Work friendships fade in remote era
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Illustration: Maura Losch/Axios
The new, scattered working world is disrupting one of the long-standing traditions of the workplace: making friends with colleagues.
Why it matters: It’s adding to America’s worsening loneliness crisis, as people increasingly feel like the critical social component of working has disappeared.
- “As social connections have become more difficult to form, it’s become even more important to have that person or those people who make you feel like you belong,” says Ben Wigert, a research director at Gallup.
The big picture: Remote and hybrid work have swept America. Some 22 million Americans are fully remote, according to Pew Research Center. Millions more telecommute for some part of the week.
- As remote and hybrid work has increased, so have meetings. Workers spend three times as much of their days in meetings now compared with 2020, Microsoft data shows.
- Even people who work in person spend 25% of their time in virtual meetings, the Wall Street Journal’s Te-Ping Chen reports.
- Yes, companies have tried to foster connection by spending more time and effort on retreats in this new era, but those events often aren’t enough.
- “It’s about serendipitous interaction,” Wigert says. “Some of that gets lost in the retreats. If an event is so big and structured you lose some of that natural interaction.”
By the numbers: The share of U.S. workers who say they know their coworkers on a personal level has fallen from around 80% in 2019 to around 67% today, the WSJ reports.
- In Jan. 2020, 47% of American workers believed someone at work cared about them, per Gallup polling. That’s fallen to 38%.
Zoom in: Scattered workplaces can also make getting through challenges or tough times even more difficult.
- Joining a new company remotely — especially as a new grad with little to no experience navigating a workplace — is often lonely.
- And layoffs can feel that much more isolating without colleagues to lean on for support.
What we're watching: It's not just remote workers who are experiencing persistent loneliness. The shifts in ways of working — from unstructured collaboration to more meetings — are affecting all workers.
- While 20% of fully remote workers report feeling loneliness for "a lot" of the day, almost the same share (19%) of onsite workers report the same, according to Gallup.
