‘This meeting could’ve been an email’ attitudes are fuelling Britain’s loneliness & productivity crisis

While there’s been an enormous amount of coverage regarding employee pushback to these return-to-office mandates, there’s been much less coverage of what this new era of office work actually looks like.

Which is why it was so striking to get survey results back that found that 2 in 5 office workers feel lonely at work.

That figure really stands out. It becomes even more noteworthy when combined with another finding from the report by Kahoot - that 30% thought their workplace relationships were actually better during the pandemic when, for the most part, they had zero face-to-face contact.

Three obvious questions jumped out at me when I first saw these dramatic findings. Why is this happening? What effect is this having on workplaces? And what can we do to remedy it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

The answer to the first question is an extremely complex mix of factors, all of which influence the overall picture, but I’ll highlight some of the most prominent elements.

Firstly, while we can’t disregard hybrid working as part of the puzzle, many workers are now either back in the office full time or spending more time in the office, and our data suggests people felt closer to their colleagues during the pandemic, when generally they weren’t in the office at all.

It is clear that some practices that were picked up during the pandemic (like instant messaging or emailing someone instead of speaking to them) have stuck around and are affecting organic communication.

Our survey found that more than one in five office workers go an entire day without speaking to a colleague and over half have messaged a coworker in the same room as them when they could’ve spoken face to face.

What appears to have happened is that many of the workplace practices adopted during the pandemic have endured, particularly those centred on written digital communication rather than face-to-face interaction. At the same time, the focus on identifying and tackling employee isolation has fallen away.

During the pandemic, we were all hyper-aware of our own and each other’s isolation and took deliberate steps to try and connect with each other; more manager check-ins, virtual social events and quizzes; even virtual co-working. We may have initially questioned these at the time, but it made us feel more connected to the people we worked with.

What we’re now seeing is effectively a worst of both worlds: lingering pandemic work practices, but without the active support and team-building that accompanied them. This theory is reflected in the data we pulled together, which found that half of workers have less than one hour a week’s face time with their manager.

Beyond that, AI’s rapid integration into the workplace has had two crucial side-effects: teams getting leaner, meaning fewer people to interact with; and many of the questions one would ask of a colleague can now be asked of a chatbot, meaning fewer opportunities for organic communication.

So now we have some idea of the ‘why ’, we can look at what effect it's having.

The effects of loneliness on our personal health are well documented, but also on a macro-level, a meta-analysis of studies has found that loneliness also leads to worse job performance, worse job satisfaction, and higher burnout. Our research backs this up: 46% of people said they were more productive during the pandemic, when they felt their relationships with their colleagues were better.

Loneliness is a condition that affects not just people’s individual health but the overall health of the country’s economy.

Which brings me to the final question. We’ve established approximately what’s going on and why it’s important to fix it, so now we need to understand what can be done.

The answer to me is twofold. Starting with perhaps the more obvious of the two, workplaces need to do more to promote face-to-face contact and discussion between employees. Over the past decade, the creeping sentiment of ‘this meeting could’ve been an email’ has become pervasive.

But what our data found was that almost half of people say meetings are their only source of interaction with colleagues. And 57% prefer meetings where they get to connect and interact with their colleagues personally before jumping into work.

The second answer lies in managers. A manager is responsible for delivery and performance, but should also be responsible for employee welfare and cohesion. Unfortunately, we are facing a manager training crisis in the UK at the moment, with many managers not given the tools to achieve those latter two goals.

Our research found two in five managers have never received formal managerial training, and unsurprisingly the same proportion feel imposter syndrome. As mentioned before, this leads to figures like employees having less than an hour of one-on-one time with their manager a week and one in seven getting no time with their manager at all!

When employees were asked how their managers could improve, clear communication and meaningful feedback topped the list. Incidentally, these are the same things managers pointed to when asked how they could improve.

It’s clear that employees are crying out for more support from their managers, and that managers are at sea when it comes to supporting their employees and making workplaces more of a collegiate space.

It is my contention, and I believe it is no exaggeration, that creating a generation of better-equipped and better-trained managers, who can motivate and engage their employees and turn them from individuals into a team, would do wonders for the wider workplace isolation issue.

I would even go so far as to say it would have an effect on wider economic headwinds facing the country, like sluggish productivity for those who are long-term out of work.

Leadership trickles down, and if managers feel isolated and out of their depth, that will transfer to their employees.

A new generation of managers has the power to finally push workplace culture out of the pandemic for good, and return us to an office culture that allows for and encourages human connection.

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Jon Neale is Growth Director for UK and Ireland at Kahoot!

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