Not only does loneliness shave 15 years off of a person’s life, but employee productivity, loyalty, collaboration, and engagement decrease when employees feel this way.

Loneliness has been silently and steadily growing for decades. In 1985, half of the workforce indicated that they had a close friend at work. By 2004, less than a third did. The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on the issue. As work cycles spin faster, remote work becomes more pronounced, advances in technology continue, and the loneliest generation (Gen Z) floods the workforce, workplace loneliness soon will turn from a simmer to a boil.

Gathering back in the office won’t solve loneliness because loneliness isn’t the absence of people but rather the absence of quality connections. Workers can be surrounded by teammates and still feel isolated and alone. Workplace loneliness is defined by the distress caused by the perceived inadequacy of a quality connection to teammates, leaders, the organization, and work itself. A remote worker who feels connected to their work and team can experience less loneliness than someone who works in an office surrounded by people but lacks quality connections.

Due to the growth and prominence of loneliness, it should be as important to teammates, managers, directors, and CEOs as it is to therapists. Loneliness isn’t shameful. It’s a signal that we need each other. Humanity’s strength has always been in our ability to work together. We build together. We grow together. We thrive together.

Loneliness is increasing—but that means it’s malleable. What increases can also decrease. One way to decrease loneliness is through learning.

Learning starves loneliness.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to be angry when you are grateful. If your brain is searching for possibilities, generosity, and value (gratitude), then it’s not searching for what’s unfair, missing, or wrong (anger). Similarly, it’s difficult to be lonely when learning. When our brain is enraptured in learning something new, loneliness is absent.

Learning lessens loneliness by giving hope. Sixty-six percent of professionals feel more successful and confident and less burned out after they’ve spent time learning. Albert Einstein famously said, “Once you stop learning, you start dying.” Learning gives us a sense that tomorrow can be better than today. As a keynote speaker and workplace loneliness author, I have experienced firsthand how learning lifts the human spirit.

Learning lessens loneliness by providing a sense of belonging. If our ancestors who roamed the plains didn’t learn a skill or perspective that was valuable to the collective tribe, then they were at risk of being excluded and isolated. Freeloaders create drag on tribes. Learning provides reassurance to individuals that they can or will contribute value. And it provides reassurance to the tribe that you are improving yourself for the benefit of the group. Modern work teams function this way to this day.

Learning connects people and lessens loneliness. When we come together as a team to learn about each other, a client’s problem, or ways to improve our abilities, we are communicating that we don’t know something or that there is room for improvement, but we can learn, grow, and succeed together. Learning also leads to social connections. When you learn something, you often share what you learned with someone else. We learn to play an instrument to one day share a song with a loved one. We learn a new joke to bring a smile to a friend. We learn how to communicate more effectively to deepen our connection with a spouse. We learn about workplace loneliness to move a team from isolated to all in. After we learn something, we are often eager to share it with the world.

Providing learning experiences via team training, leadership off-sites, or digital courses is an overlooked yet powerful lever to pull to unify a lonely and disconnected team. While the mind feeds, loneliness starves.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

1. Loneliness is an invisible mental health bully disrupting how we work.

Picture this: you step into the middle of the Ultimate Fighting Championship Octagon as 2,600 fans scream your name. You open your arms like the wings of a bird, ushering in the cheers. You’re trying to absorb their energy and confidence before you clash with your menacing opponent. The referee drops her hand and the fight begins. Throwing technique to the wind, your opponent lunges toward you, landing a crushing kick to your abdomen. You’re stunned, but bounce back because you’re a professional fighter and you’re at work.

Have you ever been kicked in the gut and then been expected to actively participate in a team meeting? Though for most working professionals it won’t be a physical blow, participating through physical pain is more familiar to lonely workers than you may think.

Researchers conducted an experiment where participants experienced exclusion from a group. They used an fMRI scanner to look at the participants’ brain activity and discovered that the part of the brain that was activated when being excluded was the same part that responds to physical pain. The sensory fibers in our brains that register physical and emotional pain overlap. That means exclusion, disappointment, bereavement, or loneliness are felt biologically the same as being physically hit. In short, feelings can be just as disruptive as physical ailments.

