Businesses that believe the best vaccine for the pandemic is simply returning to in-person work will be disappointed, according to organizational psychologist Constance Hadley.
The surgeon general of the United States has declared loneliness a lethal pandemic, equating it to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Hadley studies one environment where a loneliness outbreak seems to be spreading: the workplace.
That COVID-19 worsened loneliness—with working from home and Zoom—is perhaps no surprise. But workplaces could be hothouses of loneliness before the virus forced employees home, according to research by Hadley, a lecturer in management and organization at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
“Remember the definition of loneliness: it’s the feedback from the environment that creates loneliness.”
“Going back to my dissertation at Harvard, I was studying people with emotionally, psychologically hard jobs, like emergency room physicians, social workers, and special education teachers,” she says. “How the heck do you survive without burning out? It was the social support they got from their colleagues at work. That is the unacknowledged grease that keeps a lot of these organizations going.”
When she found many people lacking such collegial support, she turned her attention to loneliness. Others have quantified its economic damage: $154 billion annually “in stress-related absenteeism alone,” according to Cigna.
In his report, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy agreed that pre-COVID trends fostered loneliness, including plunging rates of marriage, childbearing, and churchgoing, with racially, ethnically, economically, and sexually marginalized Americans especially at risk. “Recent surveys,” Murthy wrote, “have found that approximately half of US adults report experiencing loneliness, with some of the highest rates among young adults.”
Hadley discussed her research and what it suggests for combating loneliness—and the best ways of bringing workers back to the office:
The post Expert: In-person work alone won’t fix loneliness appeared first on Futurity.
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