How can employers support staff experiencing loneliness?
As research from the Mental Health Foundation tells us, “loneliness isn’t about the number of friends we have, the time we spend on our own or something that happens when we reach a certain age. Instead, it is a feeling we experience when there is a mismatch between the social connections we have and those that we need or want. It can therefore be experienced differently by all of us.”
People who experience loneliness often talk of a gnawing sense of isolation, something I think we can all understand a little more after the last couple of years. We probably all need to think about loneliness a bit more than we do currently, and as the people responsible for the employees in our organisations, it’s vital to think about the impact of loneliness in the workplace. What happens when we feel disengaged and disconnected from work and peers and what can people responsible for people do?