How could anyone expect a workforce to show up with these ailments? According to our research, 72 percent of global workers experience loneliness monthly, with 55 percent experiencing it weekly. It’s very likely that you or your team are experiencing loneliness and struggling to bring your capable selves to work. It’s as if we are asking workers to fully focus or deliver delightful customer experiences while being physically and mentally assaulted by an invisible bully. Lonely workers are distracted at best, and debilitated at worst.

“If an employee arrived at work with a bleeding appendage, you wouldn’t ask her to get to work. You’d address the injury and assess if she were fit for duty.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that loneliness is devastating workers and their organizations, silently incapacitating many and wreaking havoc on engagement, retention, and overall performance. If an employee arrived at work with a bleeding appendage, you wouldn’t ask her to get to work. You’d address the injury and assess if she were fit for duty. The same level of care should be applied to the social and emotional needs of the team.

This isn’t a “soft” topic—it’s a dire one. In the same way organizations promote physical fitness to help workers improve their well-being, social fitness must also be promoted and practiced.

2. Work is full of loneliness lifelines.

Work is a major source of loneliness. Remote working, switching to a new team, eating lunch while answering emails, or having no one to talk to on an “off” day can all contribute to feeling lonely. Steve Cole, a leading researcher on loneliness and professor of medicine, psychiatry, and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA says, “Lonely people’s brainstems are saying, ‘I need to be ready to be hurt. I need to be vigilant for people taking advantage of me. I need to watch out and take care of myself. I need to let people in only gradually, so they don’t do what they have done before.’”

Lonely people lack trust. They are apprehensive to let others in, and they keep a wide distance in social settings. They put up an imaginary barrier, like the Great Wall of China, which snakes around their entire emotional response system, creating a blockade. The longer someone experiences loneliness, the higher and stronger the walls.

Fortunately, researchers have discovered a “secret door,” allowing someone to get past the wall undetected: purpose. Purpose is a premier loneliness suppressant. Nothing squashes loneliness quite like contributing to a worthwhile goal and feeling a part of something bigger than oneself. A powerful sense of belonging stems from the human desire to utilize one’s strengths to make a contribution that is valued by the team. Being needed reduces the risk of social abandonment, ultimately freeing people to do higher-level work.

“Nothing squashes loneliness quite like contributing to a worthwhile goal and feeling a part of something bigger than oneself.”

Researchers, trying to identify key drivers of social cohesion among thousands of employees, recently discovered that creating opportunities to build shared meaning with colleagues had the biggest effect on moving teams from disconnected to connected. Workers who reported high levels of social support and a strong sense of shared meaning with colleagues were 30 percent more likely to get a raise for superior work. Intent to quit fell by 24 percent. According to other research, Gen Z workers are 2.5 times more likely to stay with their employer for five or more years if they feel their skills are fully utilized with challenging, meaningful work. This is important to note because, before COVID hit, research highlighted that 73 percent of Gen Z workers reported sometimes or always feeling alone.

The healthiest organizations have found a way to concurrently commit to human dignity and performance. They don’t sacrifice the well-being of employees for high performance. They also don’t sacrifice performance to bend to every need of their employees. They strike a balance. When organizations commit to lessen worker loneliness, it improves employee well-being and enhances organization excellence, as lonely workers are seven times more likely to be disengaged at work, five times more likely to miss work, and twice as likely to think about quitting.

3. Reducing loneliness takes less effort than you might think.

Because loneliness is rising, it means it’s malleable, and thus can also decline. According to psychologists, the best way to lessen loneliness is through “prosocial behavior.” Prosocial behaviors are actions of comforting, sharing, helping, or cooperating that are backed by a general concern for the feelings, welfare, and rights of other people. Researchers in China found that leaders who show compassion to their employees can mitigate the negative effects of loneliness and thereby boost creativity. Another study of workers at Coca-Cola’s Madrid headquarters found that leaders were able to reduce feelings of isolation among their team by simply being nice and interacting with others.

Your behavior lessens loneliness—just small, intentional, and routine behaviors. People on the receiving end of prosocial behavior were a whopping 278 percent more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors themselves. The ripple effect of lessening loneliness with prosocial behaviors is gigantic.

“Social creatures have a social muscle that requires social fitness, and every person has the power to improve theirs.”

Loneliness directly conflicts with being human. Social creatures have a social muscle that requires social fitness, and every person has the power to improve theirs. Research shows that simple pro-social behaviors reduce loneliness in as little as a 40 seconds. Having meaningful one-on-one conversations, befriending one person at work, spending five minutes to share something personal before or after a virtual meeting, and trading high-tech for high-touch communications, all help people feel seen. Prosocial behaviors are transformational—and it only takes you. There are subtle shifts you can make to completely change the well-being of your entire team.

