As employee loneliness increases, workplace friendships may be more important than ever, and a key driver of retaining staff. How can HR support workplace connections?
Employers are now at a turning point: either take loneliness and the importance of facilitating workplace friendships seriously, or pay the price in rising levels of employee disengagement and falling retention rates.
Recent reports seem to illustrate the point. KPMG’s Friends at Work 2.0 survey revealed that a huge 45% of employees now report feeling ‘isolated and alone’ at work at least some of the time, up from around a quarter last year.
As Jonathan Thorp, chief executive of workplace connection consultancy Quantum Connections, points out, the jump is striking. It mirrors wider concern that loneliness is becoming a serious public health issue.
“It isn’t just a morale issue, it’s a wellbeing alarm,” he says. “Work is where adults spend half their waking lives, which makes the office ground zero for either worsening or healing the epidemic.”
Thanks to the widespread move to remote and hybrid work, opportunities for casual but important interactions that help build relationships formerly formed in corridors or coffee breaks have largely disappeared. But as Thorp points out, loneliness was on the rise even before the Covid-19 pandemic led to a shift in work models.
“Frequent turnover and reshuffling teams all damage the speed at which trust is built,” he explains. “A culture of hyper-productivity can stunt people’s ability to connect, and leaves little place for social time. Digital tools, while making us constantly reachable, can also make relationships simply feel transactional.”
In other words, Thorp believes: “We’ve engineered human connection out of our lives and then wonder why we feel lonely. Hybrid and remote work didn’t create the gap, they simply exposed it.”
The cost of loneliness
A report published by the Harvard Business Review entitled Loneliness is Reshaping your Workplace, reveals the harmful impact of this situation. “Loneliness has been linked to increased burnout, declining productivity and rising attrition, costing US companies up to $154bn (£117bn) a year,” it says. “Loneliness isn’t just a personal issue, it’s an invisible systemic force quietly eroding trust, creativity and performance, driven by a broader breakdown of connection.”
Laura Fink, people and culture director at HR software provider HiBob, agrees. “When people feel unseen, they stop contributing as much, disengage and risk burnout,” she says. “For employers, that means lost productivity and higher attrition.”
Workplace relationships now play a more important role than ever before. For example, KPMG found that 78% of its survey respondents linked workplace friendships with positive mental health. Some 81% saw it as essential to their emotional wellbeing. A further 87% considered ‘friendship-enabling’ cultures as crucial to their decision to stay or not.
Alex Pusenjak, vice president of people and culture at order management system provider, Fluent Commerce, is not surprised. “Workplace friendships aren’t just important, they continue to be the critical layer of organisational glue that technology and process automation have largely stripped away,” he says. “In a distributed world, these personal connections are the primary reason an employee logs on and stays committed beyond the paycheque.”