183. The Loneliness We Don't Talk About: Why So Many People Feel Alone at Work with Prina Shah

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This podcast is for people who know that the workplace can and should be better and are ready to do something about it. You will learn practical ways to change organizational cultures and human behaviour without voice words, without box ticking, without performative leadership. I am the boss of Prino Shark Consulting, working with executives, leaders, and teams to create work cultures and environments that actually work for people. I am Prino Shark. I specialise in organizational culture change and human behaviour change. I am all about making work better with people who give a damn. So if you think I can help, contact me via LinkedIn. I am here to help you to find decent ways to change the workplace. Let's do this.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast with me, your host, Preena Shah. And today I want to talk to you about something which is very much on my mind and on many people's minds at the moment, because many a person has had a conversation about it with me. And it is about the loneliness that we don't usually talk about. Why so many people feel lonely at work. So today we're exploring a topic that is rarely discussed openly and yet quietly affects almost every workplace in the world. It's loneliness. Not the loneliness that we often picture when someone is physically isolated or living alone. I'm talking about the kind of loneliness that can exist in the middle of a busy office inside a packed boardroom during a Zoom meeting. Or even while sitting alongside colleagues that you've worked with for years. Because loneliness isn't about the number of people around us, it's about whether we feel seen. Whether we feel understood, whether we feel safe enough to be ourselves, whether we feel that someone genuinely has our back. So the idea for today's episode came from a leadership workshop that I facilitated recently. I was working with the executive team of a brilliant organization which spent the morning discussing strategy, organizational performance, and the usual kind of leadership challenges. Then I asked a simple question. There was a long pause. Finally, the director looked around the room and quietly said, I have never said this out loud before, but I feel incredibly lonely sitting at the executive table. The room became silent. Not an awkward silence, a meaningful silence. You could almost see people thinking, I thought that I was the only one. One by one, other executives began sharing similar experiences. They talked about making difficult decisions alone, about carrying responsibility they couldn't discuss with their teams. About protecting everyone else's well-being whilst quietly neglecting their own. About feeling surrounded by people, but feeling disconnected from all of them. What struck me most wasn't the loneliness itself, it was how surprised everyone seemed to discover that everyone else felt exactly the same way. That conversation reminded me that workplace loneliness does not discriminate. It affects chief executives, it affects graduates, it affects project managers, teachers, nurses, engineers, consultants, business owners, frontline workers. And chances are, at some point, it has affected you too. So today I'd like us to explore why loneliness has become one of the hidden challenges of modern work, what the research else does, and perhaps most importantly, what we can do about it. Loneliness is not about being alone. When most people hear the word loneliness, they immediately think about isolation. But researchers have shown us that loneliness is something very different. Former United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murphy has described loneliness as one of the defining public health challenges of our time. In his work in Together, and later in his advisory on the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, he explains that loneliness is not only the absence of people, it is the gap between the social connection that we need and the connection that we actually experience. So loneliness is the gap between the social connection that we need and the connection that we actually experience. He also has a brilliant podcast that I highly recommend that you listen to. It's all about loneliness, or it used to be. I certainly did in a couple of my jobs in my corporate days. Equally, someone working remotely from home may feel deeply connected if they have meaningful relationships with their team. It actually isn't proximity that matters, it's connection. Work has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Technology has made us faster. Calendars are fuller, meetings are shorter, or sometimes longer. Instant messages arrive all freaking day. We communicate constantly, yet many people have never felt more disconnected. Somehow we've become incredibly good at exchanging information while becoming less skilled at building relationships. We confuse communication with connection. They're not the same thing. The different faces of workplace loneliness is what I want to talk to you about now. So let's explore what loneliness actually looks like. Because it really announces itself. It hides behind competence. Loneliness hides behind confidence. Sometimes loneliness even hides behind success. Imagine the executive. Every day they make decisions affecting hundreds of people, sometimes thousands. They know information that they cannot share. They carry the responsibility that they cannot delegate. If they admit uncertainty, will people lose confidence? If they share their fears, who is supporting them? Leadership often becomes emotionally isolating, especially the higher you go up the ladder. So ironically, the more senior someone becomes, the fewer peers they will have inside the organization that they potentially trust. Now think about the graduate who has just started. Everyone else seems to know each other. There are inside jokes, there's unwritten rules, there's established friendships, there's frigging workplace acronyms, lunch groups have already formed. No one is deliberately excluding this graduate, but no one has intentionally included them either. They spend eight hours each day surrounded by people wondering if they'll truly ever belong. Or consider the project manager. Projects create a unique kind of loneliness. You are responsible for the outcomes without always having the authority from a project perspective. You coordinate competing priorities, manage expectations, save conflict, solve conflicts, absorb criticism. When everything succeeds, everyone shares the credit. When something fails, though, the project manager often carries the emotional burden. Then there's the remote worker. Many people assume the remote worker would solve workplace challenges. For some people it has. For others, it has quietly increased isolation. Now I have to give you the caveat that we're all different and we all work really differently. So imagine spending an entire day moving from one online meeting to another. Your camera turns on, your camera turns off, you