#67 - It's getting lonely at work

​

How's this for a chart, everybody?

​

🤯🤯🤯

The problem isn't just that the compounded effects of poor social connection are so dangerous. It’s that we find ourselves in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness, the effects of which, many believe, help explain social issues that range from teen anxiety, to violence, to increased polarization.

Meantime, we spend the vast majority of our waking hours "at work", which has also become more isolated. This week we explore how it's become a more lonely space, and we ask what we can do to make it less so:

As we curated this issue, we were reminded that we -- humans -- are fundamentally dependent on one another. This quote, which we featured back in issue # 14, captures it well: "The crux of the problem lies in the fact that human well-being is not achieved alone: our psychological health is grounded in attachment to and acceptance by others. We are, essentially, social animals."

It's worth being explicit then that goal of this newsletter is to explore the way work is changing -- with you. And it is nothing if not an expression of the belief that, together, we can make work better than it is today.

So thank you for reading and exploring with us.

Aki + Usman

P.S. Our 14-minute podcast episode of issue #66, "Things Fall Apart, the Center Cannot Hold at Work", is right here​

#1

​

#RemoteWorkTax # # #

Working from home isn't all sunshine and roses. On the contrary, there are downsides, and we like to think of them as remote work "taxes". Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the phrase "psychological safety", explains one of them: the added complexity which remote work adds to communication; and the need, therefore, to go out of our way to communicate more often, more openly, with more intent, and across different channels. ✅

But another tax of working remotely is that we lose out on some of the friendship, connection and belonging off of which we tend to thrive. We know from research that even our small, in-person interactions with others compound in healthy ways.

But here's the thing: we also can't ignore remote work's incredible staying power. Clearly, people want to spend at least part of their week working from home. Which makes this a "yes, and" proposition: yes, remote work will persist in some way, shape or form. And the onus is on organizations to find ways to provide connection and belonging to their teams -- in a remote or hybrid environment.

Easy to do? No. Required? Absolutely.

And our next Story is an example of what we'll see more of, if organizations can't find a way to make up for the deficit of connection at work:

#2

#Loneliness #Connection #Vocab #WorkAround

Wow. There is a lot in this one, folks. 🤩 Let's get into it.

📌 First off -- what is body doubling? Well, working from home has become the new normal, but not getting to see, connect or interact with colleagues in-person has also been challenging for many of us. Body doubling -- working remotely but in the shared digital presence of others, is in part a reaction to this.

📌 It's also a great example of what we cite time and again in this newsletter: people or workers adapting, and reimagining work; people working around the system when they don't get what they want from it. People "workaround" because organizations don't provide them with what they want and need. In other words, because organizations are failing to also reimagine work. Per the article:

📌 So technology enables this workaround and will make future ones even easier. The founder/s of TikTok didn't design the app to enable body doubling. But people -- as they so often do -- have found a way to use the tool to meet their need: in this case, to create the connection they're not getting at work.

#3

​

#Loneliness #Relationships #Solves

The original plan for our 3rd Story was to feature a report on loneliness by Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General. Its findings are sobering: every population-wide measure of social well-being -- friendship, social engagement, companionship, you name it -- is worse now than it was 20 years ago. The report is also refreshingly focused on explaining loneliness and well-being at work, in particular. It is excellent, and important, and we share it here so you can have his diagnosis.

But ultimately, we want to feature Dr. Murthy's prescription: a letter which he and his wife wrote to his children, and published in his book, "Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection". The snippet above is the close, but the entire letter is worth reading, because so much of what it articulates is needed; and needed now at work, too:

Thanks for reading. 🙏🏻