacting with others daily at work results in a UCLA-3 score that averages 20 points lower compared to those who don’t interact.
This is where the benefits of team building can shine. When you implement activities and events designed to help workers engage, it helps your team. Instead of waning commitment and motivation, loneliness and isolation decrease while productivity and engagement increase.
Foster interdependence
Team building can only go so far if you don’t take the lessons with you and use them to grow. To create a workplace in which employees feel included instead of lonely, you need to cultivate an environment where people need each other. This type of environment includes:
- Shared mission, values and goals
- Consistent, safe interactions
- Transparent processes
Siloed work with tasks that jockey from one person to the next can be isolating. Instead, prioritize collaboration and social support by designing for interactivity, collaboration and knowledge-sharing between individuals and teams.
Improve your workforce productivity
Are any of your workers lagging behind? Think about the why before taking action. Lonely employees may miss more work and perform below their potential, but understanding that their loneliness is the root cause can direct your efforts to fix these problems.
Pyx Health can supplement your efforts. We combine compassion-centered care and technology to reach people on their terms. The Pyx Health app provides access to health resources, interactive activities and evidence-based screening to help users cope with loneliness. Plus, our care team members — called ANDYs — offer empathetic companionship and connect users to community resources.
Put your workers on the right path. Download our infographic to explore the real face of loneliness.
