Your Employees Are Disengaged and Lonely. The Cure Is Right Under Your Nose
Your Employees Are Disengaged and Lonely. The Cure Is Right Under Your Nose
Inc. has dug into the research to determine how to bring joy back to the workplace—and, no, the answer is not more snacks.
Photo: Adobe Stock
DaVonda St.Clair understands all too well how grueling—and joyless—the workplace has become. In her last job, as an information security architect at a tech consulting firm, where she worked for three years through last spring, she says she was only one of two women and the only Black woman manager on a large technical project. She had no genuine friendships or camaraderie. When her co-workers casually chatted or ate lunch with her, their managers criticized them for having “personal conversations” or “wasting time.”
“I often felt undermined, dismissed, and painfully disconnected,” says St.Clair, now 49. “Work became a daily task of survival, not fulfillment.”
St.Clair’s experience is more common than not, these days. Even without the isolation resulting from Covid 19, the workplace has, for many, become a slog, rather than a place where people make friends, meet their spouses, or find their sense of identity. In Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, which surveyed more than 200,000 people over age 15 who worked in about 160 countries and regions, employees worldwide reported feeling stressed, sad, anxious, and disengaged on the job, while one in five also said they’re lonely.
The situation has become dire, says former U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy, who began calling for change in 2017 and, in 2023, went so far as to issue a surgeon general’s advisory, addressing the loneliness “epidemic.”
“The harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished,” Murthy wrote in 2023, as part of his advisory encouraging the nation to rebuild connection and community, in schools and workplaces. “If we fail to do so, we will pay an ever-increasing price in the form of our individual and collective health and well-being.”
And yet, a job remains a worthwhile antidote to loneliness. Per a 2024 Gallup report, about 20 percent of working adults across the globe said they experienced loneliness compared with 32 percent of those who are unemployed. And there’s a gap in loneliness levels between in-person and remote employees, with 27 percent of those working remotely reporting feelings of loneliness versus 21 percent of those who work only at the office or workplace.
Connection on the job is key, suggests workplace expert Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Workplace Intelligence, and author of Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation.
“Work has become much more transactional,” he says, adding: If employers want to foster feelings of well-being among their staff, they should create an environment that allows people to think, convene, and do work that matters.
Study after study shows that workplace friendships play a critical role in employee mental health and job satisfaction. It’s the secret sauce to establishing workplace culture defined by authentic engagement and a deep sense of care and respect, says Sandy Torchia, vice chair of talent and culture at KPMG U.S. It’s important to find creative ways to foster those relationships.
Yet one in five Americans have no friends at work. Women, too, are more likely than men to report feeling lonely at work, according to KPGM’s survey on workplace friendships. Add to that, people don’t have time for much at all, let alone connection; at work, they feel disengaged from the work itself, and they don’t feel respected by leadership.
Amanda Foley, who left an exhausting 60-hour-a-week consulting gig three years ago, has a theory that society split after the pandemic.
“People are not just satisfied with the bare minimum as they were,” says Foley, 49. “There’s a broader juxtaposition of people who want more out of life and say, ‘I can’t keep doing this every single day and being unhappy,’ and then the other people who say, ‘Why are you not into this?’ It’s like they’re literally on different planets.”
After realizing her own work didn’t excite her anymore, Foley went on to start Malvern, Pennsylvania-based Curate Your Soul Intuitive PR, which focuses on highlighting people’s soul purpose. “I started picking up all these personal brand clients who kind of bridged the world of science and spirit. I love it, and I never feel stressed. It’s really important to be lit up by what we do.”
A Shared Purpose
How, then, can leaders bring connection, friendship, and joy back to the workplace?
First, let’s go beyond pizza parties and motivational posters and the after-hours work parties, says Schawbel. People face such time poverty that there’s no room for anything outside of getting work done and going home. Instead of spending nights or weekends socializing with co-workers, Schawbel suggests giving people more time during the workday for socialization instead of after the workday.
Ira Wolfe echoes Schawbel. “People don’t need forced fun,” says the Wind Gap, Pennsylvania-based HR consultant and author. “They need autonomy, respect, and a workload that doesn’t make them cry into their coffee.”
