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There’s a silent undercurrent running through our workplaces, and it’s even harder to spot than burnout or bullying. Both of those have visible signs you can at least notice, but there’s another concern that’s quietly eating away at workers from the inside.
Loneliness at work is a serious and growing problem. In the latest 2026 State of the Global Workplace report released last week by Gallup, it confirmed that one in five workers said they experienced loneliness at work the previous day, rising to almost one in three managers.
Despite being surrounded by colleagues, in constant meetings and drowning in emails, too many of us still feel the sad reality of loneliness creeping in while we’re trying to work.
Gretchen Rubin is an expert on happiness and the flipside of it. Her books have sold over 3.5 million copies, beginning with The Happiness Project that spent two years on The New York Times bestseller list and helped spark popular interest in the science behind how anyone can learn to be happier.
“Ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree that the key to happiness is relationships,” she says. “Loneliness is the feeling like your relationships are not what they need to be. In evolution, it was very dangerous to be alone and isolated, and it has all kinds of detrimental effects to your physical, emotional and mental health.”
We still need some flexibility in how we work, but it shouldn’t come at the high cost of our relationships.
There’s an important distinction to be made here between being lonely and being alone. Each of them are very different, defined by their intention and causes. “Being alone can feel very restorative. It can feel energising, it can feel free,” says Rubin
“With loneliness, you start to feel isolated and prickly.” One of the biggest paradoxes when you start feeling this way – in a workplace or outside it – is that instead of it making you eager to connect with others, it can breed defensiveness and the desire to retreat further away.
There are many complicated and layered reasons that help explain the growing loneliness epidemic, but one of them is the fast adoption of WFH and remote-first policies without enough thought given to filling the gaps in its drawbacks.
“There are many advantages to work from home,” she says, “but there is a huge downside – which we took for granted – that you were just physically with these people and hanging out with them … and this is creating a huge vacuum.”
To build trust, and encourage our ability to confide and share vulnerabilities to form genuine connections, we need to spend quality time with our colleagues.
This was once a natural by-product of working in the same location for 5 days a week, and now needs to be consciously co-ordinated by workplaces and employees or the bonds will never strengthen.
Much of the research on this topic has concluded that having at least one person that you consider a good friend at work has an oversized impact on your happiness levels.
“This is not just like somebody that I casually enjoy talking to,” says Rubin, “but somebody who has my back, who I could confide an important secret to. And that’s very difficult to do if you’re not spending time with people.”
We often measure good workplaces by how productive they are, or how long people stay, but we need to shift the focus to how connected we feel to each other. As we retool our workplaces in a post-COVID and AI-focused world, this is more important now than ever.
Of course, we still need some flexibility in how we work, but it shouldn’t come at the high cost of our relationships.
Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com.
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. He co-founded Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET.