A Human Approach to Leveling Out The Loneliness Crisis
Paradoxically, in a world of unlimited digital connectivity, we still experience loneliness and feelings of profound disconnection. In a landmark Loneliness and the Workplace Study conducted by Cigna, 61% of those surveyed reported feeling lonely. Not surprisingly, this leads to adverse implications for mental health and physical health, being synonymous with unhealthy practices such as obesity and smoking a pack of cigarettes daily. Certainly, with the Covid-19 pandemic and extended quarantine, these levels of loneliness make sense. Here’s the kicker: this study was conducted in 2018 and 2019, long before anyone was sheltering in place. Given how much the current global pandemic has affected our ability to connect and feel a sense of belonging, it’s frightening to imagine how many more people are experiencing loneliness right now.
Yet, the impacts of loneliness are even more far-reaching. Humans are pack animals; It goes against human nature to be isolated, experiencing life through a screen, limited in our mobility with the mandate to physically distance. Of the 330 million Americans who endorsed being lonely or very lonely, these people also reported dramatically reduced productivity, greater absenteeism, higher risk of turnover, and lower quality of work, demonstrating a direct link between the power of personal experience and business profitability.
In this new age of Zoom happy hours, weddings, and funerals, attended from dining room table desks, how can you ensure that your employees stay connected and maintain their well-being? How can you support your people thriving, not merely surviving, in these uncommon times?
The Resonance of Resilience
For decades, resilience has been a revered quality in leadership and in life and is also roundly misunderstood. Faulty beliefs about resilience being equated with “bouncing back” or recovering quickly and easily from challenges (we’d respectfully request that you never equate these aspects to resilience again) have muddied the water of appreciating the true power of this human trait.
So, just what is resilience exactly, you ask? Great question.
After interviewing hundreds of leaders and collecting thousands of elements of qualitative data on what allowed people to effectively face challenge, change, and complexity, at Resilience Leadership, we’ve defined resilience as this: the ability to effectively address challenge in a manner that allows us to be enhanced by the experience, not diminished.
In these trying, tumultuous, and also transformative times, resilience has become the premiere human operating system to address the magnitude and chronicity of the challenges we face collectively. Certainly, challenge is not unique to the pandemic: relentless work hours, restructuring, mergers and acquisition, and 24-7 technology that blurred the lines between home and office existed long before Covid-19 became a household name. Yet, none of these challenges have dissipated. In fact, like a layer cake that's become so dense, it's inedible, layered on top are now the additional experiences of isolation, loneliness, ambiguity, and overwhelm. This characterizes the remote work-home lives of so many.
There is good news and bad news. The quality of resilience is present in high levels in only a third of full-time workers. The good news is resilience, like a muscle, can be developed. The bad news is that without direct training or direction, only 37% of employees have cultivated the levels of resilience necessary to effectively address the magnitude of difficulty that exists in our current global economic, health, and financial environment.
Reduced resilience is linked to decreased job performance and satisfaction, higher turnover rates, and even negative coping strategies. Put simply, given the gravity of the current loneliness crisis, two-thirds of employees lack the resilience skills, knowledge, and abilities to combat loneliness, which dramatically impacts their mental and physical health, as well as the quality of their work output.
Reframing Resilience
The importance of reframing challenges as an opportunity for growth and development is an essential organizational shift. Great leaders and great companies tend to view adversity as a chance to evolve, adapt, and uplevel, rather than something to be feared and avoided. They effectively navigate the paradox of “crisis” by approaching issues with a balanced approach to both the inherent risk and opportunity that exists, careful not to over privilege or under prioritize either aspect.
This attitude trickles down throughout your workforce and breeds a culture of creativity and innovation in employees. When challenges are recast as an expected part of the journey, not as an exception to the rule, this reframe produces a greater sense of cohesion around facing shared challenges, that we’re all in this together, rather than employees feeling isolated in slaying the issues individually.
How to Promote a Connected Work Culture
The key to maintaining a positive professional culture and fostering connectivity to fend off loneliness in the workplace is more about micro-corrections and listening.
The key to maintaining a positive, professional culture and fostering connectivity to fend off loneliness is more about micro-corrections than it is about large sweeping changes, which can often feel disingenuous or even tone-deaf to employees who work further downstream from management and C-level employees. For example, instead of sending out a mass newsletter announcing your organization's commitment to a connected, positive work environment, try communicating directly with your employees on an individual or department basis. Every employee is unique, and while your creative department may find connectivity in weekly open check-in’s, your accounting department may feel awkward sharing that vulnerability with their coworkers.
Rather than focusing on their corporate communications, organizations that have created the most meaningful connections have indexed listening to employees’ experience. Companies that have endeavored to listen thoughtfully have deployed leaders to listen within open forums, which institutionalize an environment of trust. The next time you hold a corporate forum, consider approaching the employee experience in the following manner:
Twenty percent of time spent on conveying organizational messaging
Forty percent of the time soliciting and answering employees questions and concerns
Twenty percent of the time spent asking employees how the organization can help them
One Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) shared with me that when they learned that employees were stealing toilet paper from the facility due to the scarcity of bath tissue, rather than punishing employees in the midst of the pandemic, they took this report as a call to action and procured toilet paper to give away to all employees in need.
Similarly, many companies have taken a dual approach in supporting employees by both thinking globally about employees’ needs and acting locally, investing in the local communities' needs in which their employee populations live and work by supporting local hospitals, delivering water, and investing in sanitation.
Rebooting Resilience for Your People
Not sure where to begin or how to connect more deeply with your people? When in doubt, bring your employees into the conversation. Ask them what would help them feel more creative, secure, inspired, supported, and most importantly, connected, and build a plan with a multi-pronged approach to meet the needs of diverse constituencies.
Remember the mentality that “We is greater than me.” Invite your people not simply to provide suggestions but to participate in the decision-making process as it pertains to your enterprise’s wellbeing initiatives.
- Dr. Taryn Marie
To learn more about how to fortify your corporate culture with resilience, give these additional resources a read: Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People, and Resilience Is A Team Sport.
If you would like support & guidance on how to implement these important facets of a connected workforce based on a unique, proven, and hands-on approach that is rooted in over 15 years of dedicated resilience research, contact us here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal is one of the leading authorities on Resilience Leadership. Her work is resonating throughout the Fortune 500. As she describes it, "We are a world in which our human experience is defined by facing challenge, change, and complexity on an order of magnitude to which prior generations have not been exposed. The concept of resilience is built on the very ideology that we have the capacity to face hard things: trauma, loss, misfortune, and the like, and come out on the other side; not diminished, but instead, enhanced."
