“For a long time, employers have thought that loneliness wasn’t their problem to solve,” said Adrienne Prentice, founder and CEO of coaching platform Keep Company. “I would challenge everyone to say, ‘maybe we’re not paying enough attention,’ because loneliness is not only impacting the health of our individual team members, it’s impacting organizational health as well.”

In 2023, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of the public health crisis spurred by loneliness and cited a study that estimates that stress-related absenteeism attributed to loneliness costs employers $154 billion every year.

Prentice was part of an expert panel during From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference, on a new era of investing in humans. She and her fellow panelists believe employers can help alleviate the pain of loneliness. “A major ill of our society right now is our lack of community and connection,” Prentice said. “Church membership is down, we don’t know our neighbors. We’re not connected to each other. I think work has the opportunity to be the last frontier.” If connections are built in the workplace, employers can begin to close the gap.

Forming Connections by Learning Together 

“The first time you learn something, it’s likely by observing the behavior of someone else. Your friend, your parents, your brother, your sister–whoever it might have been–demonstrate some behavior that you wanted to adopt in your own life,” said Victor Arguelles, the VP of global learning and development for Marriott International.

This can be replicated in the workplace. When we observe how others work, think, reason, and problem-solve, we’re able to learn at a faster rate. Learning new skills and competencies both unites workers and levels the playing field, Arguelles said. “We know that people learn better when they learn from each other, when they find community, and where they can fail or succeed together.”

Think beyond individuals or single teams and cast a wider net across the organization, said Matt Waesche, the chief learning officer at defence contractor BAE Systems. “Curate a group of people from all different parts of the company–people that wouldn’t normally find themselves in the same room. You can have legal sitting with engineers sitting with general managers that run a craft trade with someone that might run a very technical type of work.” The diversity of expertise, experience, and thought can yield novel results for both skill-building and community.

“You have your people system and you have your work system, and if you want to improve your results, you really have to optimize both,” said Shannon Arvizu, sociologist and founder of Epic Teams, an organizational competency consultancy. She recommends peer coaching for this. Rather than hiring a third-party coach that produces a 20-page report on what a team lacks, “bring the team together to ask questions and co-create an action plan–teach everyone to be a coach.”

Uniting Workers In Person

Companies are calling workers back to the office, but poor planning has made for very public fumbles, like employees arriving to find insufficient parking and no desk to set their computer.  Others have been ordered back to the office only to dial into Zoom calls for hours at a time or sit in an empty office, without managers or senior leaders.

If you’re going to require workers to be in the office, panelists agreed, then make that time count. Ensure there are enough people in the workplace to make it a social occasion, and pull unique groups together to learn and grow together. This is especially important for young workers, many of whom graduated from college amid Covid lockdowns. They’re lacking workplace experience and hungry for interpersonal interaction.

At mortgage lender Fannie Mae, VP and head of learning Michael Trusty gathers interns and campus hires for dedicated, in-person learning programs. It’s expensive, he said, but entirely worth it. If the company wants to retain those employees, then they have to create social networks. “One of my favorite metrics–and I bring this into conversations with our senior leaders–is when I go through the cafeteria, how many of our early career professionals are sitting together? It’s great to see it. People from data science with people from finance with people from business–they’re creating their communities.”

Trusty also facilitates employee connections around the organization’s mission of housing affordability, connecting people outside the office. He takes finance professionals into middle and high schools to teach financial literacy. This kind of volunteerism–which the company encourages with paid time off–is a means of building camaraderie among workers.

Learning opportunities can be interpersonal, not just professional. Arvizu described a relationship building exercise called the “journey line.”

It goes like this: Give everyone a piece of paper and have them draw a line down the middle. Then ask, ‘what experiences have shaped who you are?’ If they’re positive and affirming, put them above the line. If they’re challenging, put them below the line. “No matter who you are, how old you are, or what background you come from, everybody will have a zigzag line,” she said. “Give folks the opportunity to share their stories and acknowledge them for their stories.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.

(Photos by Justin Feltman for From Day One)