When I was loneliest at work, no one would have guessed it. I was crazy busy. I got along with my colleagues. I came into the office when I was expected to do so and, when I traveled, I saw lots of other people. And if you had asked me if I was lonely I probably would have laughed.

But I absolutely was. I didn’t feel connected. While I could always bitch about the vagaries of work life to someone, when I struggled, there was no one I trusted. If there was something going on in my personal life that seeped into my professional one, I put on a face and soldiered on. Unsurprisingly, I ultimately left.

The November-December 2024 issue of the Harvard Business Review explores the general malaise in many workplaces right now and is filled with articles that explain why we often feel disconnected at work. There’s an article about Why Employees Quit. There’s another on how to truly listen to employee feedback, and another on how to listen to employees the way companies listen to their customers.

But in this week’s issue of Comes Now, we’re going to discuss the beautiful cover article [paywall], entitled We’re Still Lonely at Work, co-authored by Constance Noonan Hadley, the Founder of the Institute for Life at Work and Sarah L. Wright, an associate professor at the University of Canterbury. At the end I’ll dive into how its findings are particularly relevant to women lawyers.

The Statistics

As the HBR article discusses, the 2024 State of the Global Workplace report by Gallup finds that one in five employees worldwide currently feels lonely at work.

This issue is titled “Why We’re Still Lonely at Work”—because loneliness at work is not new. It’s not because of lingering effects of the pandemic and it’s not a product of working remotely. Even back in 2019 HBR published a study that found lawyers were the loneliness professionals. In fact, around the same time of the 2019 HBR study, Law.com wrote an article on loneliness in the profession. It described a profession that has both high levels of stress and also a lack of collegiality and mutual support. It talked about a culture that focuses on billable hours and revenue generation to the exclusion of everything else.

But it also talked about some unique aspects of the legal profession that can make its members feel alone. Some lawyers enter the profession with idealized notions of helping people and making society better, but then experience an existential crisis when they find themselves “in these jobs that are at times mind-numbing, that are not intellectually stimulating, they’re representing clients at some times that they’re morally adverse to.” And even if the work feels meaningful, sometimes lawyers feel that their individual contributions are not.

These feelings are compounded when lawyers feel like they are the only ones who are struggling. When you’re working long hours focused singularly on a task, it’s easy to get in your head.

The HBR Article

The authors of the HBR article studied 1,000 knowledge workers employed by companies in the United States in more than 20 industries, including financial services, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing. Using a measurement tool they developed called the Work Loneliness Scale, they screened people for loneliness to ensure they had at least 200 people in each of three categories: highly lonely, moderately lonely, and minimally lonely. They also ensured that they recruited people from all levels of hierarchy within organizations, and who had a variety of work arrangements, from fully in-person to hybrid to fully remote.

Myths about workplace loneliness

The article starts by dispelling four myths we have about loneliness in the workplace. Myth 1 was, of course, that loneliness can be solved by in-person work. So many managers—and people from my generation and older—believe that loneliness in today’s workplace is simply a product of not being in the office. It turns out the answer is more complex than that. While the authors found that fully remote employees were lonelier than those who worked fully on-site or in a hybrid capacity, other factors—such as the number of company-sponsored social opportunities offered and the person’s level of extroversion—were more significant drivers of loneliness. Perhaps more importantly, they found that whether someone works in the office five days a week or just two days makes no difference when it comes to the level of loneliness. In fact, the loneliest participants reported conducting 47% of their prior work’s interactions in person.

Myth 2 was that teams will solve loneliness. In fact, the researchers found that being on a team can make people feel even lonelier when the closeness they expect does not come to pass. The key to remedying loneliness is cultivating mutual respect and interdependence among employees—and that can be done without placing someone on a team.

Myth 3 was that lonely employees are simply needier socially than others at work. This fallacy is also often repeated by older generations about younger ones. (“They’re just weak.”) But we all have a need to belong. When the researchers measured each participant’s need to belong at work, they found that need was not correlated with the level of loneliness they were experiencing.

Myth 4 was that loneliness is a personal problem rather than an organizational one. The researchers actually found that many employees who reported being currently lonely in their workplace also reported that they had found social connection in previous workplaces.

How to fix loneliness at work

The researchers found that only 18% of the highly lonely employees said that their managers were doing enough to support their relationship with others at work. The researchers therefore made several suggestions for employers to implement to make employees feel less lonely.

The first suggestion was to measure loneliness by conducting anonymous surveys. (This is, of course, difficult to do in smaller workplaces.) They didn’t just suggest asking employees “Are you lonely?” Instead, they came up with questions designed to determine whether the factors that affect loneliness were present:

The second thing the researchers recommended was designing more “slack” in an organization’s workflow. “If employees are constantly working at their maximum capacity, they won’t be able to invest time in pivotal interactions that generate trust, mutual knowledge, and affinity.” p.73

The next recommendation was to create a culture of connection. Unsurprisingly, many of the respondents who reported being lonely at work described their work environment as “toxic,” “hostile,” and “biased.” The researchers reported that they heard about “patterns of lying, malicious gossip, cliques, and prejudiced behaviors.” It probably goes without saying that if you work at a place where you don’t feel your co-workers have your back, you will experience loneliness.

The researchers then recommended that employers “build socializing into the rhythm of work.” Embedding such activities into the regular flow of work “signals their importance and increases the chances that everyone will participate.” p.76 You might think that the only people who would participate in such activities would be people of a certain age or tendency towards extroversion. The researchers found that not to be the case, particularlly where employers keep those activities simple, such as free communal lunches, meetings that devote time to personal chitchat, and happy hours. The researchers also recommended that employers maximize each work mode (in-office, hybrid, or emote) for connection.

The authors of the study acknowledged that some people are reluctant to participate in social activities at work, even if they are lonely. They suggested that such resistance could be overcome by actively recruiting people to participate in activities of the type they would be most likely to participate.

Concluding Thoughts

I loved the fact that HBR put loneliness at work on the cover of its magazine. People don’t tend to admit that they’re lonely because there is stigma attached to loneliness. The article does a good job of reframing loneliness as an organizational problem rather than a person one. Workplaces should care about loneliness because it is indicative of a lack of trust—which not only affects the health of the organization but also makes it more likely that good people are going to leave.

But while I understand the need and desire to offer employers several options for ensuring that employees don’t experience so much loneliness, to me the most important solution was “create a culture of connection.” It’s the most important because, without a culture of connection, no amount of social activities are going to matter. That’s certainly true for women lawyers: if we’re working in a sexist environment, participating in social activities will make us more uncomfortable rather than less. And you certainly don’t want to socialize with people who don’t respect you or, worse, have been hostile towards you.

In addition, I worry about solutions that emphasize socializing outside the workplace. That can be difficult for women who tend to have more caretaking responsibilities than men. Granted, the researchers acknowledge that opportunities for connection can occur even in a fully remote workplace but, in a mixed workplace where some people come into the office but others do not, having activities that appeal primarily to those people who come into the office could further isolate those who are already lonely and magnify any proximity bias. Both of those things hurt women more than men.

Finally, as the researchers recognized, unless an employer builds slack into the workflow, social activities will not be warmly embraced. I’ve certainly worked at places where I resented being asked to attend an office happy hour when I was working more than 12-hour days. When you work in the legal profession you will unquestionably have times where you won’t have the space to accommodate social activities with your co-workers, but that shouldn’t be the case all the time.

I respectfully suggest that, when we fix some of the other things we talk about in this newsletter, the epidemic of loneliness may disappear along with them.

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