Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm poised to be your partner in retaining, engaging, and developing talent. And today, I'm excited to bring you this interview with Ryan Jenkins, one of the authors of Connectable, How Leaders Can Move Their Teams from Isolated to All In.

Ryan Jenkins is one of the co-founders of less lonely.com, the world's number one resource for addressing workplace loneliness and creating

more belonging at work. He's helped organizations like FedEx, Coca-Cola, the Home Depot, Salesforce,

Wells Fargo, and more. Improve their teams.

And in today's interview, he'll be sharing some fascinating data on the real impacts of loneliness and some practical ways we can all rediscover and amplify our feeling of connection.

Well, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today on the Modern Mentor Podcast.

I'm really excited to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

Looking forward to this conversation. Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and jump in. I would love to start

with just a little bit of context around why you chose to write this book and maybe even why you chose to

write it now. Yeah. So I've been a speaker and consultant for about a decade, and my work centers on the future of work.

And my last book was all about Generation Z, the youngest generation entering the workforce and what we could expect for the future of work as they pour into the workforce.

And it was in writing that book and researching that book, I found that 79% of Gen Z say that they

experience loneliness often or always. And how alarming is that, right? And so did some digging

and figured out this is the first time we're having the emerging generation experiencing more

levels of loneliness than our elderly community. So there's a big imbalance here. So I wanted to figure out why this is happening

and what we could do to help. And that launched me into learning more about loneliness and connection.

And Rachel, if you can believe it, this was all happening pre-pandemic. Then the pandemic hit,

and I brought all this research to my clients thinking, hey, does anyone want to talk about

loneliness and connection? I didn't, to be honest, I didn't think anybody would, but everyone

did. I've never had an appetite for a program and a topic like that. And then that accelerated the

research where now we interviewed over 2,000 global workers and we worked alongside 50 leaders

...