Meetings, Hybrid Offices & Loneliness at Work
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared a public health crisis last year over loneliness and lack of connection. He asked workplaces, among many stakeholders, to make social connection a priority. Because of the number of hours people spend working, the workplace is a critical place for loneliness to be addressed. The toll of loneliness can be seen in performance and health outcomes. For example, lonely workers take twice as many sick days.
Some recent findings worth considering concern workplace loneliness and how remote/hybrid/in-office setups impact loneliness.
Findings:
Being in many meetings can make people feel lonelier. Employees with meeting-heavy schedules were twice as likely to say they were ‘very lonely’ as those with fewer meetings. “Many organizations have replaced organic interactions with overscheduled time, particularly for remote and hybrid employees,” says Emily Killham, Senior Director, People Analytics, Research and Insights at Perceptyx. She continues, “Employees tell us that it’s not having the desired effect. Simply being in a meeting with others doesn’t create connection or relationships.”
Frequent, informal interactions count. “We used to think loneliness has to be overcome by developing meaningful relationships and having that degree of intimacy,” says Sarah Wright, an associate professor at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who studies worker loneliness. “More and more, though, we’re seeing it’s these day-to-day weak ties and frequency of [interactions] with people that matter.”
Workers in the three modalities: fully remote, hybrid and fully in-office have all reported increased loneliness. That said, Worklytics has determined that “Coming in once a month provides a significant boost in ties; two or three times a month adds a little more. Once or twice a week results in a smaller increase, though, and working in-person four or five days a week makes almost no difference.”
With this in mind, here are some ideas for how to apply these findings.
Actions for teams:
Less meetings! Run a meeting intervention and work as a team to evaluate every standing meeting on calendars. My professor Bob Sutton’s team ran a meeting intervention with a team of 60 and gave the team back 4 hours a month. Gold!
Come into the office— but not every day. Where possible, encourage teams to coordinate in-office times for serendipitous interactions. Remember, even if you’re not co-located with your direct team members, cultivating those weak ties will still boost your connectedness. Seek out your cross-functional partners and sync office convergence with them. Even a few times a month is a boost!
For fully remote teams, try quarterly, in-person gatherings. This requires a certain funding level, but if you are able to do it, be sure to leave lots of room for serendipitous connections. Nothing worse than sitting in a conference room together looking at slides.
Actions for individuals:
Phone calls. Yes, the old-fashioned voice call. I recognize this might be controversial, especially among Gen Z and some Gen Y who vastly prefer texting. The voice call provides more context and texture to communications than text-based communications. It creates a higher quality of connection. It can cut down on the back-and-forth of emails and tends to be a lighter lift than video calls. Pro tip: I text my Gen Z colleagues before I call.
Make video calls easier for your brain. If video calls are a must, make their cognitive load lighter by shrinking your video window and using an external keyboard to give you more distance and physical flexibility. See more tips here.
Actions for leaders:
Be thoughtful about geographic locations for teams and time zone overlap. Can you limit project work to two major geographic zones? Spanning 3 zones (Americas, Asia, and EMEA) for day-to-day work is a recipe for too many meetings and burnout.
Create rituals to check in on individuals and teams. I have found the Roses and Thorns exercise to be impactful, where everyone talks about one thing they’re looking forward to or celebrating in their lives and one not-so-great thing. If you track it over time, and hear a consistent thorn coming up, it can be a topic to follow up on in a 1:1 with “What is one thing I can do to support you?
About ModelExpand
ModelExpand is a strategic workplace advisory firm that helps companies put their ideals into action. We partner with organizations to implement, operationalize, and scale their Culture and People initiatives in a way that improves performance across the organization. The ModelExpand team is composed of people from all walks of life. The diversity of the team’s lived experiences, robust industry knowledge, and research acumen fuel ModelExpand’s innovative and tailored solutions. ModelExpand’s work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes and CultureAmp.
