Another Workplace Crisis: Loneliness

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Harvard Business Review

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4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General, says that, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were facing another health crisis: loneliness. Studies show that, around the world, more people have been feeling a greater sense of social isolation, which has many negative affects, including increased blood pressure, reduced immune response, and decreased engagement and productivity at work. But organizations can be a place where people find a greater sense of belonging. Murthy wants us to take loneliness more seriously and focus on fostering the types of authentic connections -- face-to-face and virtual -- that we need to combat it. He's the author of the book "Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you listen. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. Today's guest says that even before the COVID-19 crisis we were up against another kind of epidemic, an epidemic of loneliness.
0:57.0	Studies show that social isolation has been a growing problem in the US and other parts of the world for years and that it has a huge
1:05.5	negative impact on our health, well-being, and productivity.
1:10.2	Work could be a place where we find connection, but too often it's not.
1:14.4	We're hold up in our own offices or cubes or working remotely,
1:18.0	and we're not interacting in a meaningful way.
1:21.3	If social distancing becomes more common in the future, our struggles with
1:25.4	loneliness could get even worse. But Dr. Vivek Murphy says there are ways for
1:30.5	individuals and organizations to combat this trend.
1:34.0	And he's with us now to talk about not just the problem but also those solutions.
1:38.4	Dr. Murphy is a former Surgeon General of the United States and the author of the book
1:42.4	Together, The Healing Power of
1:44.1	Human Connection in a sometimes lonely world. Dr. Murphy, thank you so much for being
1:49.0	with me. Thanks for having me. So you have written and talked about this loneliness epidemic before, but briefly just tell us why is
2:04.4	loneliness such a big health issue? What damage does it cause to us? Well, loneliness is
2:09.9	not new. It's a feeling that people have experienced for generations. What is relatively
2:16.5	new is our understanding, what it is, and the impact that it has in our body and our broader
2:21.8	lives.
2:23.0	And one of the things that we're starting to recognize
	...

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