How to Fight Back Against the Loneliness of the American Worker
Recently, our team Slack was briefly aflutter chatting about a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Loneliness of the American Worker” (article link - paywalled - or podcast link - free). Not that it was necessarily earth-shattering. We’ve heard this before, and we’ll hear it again: we are living in lonely times. But reportage like this makes us wonder anew about how community building can mend the strained ties that bind us. Here’s the conversation we had. We hope that it can inspire you to direct your efforts authentically toward creating a sense of belonging and connection. Ironically, community building can become transactional and stale unless we reconnect to our broader possibilities.
How to Make Meetings More Connective
Kelly: I almost fell out of my chair when I read that Americans have tripled the time spent in meetings since 2020. Obviously, this is problematic on so many levels, and we all need fewer meetings. But how do you think we can make the meetings we do have more meaningful and connective? I liked what the article pointed out, for instance, about the essentialness of chit-chat.
The Wall Street Journal's "The Loneliness of the American Worker"
By Te-Ping Chen, dated May 27, 2024
Carrie: I couldn’t believe how much the meeting time had increased either! We can take several steps to create more meaningful connections during meetings (and meaningful connections are not at odds with productive outcomes; they go hand-in-hand!). First, let’s see chit-chat as productive because it is. As the Wall Street Journal article mentions, Ernst & Young has asked managers to use the first five minutes of team calls to engage in conversation “as real human beings.” I love this idea, though in practice I can imagine a manager saying, “Okay, time to talk as real human beings now. Go.” Then 5 minutes later, abruptly, “Okay, let’s get to the task at hand.” Super awkward.
Facilitating a good chit-chat conversation is simple but not easy. Last year, we trained a client team on this very topic. We taught them that effective rapport-building is strategic and intentional. It builds trust and makes us feel good, and there are simple, powerful ways to do it that might feel awkward at first but do improve with time.
"Facilitating a good conversation is simple but not easy."
Here’s an example of a team connection ritual you can steal: We have a ritual with all our clients where we do a traffic light check-in at the top of every meeting. Some clients want to zoom through it (totally fine) and others want to spend half the meeting there. We let them set the pace while honoring the work that must be done. So much of our work can be accomplished asynchronously, but genuine, vulnerable check-ins are best done live.
How to Make In-Person Gatherings People Actually Want to Attend
Kelly: I love our traffic light check-ins. It’s so helpful to know how everyone’s feeling before we dive into the work. Why might employees be reluctant to socialize or turn up at in-person events?
Carrie: Broadly speaking, our culture is obsessed with convenience. And guess what is genuinely inconvenient? In-person gathering. Yet it’s also what makes life worth living. Remember when we literally could not be together physically in 2020-2021? While excellent for the extreme introverts, over time we all suffered greatly.
We should relish being inconvenienced by our friends and respected colleagues. Last week, for instance, my niece asked me to come to her middle school graduation at the last minute. I had to cancel all my plans and miss work, and I drove over an hour to be there. As I drove, I thought of how annoying it was that I had to do it, and how grateful I was to be so annoyed and have the privilege to be able to cancel my other plans. What a gift to be inconvenienced because I care about someone, and because she cares about my presence. What if we start celebrating inconveniences as a gateway to connection?
"What if we start celebrating inconveniences as a gateway to connection?"
But there are also real structural issues that must be addressed for people to show up in person. Employers need to make it easier for employees to show up by offering benefits like travel stipends, transportation or coordination of transportation, childcare or kid-friendly areas, days without meetings to make up for lost work time from travel, and clear info about accessibility. We should all keep these offerings in mind when designing in-person community gatherings.
How to Structure Team Connection
Kelly: On a personal note, you and I have been working together remotely for over four years now. We see each other in person about twice a year, and we occasionally see some of our other team members, though some we’ve never met in person. Same with clients. How do you think this impacts the way we work or the way we feel about work?
Carrie: Personally, I love our setup. We’re both introverts, so I think it works for us. But it’s taken us years to find the balance. At first, I think we both struggled with our inability to meet in person; we didn’t meet until a client workshop sent us to Philly in 2022!
But now we have structure, and it’s taken us time to get to it, but here are the pieces that I think bring it all together:
Weekly 1:1s
Weekly all-team syncs
Daily communication of working hours (which often change throughout the day) and check-ins of what we’re working on
Slack guidelines (created by you; these have been game-changing!)
A transparent out-of-office calendar and unlimited time off
All-team sabbaticals where we are all offline at the same time (a week in winter, summer, and spring break)
No-external-meetings weeks (that I need to get better at protecting for myself)
We spend a lot of time just catching up, and I think that this time has only increased over the last year, for the better. We’ve been practicing what we preach, and I’m proud of that. We know that building rapport matters, so we spend time just talking with no agenda. We have a check-in ritual as a team, and we let that go for as long as it needs to. Is it always the most efficient? Absolutely not. But we’re optimizing for our values: relationships, compassion, equanimity, and equity. And I believe efficient work comes from dealing with our emotions (lots of social science research backs this up), which underlie how we show up, whether we name our feelings or not.
What do you think? How is it working for you? What do you find most helpful?
Kelly: I agree with all this! The in-person time we’ve had is really important to me and definitely strengthens the work we do remotely, as do all the rituals you listed. The daily and weekly check-ins are essential, and I think we’re pretty good at the art of chit-chat. :) Also, I love our team’s #cuteness-overload Slack channel where we share personal parts of our lives just for fun. It’s the little things.
I still struggle sometimes with spending so much of my life in front of my computer, but I’m also proud of the way we center our values. Our work feels flexible and respectful, and we are good at taking breaks.
"I still struggle sometimes with spending so much of my life in front of my computer."
Addressing the Loneliness Epidemic
Carrie: How do you think we can better address the loneliness epidemic through our work as community builders?
Kelly: We have to continue to choose to spend time on relationship-knitting activities, again and again. So much of our work combats loneliness. I feel it every time I do a 1:1 interview with a community member, sitting and really listening for 45 minutes without judgment. I feel it when we spend time doing check-ins with clients, when we teach using the words “Oops-Ouch-Whoa” as a form of repair, when we design “campfires” at gatherings, or when we spend 30+ minutes at the start of a workshop letting the people in the room (or Zoom) get to know each other and warm up. Taking up such a generous amount of time on relationality feels radical, because it actively resists the pressure to immediately get to work, get stuff done, and be productive (putting all that in air quotes; thanks, Capitalism). But focusing on relationships is always worth it. Every time we do, I hope and believe we are making someone’s day less lonely, and we’re also showing our clients that they can do the same thing with their community members. There’s an anti-loneliness ripple effect.
“Taking up such a generous amount of time on relationality feels radical, because it actively resists the pressure to immediately get to work.”
Carrie: Okay, you’ve got me FIRED up!
Readers, how does your place of employment encourage connecting “as real human beings”? Is it working? And what do you do within your community to combat loneliness? Is this even a consideration for you? Hit reply and let us know!
