Younger Workers Feel Lonely at the Office: Survey
January 23 2020 - 6:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Rachel Feintzeig
They have friends at work and good relationships with their
managers. But younger employees still feel alone at the office,
according to a new survey.
More than 80% of employed members of Generation Z -- many of
whom are just entering the workforce -- and 69% of employed
millennials are lonely, according to a survey of more than 10,400
people, including about 6,000 workers, in the U.S. from health
insurer Cigna Corp. Older workers have lower rates of loneliness;
they are also less likely to say they feel alienated by their
co-workers or emotionally distant from colleagues, the survey
found.
For many younger workers, a day at the office comes with a sense
of emptiness and the need to hide their true selves, according to
the data. More than 60% of both Gen Z respondents -- 18- to
22-year-olds -- and millennial workers -- which the survey defined
as those 23 to 37 -- have a close friend at work. Yet they find
their jobs less meaningful and feel more friction between their
values and those of their companies, compared with older workers,
the survey found.
Cigna classified participants as lonely -- or not -- based on
their responses to a 20-item questionnaire called the UCLA
Loneliness Scale. It assesses feelings of loneliness and social
isolation.
Communication styles might be feeding younger generations' sense
of isolation, said Douglas Nemecek, Cigna's chief medical officer
for behavioral health. They tend to shun phone calls and in-person
conversations -- the kinds of interactions that can lead to real
connections -- in favor of email and text messages, he said.
Cigna's survey also found a connection between social media use
and loneliness. Nearly three-fourths of heavy social media users
were classified as lonely, compared with 52% of light social media
users.
"Having a thousand friends on Facebook and Twitter does not
necessarily help us to feel more connected," Dr. Nemecek said.
The relationship between social media and loneliness seems to
have intensified since Cigna's 2018 survey -- that year, just 53%
of heavy social media users were considered lonely, compared with
47% of light social media users. Cigna conducted its most recent
survey in July and August and found that Americans are getting
lonelier overall. Now, Cigna classifies 61% of Americans as lonely,
up 7 percentage points from 2018.
The rise of remote work might be contributing to some employees'
feelings. Telecommuting has become a hot benefit, with 27% of
companies allowing full-time remote work in 2019, up 4 percentage
points from 2018, according to a separate survey from the Society
for Human Resource Management. Cigna found that remote workers were
more likely to say their relationships with others weren't
meaningful and that they didn't have anyone to turn to.
According to Cigna, lonely workers take twice as many sick days
as non-lonely workers -- 9.5 days, compared with 4.2 days -- and
miss more days of work because of stress. Those can be vital issues
to employers, who are Cigna's clients.
Other research from Sigal Barsade, a management professor at the
University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, has found
that lonely workers are less committed to their organizations and
have lower performance ratings from supervisors.
Loneliness lowers workers' social skills, Ms. Barsade said,
leading them to start sharing too much or too little with
colleagues. As a result, she said co-workers start to view lonely
workers as less approachable.
"You start to withdraw from the people you want to connect to,"
she said. "Once you hit a certain tipping point for loneliness,
it's very difficult to come back from."
Ms. Barsade has also found that emotions like loneliness at work
can be contagious. Her research, based on a lab experiment where an
actor embodied four different moods, from angry and stressed to
calm and serene, found that employees subconsciously mimic others'
facial expressions and then end up owning those emotions,
ratcheting up the impact on an organization.
"This is not just the individual employee's problem," Ms.
Barsade said. "This is the whole company's problem."
Write to Rachel Feintzeig at rachel.feintzeig@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 23, 2020 06:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
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