# How Connie's research on loneliness began - **Episode:** [139](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/139.md) (2024-10-24) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** loneliness-research, origins, academic-research - **Time:** 6:27–11:26 (start 387s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/139?t=387](https://truthliesandwork.com/139?t=387) --- [6:27] Connie Hadley: First of all, I have to step out of the work arena to fill people in on what we've learned from studying loneliness in the social realm. So there's been longstanding research among psychologists just about people's loneliness, but they've been studying in their personal domain, the people who don't have strong family and friend connections. And a lot of the people studying that are psychologists looking at sort of the, you know, the psychological experience, but there's also a lot of people looking at it from a medical standpoint and looking at the physical health impact. And so the number one reason it's expensive for employers is because people who are chronically lonely have huge healthcare problems associated with it. And there's this big meta-analysis that showed that it's as dangerous for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's worse than obesity. Loneliness is shown to predict things like dementia, cancer, heart attack, diabetes. And so if you're an employer and you're paying healthcare insurance for the people who work for you, you're likely to see those costs go up if your people are lonely. And then the other aspect of loneliness that can hit the bottom line is that people don't do their best work when they're lonely [7:35] Leanne Elliott: Yeah [7:36] Connie Hadley: They're not going to be as engaged, as motivated. They will have their minds sort of not at full capacity because they'll be distracted with these feelings of rejection and isolation. And so we've also estimated the productivity impact that people have. And in my research, again, some of these medical background things, those are things I have to borrow from my peers in other areas of science. But in my own research, I've certainly seen seen a big correlation between loneliness and low job satisfaction and intention to quit. And so the last thing that happens for employers is that people leave. So they then have turnover costs associated with it where they have to find— go through the recruiting process to find another employee and bring them on board. So when you think about the physical health costs, the lack of productivity, and then the departures of people who are lonely, it really does— [8:30] Leanne Elliott: Yeah [8:31] Connie Hadley: create quite a problem [8:31] Al Elliott: All right, so let's now talk about the big news. Connie Hadley's latest research that she conducted in partnership with Sarah Wright has made the COVID of Harvard Business Review with her article, We're Still Lonely: What Leaders Can Do About It. This is a huge deal, not only because it's HBR, obviously one of the most respected business publications out there, but also because workplace loneliness is a topic that's finally getting the spotlight it deserves. This is also a huge moment for the organizational psychology community. Featuring my, my wife over there. Getting featured on the COVID of HBR is pretty rare for psychologists. The fact that Connie's work has made the COVID signals a shift in recognizing how crucial psychological well-being is to the future of work. It shows that issues like workplace loneliness aren't just soft topics. They're actually becoming central to how we understand leadership and organizational success. So let's get back to the interview where Connie shares how her latest research is moving the loneliness conversation forward [9:29] Connie Hadley: Sarah Wright and I have been studying loneliness for a while. And because we didn't know that much about work loneliness until the last 10, 15 years, we started with the basics, which is just trying to define it and try to identify what it looked like in the population. And Sarah's done some good work on modeling the process by which people might become lonely. But I spend most of my time talking to managers and people who work in jobs outside of academia. And they were like, OK, OK, we get the problem. What do we do about it? So that really was the impetus for this new study. And what we wanted to do was say, OK, we're going to continue to build on our knowledge base about who gets lonely and what that feels like. But now let's actually test some possible interventions that could reduce the loneliness. And we did a 2-part study. We surveyed 1,000 US knowledge workers ages 22 to 50. And we deliberately— we hired a panel firm to find people to complete our surveys. And we told them that you have to go out and find people who are low in loneliness, so the people who might say are not lonely, they're well-connected, people who are moderately lonely, and people who are high in loneliness. And we gave them this 5-question survey that Sarah and I have developed to measure work loneliness. And so we said, go out there and find us some people who are lonely in a lot of different ways so that we can compare them and try to understand how they're similar and different, and also give them these test scenarios and see who responds to what. And so that's the, that's the article that's now out in the Harvard Business Review. We also have a research report that's publicly available on my institute website. So people can look if they really want to geek out on lots of data and statistics, it's available for them as well. And we also have made available the self-assessment tool, the 5-question survey that I mentioned. So people If they're curious to know if they're feeling lonely, they can take that test for themselves