Now, if you’ve happened upon many of these blogs in the past, it will come as little surprise to see the subject of sport featuring prominently. I’ve spent a perhaps unhealthy amount of my life playing, coaching, administering and watching any number of sports. The sense of shared experience, inclusivity and community that sport is able to create are rarely replicated elsewhere.
One sport that I can largely take or leave – and not purely because of my general level of incompetence – is golf. Whatever its attractions, it tends not to inspire camaraderie and common purpose – a player will admittedly spend a long time during a round in the company of others, but these people tend to be competitors rather than team mates. Golf, its triumphs and demons alike, tends to be a solitary experience.
The Ryder Cup is a glorious exception to this. This biennial event held between the best golfers from the US and Europe has just finished. If you’re interested in the game, you’ll know the result and if you have no interest in golf, you’ll have about the same interest in how it played out. Suffice to say that Europe took home the silverware. Switching on as I did from time to time over its three days, I was struck by the relationship of two European players – Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood. The former came into the tournament with an inglorious previous Ryder Cup record and, for Fleetwood, this was his debut.
Despite this, they were utterly triumphant, paired together four times, they won on each occasion. Interestingly, it was impossible not to observe real care and affection between the two. They trusted each other and felt comfortable in each other’s company. One post-match interview confirmed the view that there were indeed good friends.
There appears to be little obvious connection between golf and the star of Black Panther, but bear with me. The film’s main character was played by actor Michael B Jordan, who, this month announced that filming was due to start on his next project, Just Mercy. In his announcement, Jordan made it clear he had taken up perhaps the first example of an inclusion rider. First flagged by Oscar winner, Frances McDormand, earlier in the year, the term relates to the option that major stars have of demanding diversity in both the cast and crews of a particular film.
And the movie industry has much work to do regarding inclusivity. Perhaps reflecting the environment which encouraged the likes of Weinstein, in 2017, white actors were cast in 71% of all speaking roles. Similarly, only 32% of characters with dialogue last year were played by women in Hollywood movies.
It’s hard to overstate just how important inclusivity is within the workplace. Clearly, it touches on engagement, productivity, broader talent pools, as well, very very simply, as being the right, fair and overdue thing to do.
But, in focusing on inclusivity, it is easier or certainly more tangible to see inclusion in terms of gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality and so forth.
Ironically, is inclusivity not really so inclusive?
Coming across a recent piece of research from Mind and Totaljobs, I was struck by the vast scale of loneliness within modern working environments.
That’s right, loneliness.
According to the survey, some 60% of UK employees have felt lonely at work and an even more chunky 65% feel their organisation does little to combat loneliness within the workplace.
This gets more and more sombre. Research from Relate suggests that 42% of us feel we do not have one single close friend at work.
Sombre, maybe, but important? Definitely.
According to Gallup, employees who do not have what they consider to be a best friend or a strong colleague relationship had just a one in 12 chance of being engaged within the workplace. Let’s contrast that with the togetherness and affection that brought the two golfers through an incredibly pressurised furnace of an environment over the weekend.
Although this is a subject that arguably flies relatively under the radar in comparison to other workplace inclusivity areas, we do have in Tracey Crouch, the world’s first Loneliness Minister. And she has her work cut out, last year, the Jo Cox Commission revealed that no fewer than 9m people in the country were affected by the issues of loneliness.
And if it’s easy to assume that such figures are largely made up of the old, this is anything but the case. A recent piece of research from insurer Cigna, suggested that US Generation Z and Millennials felt comfortably more lonely than their Generation X and Baby Boomer counterparts by up to ten percentage points.
And the reasons and implications for such levels of loneliness?
Ironically, many of the workplace innovations of the last 15 years are exacerbating this. The flexibility we all increasingly seek sees more and more people working from home or working flexible hours, giving us more time to ourselves but less time with colleagues. Open plan offices, ironically introduced to encourage greater interaction and collaboration (although more and more studies suggest the opposite outcomes), are resulting in people withdrawing behind headphones into their own bubbles. Longer working hours mean that people have less time and inclination for a chat over lunch or indeed for a drink after work.
Whilst the reduction of the 80s and 90s workplace drinking culture has probably done much for productivity and livers alike, it is unlikely to have enhanced levels of camaraderie. Hot desking will doubtless inspire conversations with colleagues from different functions and divisions, it is unlikely to foster deep and lasting friendships. It’s fairly clear that the increase in contract work and the gig economy will also challenge issues such as shared purpose. Similarly, as job-to-job flows – voluntary labour turnover – increases (the Bank of England suggested in September that such levels were now back to pre-crisis times), then again, we are likely to move around more and see less and less of the same colleagues.
And spending more time on social media doesn’t make us more social – of the 300 or so friends I have on Facebook, it’s years since I’ve actually seen the great majority of them – in the words of MIT Professor, Sherry Turkle, we’re ‘alone together’ with such people on social media.
And whilst people are, quite rightly, increasingly vocal about their gender, ethnicity and sexuality within a workplace context, the same is not the case with loneliness. Ironically, loneliness tends to be something we keep to ourselves. The Mind/Totaljobs’ research suggested that 30% of women and 39% of men are unwilling to bring the subject up.
But if undoubtedly sad, what difference does this sense of isolation mean at work?
Very simply, it’s hard to create much of a team dynamic on our own. According to Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, ‘Motivation comes from working on things we care about and from working with people we care about’.
Similar thoughts too from Neuroscience Researcher, John Cacioppo, ‘Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people. It’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else’.
The challenge, then, is for employers and employees alike to create a more collaborative working environment, where people, all people, feel included and part of a shared purpose. And where they have the time, the environment and the encouragement to share such purpose.
And employers and employees alike get to benefit. For California State University, if an employee feels lonely, this tends to trigger an emotional withdrawal from their work and a decrease in commitment.
And a final uplifting note. According to former US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, loneliness at work is a growing health epidemic and a greater threat than even obesity. Being lonely at work can be the equivalent in life expectancy terms of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
As we live increasingly busy, fragmented, flexible, transient lives, our connection with fellow travellers can grow more and more tenuous. The upside of a workplace which realises this and which actively encourages more togetherness, more common goals and more inclusion can be of much more significant benefit to employee and employer alike than perhaps any of us have realised.
It’s hard to think that a solution that will benefit recruitment, retention, engagement, collaboration, culture and productivity is something few of us want to talk about.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 