That makes sense to Shubhi Mishra, 39, founder of Raft, a McLean, Virginia-based defense software firm. While Raft’s 350 employees will get together for events like company picnics and 5K races, Mishra doesn’t artificially make people come together to build relationships.
Connection, Mishra says, comes from the deep meaning in what people do at work. Raft’s people tend to care about one another and what they’re working on, she says, and they naturally have become friends.
“Meaningful joy comes from working on something that matters,” Mishra says. “That shared sense of purpose is what connects us.”
Plenty of research confirms that a shared purpose at work boosts creativity, productivity, engagement, retention, and more, says Tracy Brower, sociologist and author of The Secrets to Happiness at Work. By working on shared goals together, people can create positive bonding experiences that go against the narrative of work as pure drudgery. “We need that sense of belonging and that sense of connectedness,” Brower says.
Yet for most Americans, the workload prevents many from feeling joy and purpose. Nearly three-quarters of employees who report high-stress levels attribute that to unmanageable workloads, according to the 2025 iHire Toxic Workplace Trends Report. About two thirds of respondents cited lack of work-life balance and nearly half noted unrealistic deadlines.
People wind up feeling like a cog in a machine with mixed messages about taking time for themselves but with expectations to be available 24/7, says Wolfe, the HR consultant from Wind Gap. Normalize rest, he says.
“They need autonomy, respect, and a workload that doesn’t make them cry into their coffee.”
—Ira Wolfe, an HR consultant and author
“Real joy isn’t a scheduled event—it’s found in unplanned moments of connection, creativity, and even a little workplace mischief,” says Wolfe. Encourage humor, he says. Celebrate weirdness. Let people have side projects that spark curiosity instead of just hitting deadlines, he says.
And, importantly, employers should realize that wellness programs—yoga classes and mindfulness workshops, etc.—aren’t necessarily going to help employees feel better. A research review by a team that included Harvard Business School associate professor Ashley Whillans found that those initiatives, which employers are on tap to sink an estimated $94.6 billion into by 2026, are failing in part because of a focus on individual employees rather than systems. They can create superficial care initiatives that workers may find inadequate, overlooking the root causes of an unwell workforce and resulting in what’s called carewashing. Ultimately, those efforts made people feel worse and more disengaged.
Building Trust
Employees are beginning to push back. A January survey by online resume service Resume Now found that 65 percent of workers say they feel empowered to decline extra work, with younger workers under age 25 reporting the highest levels (77 percent) of empowerment. A March survey by Gallup found that Americans overall are working fewer hours than in years past, while also finding they feel detached from their employers and their wellbeing continues to decline.
That detachment may boil down to the way people are treated at work. A January Gallup survey found that only 37 percent of employees feel they are treated with respect at work. The number of people who feel respected at work has declined significantly over the past 20 years, says organizational psychologist Gena Cox, who studies respect inside workplaces. People are getting more respect from customers and those outside their own department than from those who work most closely with them.
People who feel respected will feel valued, seen, and heard, and they tend to have an emotional freedom to say what they’re thinking, laugh, and feel free at work. “Feeling respect at work could power all these emotions, these positive emotions, including joy,” says Cox, who is also author of the book Leading Inclusion.
At Raft, Mishra encourages everyone to speak up and give their opinions. Having a voice is celebrated. Having a different opinion is celebrated. Pushback and debate are celebrated. “We love friction, but when we commit, we go,” she says.
When employees feel safe speaking up, that will naturally fuel trust, which is crucial for organizations to succeed. It’s also something that employers must work to maintain, because trust can be broken—swiftly.
Tara Kermiet learned that the hard way. Kermiet was initially thrilled with her new job at a leadership consulting firm in 2021, and she often noted its people-first culture. Yet a couple years into that position, the now 41-year-old’s employer suddenly laid off 30 percent of the staff—with no word on what was happening, who was going, and what was next. She learned who lost their jobs only when they disappeared from the company Slack channel.
