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An Antidote to Loneliness: Building Real Social Connection into Your Work-life

In our current world, there’s good reason to be concerned about social connection.

Former US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy has called loneliness a growing health epidemic. “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness,” Dr. Murthy said in a piece for the Harvard Business Review. “I found that loneliness was often in the background of clinical illness, contributing to disease and making it harder for patients to cope and heal.” While often neglected, loneliness has the equivalent effect on one’s lifespan as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 

With the growth of the gig economy, remote work and entrepreneurship, many people are finding themselves spending the majority of their workday alone. The numbers of freelancers, independent consultants and other independent workers is exploding according to consultancy MBO. And more broadly, 43% of America’s workforce, work remotely at least some of the timeaccording to a recent Gallup poll.

“In the workplace, new models of working — such as telecommuting and some on-demand ‘gig economy’ contracting arrangements — have created flexibility but often reduce the opportunities for in-person interaction and relationships,” said Dr. Murthy. “We know that if we are to prioritize our health and the health of our companies, the workplace is one of the most important places to cultivate social connections.”

While some companies are bucking the remote work trend and bringing their employees back to the office, this isn’t the majority and it doesn’t help independent workers. For this growing sector of people, coworking is a great solution. And there’s evidence that coworking makes people happier. In a 2016 study by Emergent Research, 89% of respondents said they are happier since working from a coworking space, and 83% said they were less lonely.

As social creatures, it’s important to pay attention to be mindful that isolation and loneliness can have devastating mental and physical consequences. But the good news is that loneliness is something we can and must solve together.

 

Photo by Luca Baggio on Unsplash

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The Office of Christmas Past: In Victorian London, Working at Your Boss’ House was Common

Amidst the holiday shopping frenzy, Charles Dickens’ classic story, A Christmas Carol, is a reminder of the perils of a life spent in the pursuit of money – and that there’s a place in the underworld for bosses who don’t give adequate time off.

But this isn’t all we can learn from A Christmas Carol, according to David Charnick, an English academic who leads a literary walk of London. In a blog posthe says this story gives us a peek into the conditions of office work in Victorian London. It may surprise a modern reader to know that put-upon employee Bob Cratchit worked at the home of boss-from-hell Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge had a pair of rooms for himself, and the rest was used by Cratchit and other employees during business hours.

In 1843 when A Christmas Carol was published, Charnick noted that “most business was still being carried out in coffee houses, counting houses and merchants’ homes.” It wasn’t until the late 19th Century that office buildings became common. 

The East India Company was among the first companies to erect blocks of offices in London. And 1864 was the year two major companies began building office buildings to be rented out to business tenants – the City Offices Company Ltd and the City of London Real Property Company Ltd.

By the late 19th Century, office buildings were common, and hydraulic lifts (elevators) made taller buildings more desirable – especially higher floors.

Office buildings have since become ubiquitous worldwide, but it was a new concept at the time and was reflective of societal changes that needed separate spaces where companies could work together. Coworking could be seen as another major progression in work culture that’s just in its infancy but that values a healthy work-life balance and cooperation over hierarchies. It could make what came before downright Dickensian.