One of the most disturbing trends of the last few years is that employee loneliness is costing your business more than you may realize!
Personally, I never thought about loneliness affecting workplace productivity. However, recent studies show a correlation between burnout, loneliness, and reduced employee productivity.
A recent Harvard Business Review article claims almost 50% of people are often or always exhausted at work. The more exhausted people are, the lonelier they feel. The lonelier people feel, the more disengaged they become at work. The more disengaged people become, the more their productivity suffers!
So, there is a chain reaction where increased exhaustion results in increased feelings of loneliness, resulting in reduced engagement and productivity.
Here’s the vicious part of the cycle: increased feelings of loneliness directly affect feelings of exhaustion. The lonelier someone feels, the more they are likely to suffer from workplace exhaustion, and the more exhausted they feel, the lonelier they feel!
The result is disengagement skyrockets while productivity plummets.
Yikes!
The Cause of Loneliness
So, what is causing this loneliness epidemic?
One significant cause of loneliness is those nasty screens to which we are all addicted. Computer screens. iPad screens. Phone screens. Television screens. People are spending more and more time disconnected from each other because they have their noses stuck in a screen for nearly 4 hours a day, up a staggering 53% from just six years ago!
The second cause of increased loneliness is the COVID pandemic. People haven’t been allowed to connect. No in-person weddings or funerals. No sporting events. Limited eating out in restaurants. Laid-off workforces. Employees are working remotely from home connected via Zoom.
Limited to no human connection drives significant increases in feelings of loneliness.
The Workplace Treatment for Loneliness
Businesses that want to survive and thrive need to fight the plague of employee loneliness.
The Harvard Business Review article suggests leaders take these three steps to minimize the impact of employee loneliness.
1) Promote a workplace culture of inclusion and empathy.
This should come as no big surprise. Workplaces characterized by caring, supportive relationships lead to greater connectivity among employees.
2) Encourage employees throughout the organization to build developmental networks.
Companies purposeful about connecting employees in supportive networks of coaches, mentors, and peers experience higher levels of social connection.
3) Celebrate collective successes.
Companies that take the time to celebrate individual and collective success increase employees’ sense of belonging and connectedness.
Taken together, these three actions will increase the feeling of employee connectedness, reducing feelings of loneliness.
These are good steps to take as leaders and business owners, but we know there is another important aspect of loneliness that we should address as Christian leaders.
The Ultimate Cure for Loneliness
Although helpful to have meaningful connections at work, these relationships come and go. People get promoted and move to other roles. They change jobs altogether. They move to new cities. They retire!
People drop out of our lives all the time. Sure, we promise ourselves we’ll keep in touch, but personal experience tells me that doesn’t happen. Unless those relationships are replaced, loneliness sets in.
The one relationship we can count on throughout our lives is our relationship with God. God sees us, knows us, hears us, and loves us at the deepest level possible.
God Sees Us
We all have a desire to be seen. We want people to see us as individuals, to know that we are not insignificant or irrelevant. We want people to see and appreciate our value!
“The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7b).
God Knows Us
The core of any relationship is being known for who we are. God knows our past, present, and future. With God, there is no fear of judgment or rejection because of who we are.
“O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar” (Psalm 139:1-2).
God Hears Us
We all want to be heard, to know that the expressions of our hearts matter. God promised that when we come to Him, He hears us.
“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 John 5:14).
God Loves Us
Our most profound relational need is to love and be loved. As wonderful as it is to experience love for parents, a spouse, or children, it pales compared to God’s love for us. God is the essence of love!
“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16).
What Can You Do?
Every workplace can adopt the steps suggested in the HBR article to reduce workplace loneliness.
Purposefully developing relational connections among employees will help reduce loneliness and the resulting impact on productivity.
However, those actions are only a starting point. They treat the symptoms, not the real underlying cause of loneliness. You see, there is a God-sized hole in our hearts that only He can fill. Only God can eliminate the loneliness and fill that hole in our hearts because only He sees us, knows us, hears us, and has loved us from before we were born until we meet Him again in heaven.
If you want to defeat loneliness in your workplace, you need to help people establish a personal relationship with God. Our relationship with God will endure no matter what we face in life!
More Articles
I have written several articles on interpersonal relationships. You can find them by typing “Interpersonal Relationships” in the search bar. Meanwhile, here are several of my favorites.
- #425: Is Expressing Your Faith in the Workplace a High-Wire Balancing Act?
- #328: Our Employees Need Doctors More Than Judges!
- #310: From A Somebody To A Nobody and Back Again
- #308: Is All This Division and Animosity Necessary?
- #270: Acceptance and Approval Are NOT the Same Things!
Join the Conversation
As always, questions and comments are welcome. Have you encountered an increase in loneliness and the resulting impact on productivity in your workplace? If so, how did you deal with it?
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Category: Relationships | Interpersonal Relationships
Ron- I just finished reading Benjamin and Jenna Storey’s book “Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment.” It explores Montaigne and Rousseau’s secular approach to happiness vs Pascal’s argument for why we need God to find happiness. The book also explores Tocqueville’s observations of Americans, how busy we are (even back then) and always chasing happiness, but never quite finding it. The authors don’t mention their Catholic faith, but they seem to point toward the answer to our loneliness and restlessness: God. Your piece today reminded me of the book.
Wow John, you really dig into some heavy reading! I’ll put this book on my “to read” list! Thanks!