4. Be more interruptible.

Healthy and happy leaders and team members are interruptible. They don’t let tasks and deadlines override relationships. They have the necessary margin and self-permission to say no to the urgent and lean into the important. If you wish to be a memorable and impactful team member, the discipline of being interruptible is a must.

Interruptions can be costly and stressful, but so is busyness. Considering that busyness is a leading cause of loneliness, practicing interruptibility will deliver a swift blow to loneliness. The decrease in loneliness is immediate for yourself because you’re present and connecting, and it’s immediately beneficial for the other party because they sense your presence in that moment.

Being interruptible is about intentionally placing your focus, productivity, and priority on the organization’s number one asset: people. Parting with your most precious resource—your attention—makes others feel seen, appreciated, and included. Productivity is not about squeezing people, but about showing up for them. Leave “never drifting off task” to the robots. Drifting off task and wading into the lives of others is best suited for a strong professional.

In fact, relationships are stronger when two people respond to each other’s requests for connection. Psychologist John Gottman calls these requests “bids.” According to his research, married couples who regularly turned toward (or engaged) the bid, versus those who regularly turned away from the bid, had much stronger connections. Gottman found specifically that couples who had divorced after a six-year follow-up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in 10 of their bids for connection were met with acknowledgment or support. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time. Nine in 10 of their bids for connection were met with acknowledgment or support.

When workers are connected to their team, the work, and their leader, they are stronger, healthier, and more useful. Just like a smartphone was built to connect with other technology, humans are built to connect with other humans. We are all connectable. However, without the appropriate action, our collective connect-ability will become dormant, stripping humanity of its very essence. Together, we can awaken the renewed sense of connection that humanity is silently screaming for, because work is the most fertile ground for connection to spring forth.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

Your team faces an invisible threat. It makes them seven times less likely to be engaged, five times more likely to miss work due to stress or illness, and twice as likely to think about quitting. It is silently and secretly undermining your team’s wellbeing and crippling its performance. This invisible threat? Loneliness.

Remote work, advancing technology, and an always-on work culture are fracturing our relationships, resulting in deep disconnection and loneliness. A colossal 72% of global workers feel lonely at least monthly; 55%, at least weekly, according to research among over 2,000 global workers in my book, Connectable: How Leaders Can Move Teams From Isolated to All In.

In the United States alone, over 15 million full-time workers say they are lonely all or most of the time. And senior leaders are every bit as likely to face loneliness as their teams: half of chief executives report experiencing feelings of loneliness in their role, and 61% believe it hinders their performance.

If you or your team are experiencing loneliness, you are not alone. Loneliness is a universal human condition. It’s not shameful: it’s a signal that we belong together. Loneliness lies at the intersection of inclusion and wellbeing. If you haven’t begun having conversations about workplace loneliness, you soon will, as it is a looming issue for employee engagement and retention. Why? Because the fastest-growing generation in the workforce is the loneliest generation. Seventy-three per cent of Gen Z workers report sometimes or always feeling alone – and 75% of Gen Z (plus half of Millennials) have left a job because of mental health reasons, compared with 34% of other generations.

Not only is loneliness unhealthy, but employee productivity, loyalty, collaboration, and engagement all decrease when employees are lonely and disconnected. Improving team connection is good for workers’ wellbeing and good for business.

While loneliness is increasing, that means it’s malleable. What increases can also decrease. We must put in the effort now to create the connections that lead to better teams, better companies, better communities, and a healthier us.

Redefining loneliness

Workplace loneliness is defined by the distress caused by the perceived inadequacy of our connections to teammates, leaders, the organization, and the work itself. A team member that feels detached from the mission of the organization or has a lack of clarity in their role can experience loneliness.

Critically, it is the absence of connection, not of people. A team member who works remotely but feels connected to their work and their team might experience less loneliness than a team member who works alongside colleagues in an office but lacks a strong connection. Reducing loneliness therefore leads to better connections.

A framework for reducing loneliness

Think of your team’s and your own wellbeing like the depleting battery of your phone. You don’t have a pleasant conversation with someone once and feel recharged forever. Your wellbeing batteries are always depleting. They need to be recharged regularly. Much like connecting your phone charger to a power source, you must seek meaningful connections with others to increase your wellbeing and protect against the empty battery of loneliness and isolation.

