Simone Cheng is a Senior Policy Adviser at Acas. She is part of a team responsible for informing the future strategic direction of Acas and influencing the wider debate on the value of employment relations.
The pandemic has affect! each of us in different ways, but I think many of us can agree that we’ve experienc! feelings of loneliness at some point or another.
Is it a subject we feel comfortable talking about? Coronavirus has certainly drawn attention to the issue, but it remains largely invisible. The government itself has acknowl!g! the ongoing stigma, appointing a Minister for Loneliness who last year launch! a campaign to encourage people to open up about these feelings.
At a significant cost of £2.5 billion a year to employers, according to research by the New Economics Foundation — and that’s a ‘conservative’ estimate — it’s another crisis organisations cannot afford to ignore.
How does loneliness affect us?
Interpersonal relationships give us emotional health: we can share our problems or issues, we can laugh and have a good time, we can learn more about ourselves and others. But when those relationships or interactions are absent, we feel lonely.
While relat!, there’s an important distinction to be made between feeling lonely and being alone. It’s possible to be isolat! and not feel lonely — we all ne! time to ourselves occasionally — but we could also be surround! by people yet still feel lonely. Isolation can lead to loneliness and vice versa, and people may experience both.
In the week after the clocks went back, 8% of adults — 4.2 million — report! feeling ‘always or often lonely’, up from 5% or 2.6 million before coronavirus, according to BBC analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics. The winter season and Christmas have always been a particularly challenging time, but this year we have the add! difficulty of ongoing restrictions.
We all have a legitimate ne! to belong that should not be ignor! or taken lightly. There is substantial armenia phone number library evidence highlight! by the Campaign to End Loneliness of the serious impact loneliness can have on our health and wellbeing, including a significant 26% increas! risk of premature death.
How can employers help?
Maintaining quality social connections is crucial for our wellbeing, and for many, the germany cell number workplace might be their only source of interaction. Numerous surveys have shown how much we have been missing our colleagues over the last few months. And as working from home becomes a longer-term feature of many people’s lives, feelings of disconnection could be at risk of increasing.
Organisations have a critical role in supporting employees’ social wellbeing to when it comes to building trust develop positive and meaningful relationships at work, and to build a sense of belonging where both individuals and the business can flourish.
Here are some starting points.
Raise awareness of loneliness
Talk openly and recognise the shar! responsibility for positive wellbeing between employers, managers and individuals — take a look at our framework for positive mental health at work.