answer emails, you complete reports, you attend briefings, all online. At five o'clock, you close your laptop and realize something surprising. You haven't actually had a conversation with another human being in person all day. Everything has been transactional and nothing has been relational. So you're missing out on the coffee conversations, the kitchen cooler conversations, you know? So, I want to get into why belonging matters. Researcher Brene Brown has spent years studying vulnerability, courage, and belonging. One of her most powerful observations is that true belonging doesn't require us to change who we are in order to fit in. In fact, Brene Brown argues that fitting in and belonging are completely different experiences. Fitting in asks us to become what others expect. Belonging allows us to be accepted as we are. Think about how many workplaces unintentionally reward fitting in. People learn quickly what opinions are safe to express, what emotions are acceptable, which questions make people appear weak, which mistakes should never be admitted in this workplace culture. Slowly people stop bringing their authentic selves to work and they wear their professional armor. Eventually, they will become lonely. Not because people don't know them, but because nobody knows the real them. That's one of the deepest forms of loneliness, being appreciated for a version of yourself that isn't entirely authentic. So one of the missing ingredients I want to talk to you about is psychological safety. So this brings us to the work of Harvard professor Amy Edmondson. Her research introduced the concept of psychological safety. Psychological safety is the shared belief that people can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and express concerns without fear of embarrassment or punishment. When psychological safety is absent, people become quieter. They stop asking questions. Innovation and creativity decline. Mistakes increase because nobody feels safe enough to admit them early. Eventually people begin protecting themselves rather than contributing openly. The tragedy is that workplaces often interpret silence as agreement. In reality, silence is frequently a symptom of disconnection. When people no longer feel psychologically safe, loneliness begins to grow. Not because people dislike one another, but because nobody feels able to reveal who they truly are. One friend can truly change everything. So one of my favorite findings comes from Gallup. They do surveys every year. For years, Gallup has studied employee engagement across millions of workers around the world globally. One question consistently stands out. Do you have a best friend at work? And at first it sounds almost childish. Surely organizations shouldn't concern themselves with friendships. Yet, Gallup's research consistently shows that employees who have a close friend at work are more engaged, experience higher well-being, collaborate more effectively, produce higher quality work, and are significantly more likely to remain with their employer. Why? Because friendship creates belonging, it creates trust, it creates that emotional safety. A close colleague notices when you're struggling. They celebrate your wins. They challenge your thinking. They check in after a difficult meeting. That relationship becomes an emotional anchor inside the workplace. Friendship in this manner isn't a distraction from performance. It is often one of the conditions that actually enables performance. So practical ways to reduce loneliness is what I want to go into now. What can we actually do? First, replace small talk with meaningful curiosity. I don't know about you, but small talk kills me. It's so dull and boring and just sucks the energy out of me and just it's a waste of time. So instead of asking, how are you? try asking what's been taking up most of your thinking lately? The quality of your questions determines the quality of your relationships. Now, as a coach, I have completely found that. As a podcaster, I have really found that when I'm interviewing somebody else. So let me read that again. The quality of our questions determines the quality of our relationships. It's truly the way you connect with someone else. Second, leaders need to model vulnerability, not dramatic vulnerability, not oversharing, but simply admitting I'm still working through this, or I'd value your perspective or your advice on this thing. When leaders stop pretending to be invincible, everyone else receives permission to be human too. Third, protect informal connection. The five minutes before a meeting, walking to get a coffee, checking in after a presentation. These moments often build more trust than formal team building events do. Fourth, intentionally notice the quiet people. Every workplace has them, but not everyone who is quiet lacks confidence per se. Sometimes they've simply concluded that their voice doesn't matter. Invite them in gently. Fifth, build relationships beyond your immediate team. Create peer networks, find mentors, join professional communities. Sometimes the people who understand us the best do not work beside us. Finally, ask yourself one question every Friday afternoon. Who did I genuinely connect with this week? If the answer is nobody, then perhaps next week deserves a different approach. I often think back to that leadership workshop that I talked to you about at the beginning. Not because of the fact that the director admitted that he was lonely, but because of what happened next. Once one person spoke honestly, everyone else realized that they weren't alone. Nothing about their workload changed that day. Their strategies didn't change. The budget didn't change. The organizational chart didn't change. What changed was connection. People stopped performing leadership and stra started practicing humanity. Perhaps that's a lesson for all of us. Loneliness is not solved by adding more meetings or more technology or more collaboration software. It is solved one genuine conversation at a time, one courageous question at a time, one act of empathy at a time, one moment of vulnerability at a time, one decision to truly listen to. The opposite of loneliness isn't simply being surrounded by people. The opposite of loneliness is belonging. It's knowing when you walk into work that someone notices that you're there, someone values your contribution, someone cares enough to ask how you're really doing. If each of us committed to creating just one moment of genuine connection every day, imagine how different our workplaces would become. Imagine how different how our leadership could become. And perhaps most importantly, imagine how people would quietly go home feeling just a little less alone. Thank you for spending time with me today. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd encourage you to share it with a colleague, your leadership team, or someone who might need to hear that they are not alone. Until the next time, remember this. Take care, over and out for me, and I will see you in the next episode.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

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