I have developed the Less Loneliness Framework, a four-step process to get your team reconnected, re-engaged and recharged – and like recharging that phone, it is a continual process. Each step is represented by a letter in the word LINK, as it is designed to create stronger links between workers and their team, their leaders and their work.

As with many problems, the first step is to build awareness and understanding – to ‘Look at Loneliness’. Since you are reading this article, you are satisfying that step.

The next step is to ‘Invest in Connection’ and strengthen your team’s connections.

The power of prosocial behaviours

According to psychologists, the best way to lessen loneliness and limit its effects is by using prosocial behaviours. These are acts of comforting, sharing, helping or cooperating, backed by general concern for the feelings, welfare, and rights of other people.

Researchers in China found that leaders who show compassion to their employees can mitigate the negative effects of loneliness and thereby boost creativity.

Another study of workers at Coca-Cola’s Madrid headquarters found leaders were able to reduce feelings of isolation among their team by simply being nice and interacting with others.

Your behaviour lessens loneliness. You don’t need medication, day-long retreats, meditation apps, or to become a certified therapist – just small, intentional, and routine behaviours.

Executing prosocial behaviours every day makes a difference. People on the receiving end of prosocial behaviour were a whopping 278% more likely to engage in prosocial behaviours themselves.

The ripple effect of lessening loneliness with prosocial behaviours is gigantic. If your team executes prosocial behaviours, it could ignite similar behaviours throughout your organization and even out in the wider world, leading to healthier individuals, stronger families and more united communities.

Prosocial behaviour is transformational because it is so simple: it only takes you. You don’t necessarily need to persuade other leaders, or get buy-in from your team, or overhaul your company culture. As a leader, you can make subtle shifts that completely change the wellbeing of your entire team.

The healthiest organizations have found a way to have concurrent commitments to human dignity and performance. They don’t sacrifice the wellbeing of employees for high performance. Nor do they sacrifice performance to bend to every employee need. They strike a balance. Lessening loneliness improves both employee wellbeing and organizational excellence.

Investing in safe connections

One way to create environments where prosocial behaviours can flourish is by creating psychological safety among a team’s members. It means that people feel free to ask questions, raise concerns, and pitch ideas, without fear of unnecessary repercussions. Psychological safety is invaluable for organizations interested in reducing loneliness among their workers.

When workers feel psychologically secure and protected, their need for belonging is fulfilled and thus loneliness is lessened. Leaders who create psychological safety among a team also reap significant performance benefits: a 12% increase in productivity, 27% reduction in turnover, and 40% reduction in safety incidents, according to Gallup.

Teams can be lonely places. People can feel vulnerable and exposed if they believe their teammates don’t support their ideas or appreciate their work.

These interpersonal struggles intensify for remote workers who lack the support of a nodding ally across the table. It’s challenging for leaders to create psychological safety because by virtue of their role they have power – and power is a barrier to psychological safety. To counterbalance the weight of their powerful role, leaders have to go out of their way to intentionally and strategically build psychological safety. Otherwise, the absence of psychological safety will repress innovation, stunt engagement, slow performance and decrease the strength of connections needed to support mental health among a team.

Psychological safety is the wellspring that organizations need to repair and refresh workers struggling with their mental health. Most leaders need to invest a little more time and energy in creating the conditions for it to flourish.

A simple strategy for less loneliness

When asked, “Where did you learn to be a great leader?” Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, explained that he learned leadership from his father, a tribal chief. When Mandela was young, he would go with his father to tribal meetings. He remembered two things. The first was that his father always had his tribal council sit in a circle. The second was that his father was always the last to speak.

When leaders share their thoughts about a topic and then ask for the team’s opinion, it’s too late. By speaking first, leaders undermine dialogue and thwart creativity, because the team will be less likely to volunteer any ideas that conflict with the leaders’ views. The skill of keeping your opinion to yourself until everyone has spoken provides leaders with the authentic and unbiased thoughts of the team. It also provides team members with the feeling that they are heard and valued contributors. To effectively speak last:

• Craft open-ended, non-biased questions
• Get comfortable sitting in silence as the team processes ideas
• Address responses in a neutral manner, such as, “Thank you, that was an insightful observation”
• Trade comments for clarification. Resist providing commentary and seek more clarity through phrases like, “Tell me more”.

