# Meet Dr. Connie Hadley

- **Episode:** [139](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/139.md) (2024-10-24)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** guest-bio, researcher, career-journey
- **Time:** 4:19–6:27 (start 259s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/139?t=259](https://truthliesandwork.com/139?t=259)

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[4:19] Connie Hadley: Sure. Well, as I just alluded to, originally when I was back in grad school, I was really focused on people's emotional lives at work and their psychological attachments to people at work and their jobs themselves. And I was really focused on social support and on all these great things that come from having really strong workplace relationships. But over time, as I continued to research this topic, I found that a lot of people didn't have that. They don't feel like they have anybody they can go to at work. They don't feel like people have their back that are interested in them, that are supporting them. And it dawned on me that this, this is actually a real issue. And coincidentally, at the same time, other people are starting to study that, including my fabulous, fabulous co-author, Sarah Wright. She's at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She was doing some work on it in the academic literature as well, looking at work loneliness, which is what we've now started to call it. And a little bit before the pandemic, I was doing some new research on that with Mark Mortensen from INSEAD. And we found that, like, in this one study, Mark and I found that people who were globally working around the world with different knowledge work teams had, like, 76% of them had trouble being connected to their teammates. So, that really was a wake-up call for me in my research, just how big the problem was. And then, Cigna was doing some research studying it in the US that showed how common it was. Then the pandemic happened, and that's when everybody really started to wake up to this issue. So I haven't done the quantification studies that others have, including the UK government has actually done a lot of really important work on work loneliness. And they've estimated the cost to employers of loneliness is in big price tags in the billions of dollars a year. And so now I feel like there's this social reason to fix it because it's going to make people's lives better at work, but also this financial reason to fix it
[6:15] Leanne Elliott: And why is that? Why is Loneliness causing such a financial impact on our business. I'd imagine there's some people listening that would find that quite surprising that it is, and also that it's quantifiable