With just two people left in her department, her workload grew, communication disappeared, and burnout set in, so much so that Kermiet had panic attacks before meetings. In April 2024, she just quit. “It was amazing how quickly it fell apart,” she says.
Kermiet has since started her own Leland, North Carolina, leadership consulting firm and says one of the big things she preaches to her clients is the idea that integrity is not a part-time job. “If you say your people are first, then you should put your people first,” she says. And if you list values on your website—such as communication, trust, or transparency—then follow through with those values, she says.
“Companies are protecting the business, rather than thinking holistically about the ecosystem that supports the business,” adds Kermiet.
What Actually Works
Jessica Willis, 46, founder of Detroit-based Pocketnest, a white-label financial wellness platform, has made a conscious effort to build a culture around transparency with her team. During the quarterly all-hands meeting with her 13 employees, Willis shares “pretty much everything going on” at the six-year-old company, she says. “It’s just easier than trying to not be transparent,” she says.
Overcommunicating, she says, not only creates trust among all employees, but fosters a genuine sense of connection. She says she and others know the real-life personal challenges everyone is going through or has been through, which allows them to support one another and deepens their relationships.
Inside the startup, there are still stressful moments, but Willis and her executive team try to take the pressure off. “We actually use this line all the time,” she says, “Everything matters, and nothing matters.” Because, she adds: “life is much more important than what you’re doing at work.”
“If you say your people are first, then you should put your people first.”
—Leadership consultant Tara Kermiet
Willis says she recalls being in her 20s and 30s and not feeling inspired by the leaders managing her at other companies. So when she started Pocketnest, she set out to create an environment so inviting that people would be excited to go to sleep Sunday knowing that Monday was coming, she says. “We laugh all day long.”
It was a similar start for Mishra when she started Raft six years ago. She wanted to hire “adults” who could be counted on to take the time they need to do their work and to recognize if they needed a break. Their team of fellow adults would be there to support them and hold them accountable.
Mishra calls it complete ownership. The result: a tight-knit workplace culture and a staff turnover of just 3 percent. Mishra says there’s a sense of community and that people talk about being excited and engaged in their work.
For other organizations, connection can be as simple as encouraging staffers to eat lunch together. In years past, people would bump into each other in the office and start a conversation that led to grabbing lunch. But that’s not happening anymore. Just over 75 percent of Americans eat lunch at their desk.
What else works? Service. Volunteering or helping others informally can deliver a sense of psychological safety and help build the kind of supportive environment where people are looking out for others versus themselves. Says former surgeon general Murthy: “When we serve other people, whether that’s going to volunteer at an organization down the street or that’s helping somebody in our class, or helping somebody in our community who’s struggling, those small acts of service do two things: number one, they allow us to connect with someone deeply on something that matters to them, in a moment when it matters, but they also reaffirm to us that we have value to bring to the world.”
Leaders must also take care of themselves and other top lieutenants, says Inga James, who left her executive director job last fall at a Frederick, Maryland, sexual assault nonprofit after relentlessly long hours, extreme stress, and mental fatigue sent her over the edge. She said the organization would create retreats and support groups for the staff who dealt with traumatic cases, but there was nothing for leadership.
Looking back, James, now 64, wishes she had invested more in professional development for her leadership team and herself and that she had found a support group for like-minded leaders. Even giving leaders a much-needed day off could make a huge difference. “It will make your person feel valued, which brings joy to the office,” she says.
Joy tends to start at the top—but it doesn’t just stay there. Says Wolfe: “It’s contagious.”
From the field
Many of our clients create a customer service team and once a month talk through ideas that will WOW their customers but not cost the company any additional money. The more creative ideas are incorporated into their mystery shopping form to make sure new ideas are happening on a regular basis. This approach give the employees a feeling they are directly involved in the companies success and that their creative ideas stem from the front line, not just having senior management require them to do yet another customer service task.
Need help in creating a strong customer service culture, give us a call, we'd love to chat about some ideas.
BY JENNIFER ALSEVER @JENNIFERALSEVER AND CARL PHILLIPS
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