Psychological safety exists when team members feel they have the opportunity to speak in roughly equal proportions to their peers – and when leaders start speaking last, they create more space for their team’s voices. Teams where a manager spoke 80% of the time or more were less successful than teams who practiced turn-taking during discussions. The goal is ‘proportional conversations’, where each voice can be heard. Encourage these with simple steps:

• Prepare and share the meeting agenda ahead of time, to help people gather their thoughts beforehand
• Assign different team members to run the meeting, and rotate weekly. (This is especially helpful for hybrid teams: assigning a remote team member to run the meeting pulls them more into the in-person meeting)
• For hybrid meetings, encourage remote team members to contribute first, so as to involve them fully and avoid them falling into the background
• Leaders should consider small meetings or one-on-one settings to continue the conversation with quieter individuals.

Gaining more awareness and understanding about workplace loneliness is the crucial first step in cultivating more belonging at work. But as depicted by the circular Less Loneliness Framework (see above), exhibiting prosocial behaviours, like speaking last and conducting proportional conversations, is a continuous process in the battle against loneliness – leaders also need to help teams focus on what matters and inflame what works to build momentum. Considering the results are stronger, healthier and higher-performing teams, it’s well worth the effort.

The power of connectivity

Today’s smart devices are connectable. You can connect your smartphone to a smart TV, wi-fi networks, or a charging station. When a device is connected it becomes more powerful, intelligent and useful.

A connectable team experiences similar benefits. When workers are connected to their team, the work, and their leader, they are stronger, healthier and more useful. Just like a smartphone was built to connect with other technology, humans are built to connect with other humans.

We are all connectable. However, without the appropriate action from leaders, our collective connectability becomes dormant, stripping humanity of its very essence.

I believe humanity is silently screaming for better connections – and work is the most fertile ground for those connections to spring forth.

With simple, powerful steps, leaders can awaken a renewed sense of connection for us all.

A more connectable workplace is within your reach.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

The year is 1991. A bowl of Kix, with 2% milk, is consumed quickly in the morning. Judi Sheppard’s Jazzercise VHS workout tape is playing in the background. Jeff, a middle-aged accountant puts on his nicest turtleneck and heads to work. Jeff gets to work at 9:00am, works until 5:00pm and heads home. Once home, Jeff isn’t tempted to work anymore because he doesn’t have the capacity to do so. His work telephone, desk, word processor, manilla folders, and filing cabinet were located inside the office building. Jeff can turn on the TV, watch an episode of Seinfeld, relax with his family, and not feel obligated to do anything work related until tomorrow. Must have been nice.

For many back then, work was a single location. Today, work has pivoted from a place to a space. The technology shift from fixed communications to mobile communications has redefined how and where we work. 

The never-offline and always-available work culture is today’s norm. For many people turning off work at 5:00pm is an antiquated practice. What’s typical for most is checking email prior to getting out of bed in the morning, shopping online while at work, exchanging texts with their managers after 8:00pm, and then starts the week’s projects on Sunday afternoons.

Today’s most beloved employers have been encouraging always-on work by including meditation spaces, nap rooms, foosball tables, and fully stocked kitchens inside the workplace to ensure employees never have to leave work. Most of these employers likely have good intentions to reduce loneliness by using these perks, but by keeping employees away from their communal relationships, and not helping to protect their personal time, have instead increased worker isolation. 

Insert a global pandemic in 2020 and the lines between work and life vanish. Job board searches including the keyword “remote” climbed to all-time highs. Notable companies like Siemens, Twitter, Nielsen, Square, Nationwide Insurance, and Zillow all granted their employees the option to work from home permanently. 

According to 2020 data, 61 percent of employers said that they expect their staff to be available outside of regular hours. More employees are working through lunch and logging on to tackle work tasks late into the night than ever before. In addition, 51 percent of employees reported symptoms of burnout in May 2020 (when many were forced to work from home) and by the end of June 2020, the figure had jumped to 69 percent. 

Even before the arrival of the novel coronavirus our work-life balance was out of control as 42 percent of employees said they felt obligated to check in with work while vacationing, and more than one-fourth felt guilty for using all their vacation time.

