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Bosses like to complain that it is lonely at the top. Lately, they have been worrying about how lonely it seems everywhere else.
The world is in “a crisis of disconnection, where loneliness, division and polarisation have become far too common”, warned Laxman Narasimhan, Starbucks’ new chief executive, on the coffee chain’s earnings call this week.
Hours earlier, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky was telling an FT journalist that loneliness might kill more people than Covid-19. As we lose ourselves in our screens, this California tech founder fretted, “I am getting concerned about the trajectory that we as a society are going on.”
Executives’ public musings on loneliness peaked as their offices emptied in the pandemic’s early months, notes Nick Mazing, director of research at data provider AlphaSense. But the topic is on CEOs’ minds again after US surgeon general Vivek Murthy issued an 82-page advisory on another public health crisis: America’s “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”.
Murthy grabbed headlines for warning Americans that social disconnection is as likely to send them to an early grave as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But he targeted part of his report at bosses like Narasimhan and Chesky.
Social isolation damages employees’ performance and satisfaction at work, he observed, while driving absenteeism that costs US employers an estimated $154bn a year.
On the flip side, “supportive and inclusive relationships at work” were associated with higher job satisfaction and innovation, America’s top doctor reported, while better communication could prevent workplace burnout.
So is this the next in the list of societal problems that CEOs feel they should leap in and fix? They may be tempted by the business case Murthy laid out. But the corporate responses to date suggest an instinct to treat this malaise as a marketing opportunity, not a call to action.
Narasimhan segued from his warning about loneliness to a pitch that “Starbucks delivers connection . . . any place, any time.” Sincere as he sounded, Chesky similarly framed his fears as an explanation for why Airbnb was encouraging travellers to stay in the spare rooms of hosts they might talk to rather than booking empty second homes.
As we swap friends on social networks for followers on social media platforms, he said, he wanted Airbnb “to be about people and connection” instead — a physical social network.
But if a loneliness epidemic prevails, which some academics contest, then it raises serious questions about CEOs’ own organisations.
The first is how so many people feel excluded at work even as their leaders champion diversity, equity and inclusion. At companies such as Starbucks, those workers fighting management for union representation seem not to feel the same connection that their CEO sees.
Employers still debating what mix of in-person and remote working will give employees both flexibility and meaningful ties to colleagues should consider Murthy’s question of whether they are “respecting the boundaries between work and non-work time” that help workers nurture meaningful relationships.
They should also heed his warning about technology’s negative effects. Tech companies will surely face more heat as authorities focus more on this risk, even as some pitch robot pets or virtual worlds as solutions.
But many non-tech companies are sketching out futures in which artificial intelligence and automation take on more human tasks. CEOs concerned about a disconnected workforce should consider whether chatbots and co-bots will really improve things.
Executives’ response to this newly declared epidemic must start with what it means to their own people. Perhaps because of their own isolation, CEOs risk missing the point: that their priority is not to solve a societal failure, but to prevent a failure of management.
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