All of this explains why our recent relationship between work and life is so tumultuous. And why we are having such a hard time establishing the necessary guardrails to protect our personal time and social connections outside of work. We are in a constant and ever-evolving battle to keep work at bay just long enough to maintain our crucial personal relationships while still qualifying for the next promotion. 

Of course, working hard and for long hours isn’t bad. Until it leads to burnout.

Reaching burnout status is different for everyone and depends on your age, stage of life, personality, role and responsibilities, industry, etc. What doesn’t differ is how quickly burnout can turn an always-on, productive employee to an always-off, lonely employee.

A recent Gallup study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees found that 76 percent of employees experience burnout on the job at least sometimes, and 28 percent say they are burned out “very often” or “always” at work. According to the 2016 LinkedIn Censuswide Study, nearly half of American workers would forgo the corner-office job and a high salary to gain more flexibility in their schedules. And according to the Center of Generational Kinetics State of Gen Z® 2020 study, after salary, working-age Gen Z (16-24) is most attracted to a job that offers flexible scheduling (29 percent) and flexible hours is the top workplace benefit Gen Z is interested in. 

Clearly “sometimes on” work is advantageous for worker wellbeing, as well as talent attraction and retention. Yet, despite a growing desire and need for better work-life balance, only 23 percent of companies feel that they are excelling in helping employees balance personal and professional life/work demands. 

Organizations and leaders that expect employees to be always-on, prioritizing work over other important aspects of life—including the establishment and nurturing of relationships outside of work—run the risk of hindering worker health, productivity, and loyalty. 

When workers can’t guard against work encroaching on their personal time, burnout and loneliness are around the corner.

What Is Loneliness?

Loneliness is the absence of connection. 

Loneliness is a subjective feeling of the lack of trust, closeness, and affection of loved ones, close friends, and community. Loneliness is not defined by the lack of people because someone can still be lonely while surrounded by others. As a social species, humans require more than the mere presence of others. We require the presence of others so we can dream, strategize, and work towards a common goal together. We need to be in the presence of others who value, appreciate, and “see” us for everything we are. Loneliness is being seen through; connection is being seen as.

Unfortunately, being seen through is all too common in the workplace. Connection is traded for the convenience of moving fast. While seeing through someone greases the wheels of productivity, it leaves an organization feeling hollow, ultimately making employee disengagement and burnout a high probability. 

Researchers Peplau and Perlman state, “Loneliness corresponds to a discrepancy between and individual’s preferred and actual social relations.” Everyone craves and needs connection, but the size of the discrepancy varies for each individual. The discrepancy for extroverts might be much larger than introverts. The discrepancy also varies across stages of life (single, married with kids, empty nesters, etc.). No matter the person or situation, humans seek belonging by securing strong relationships. The frequency of social contact or the quantity of relationships doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the connection.

It’s the quality of the connections between a person or group that defines loneliness.

Loneliness is also measured by one’s personal comfort levels of being isolated. Isolation is the physical state of being separated or apart from other people. Isolation decreases the opportunities to interact with other people thus increasing the risk of loneliness. However, you can be isolated without experiencing loneliness. For example, remote workers who are isolated from other team members can experience little to no loneliness while involved in a project that interests them. 

The negative state of isolation is loneliness. The positive state of isolation is solitude. Solitude is a state of being alone without the emotions of loneliness. When we experience loneliness, we want to escape it as it is an unpleasant emotion. On the other hand, solitude is peaceful aloneness created by a state of voluntary isolation. Solitude can take many forms such as self-reflection, meditation, mindfulness exercises, or a quiet break from the demands of life. Solitude offers the opportunity to connect inwardly with oneself. Emotional wellbeing, clarity, creativity, and perspective are some of the benefits of intentional and healthy solitude. 

Loneliness carries the unfortunate stigma of shame. Conversely, solitude is held in high esteem. However, solitude seems to be more and more elusive in today’s distraction-prone world. But when solitude is fought for and done right, it helps to strengthen the connection with ourselves which in turn equips us to connect more with others. 

Ironically, solitude is insurance against loneliness. And as we’ll explore in this book, solitude is a leader’s first line of defense in protecting against loneliness in oneself and ultimately their team. Needless to say, workplace leaders are in a prime position to address loneliness.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.

As a team connection keynote speaker and trainer, I help companies build stronger teams and cultures via human connection. If you’d like help solving tough teamwork challenges inside your organization, click here.