How benefits consultants can bring a sharper health and workforce lens to client conversations about social connection
A client may be doing many of the things associated with a connected workforce. New hires are paired with buddies. Employee resource groups host regular events. Managers hold team meetings, and employees have access to mental health support.
Yet someone can participate in all of it and still feel alone. They may spend most of the day talking with colleagues without having anyone they trust enough to call when work becomes difficult. A new employee may attend every welcome session but struggle to find their footing. Another may want support with a strained relationship or persistent loneliness without realizing that their mental health benefit is a place to begin.
This is part of what makes social connection difficult for organizations to understand. The activity around it is often visible. The quality of an employee’s relationships, and the support they feel able to draw on, is much less so.
Responsibility for connection is often spread across several teams. People or employee experience teams may oversee belonging, onboarding, and workplace practices. Benefits teams may encounter loneliness through well-being assessments or mental health support. Managers, employee resource groups, and workplace leaders may shape how employees interact day to day. Each may influence one part of the experience, but no one may be looking across all of them.
For benefits consultants, that creates an opportunity to help clients connect decisions they already make across workforce culture, mental health support, employee communication, measurement, and health care strategy.
Most leaders already understand that supportive relationships are good for people. The health evidence gives that familiar idea greater weight.
The World Health Organization reports that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness. Its Commission on Social Connection associates loneliness and social isolation with higher risks of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, cognitive decline, depression, anxiety, and premature death.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on social connection cites research associating poor social relationships, social isolation, and loneliness with a 29% higher risk of heart disease and a 32% higher risk of stroke. More recent observational studies have found associations with a 19% higher risk of degenerative heart valve disease among adults with the highest levels of loneliness and a 42.9% higher risk of incident cardiovascular disease among Chinese adults aged 45 and older.
These findings don’t establish that loneliness directly causes any one condition, and they don’t make every employee’s social life an employer responsibility. They do show that connection belongs in a broader conversation about health. An employee who feels lonely may also be managing depression, anxiety, chronic stress, or a health condition that makes it harder to participate in relationships. The direction can run both ways, and the experience rarely fits neatly within a single benefit category.
That nuance matters as clients contend with another year of steep increases in health benefit spending. Employers expect total health benefit cost per employee to rise by an average of 8.2% in 2027, even after planned cost-reduction measures. Social disconnection doesn’t explain that increase, and a connection strategy shouldn’t be positioned as a near-term cost-containment tool. But when clients are trying to understand health risks earlier and make existing investments work harder, it’s reasonable to ask whether social health is visible anywhere in the strategy.
An employee who doesn’t feel supported at work may be less inclined to ask for help, contribute a half-formed idea, or tell a manager that a workload has become unsustainable. Someone coping with loneliness outside work may find it harder to concentrate or summon the energy to participate. These experiences are personal, but their effects don’t necessarily remain outside the workplace.
The McKinsey Health Institute estimates that employees experiencing loneliness miss nearly six additional days of work each year. Research from Perceptyx found that employees with a strong sense of belonging were nearly 22 times more likely to be fully engaged and three times more likely to intend to stay for at least another year.
These figures aren’t promises that a particular program will reduce absence or improve retention. They show why connection can serve as a bridge among employee health, workforce experience, and organizational performance—areas clients often manage and measure separately.
A client may already be investing in belonging through its people strategy and mental health through its benefits strategy. A consultant can help the client examine whether those efforts reinforce one another, or whether employees are being offered moments of interaction without the conditions or support that help relationships take hold.
Work is one place where people form relationships. It’s also only one part of an employee’s social life. Both truths belong in a credible client conversation.
Organizations can influence how new employees are welcomed, whether team norms allow people to speak candidly, and whether distributed employees have repeated, low-pressure opportunities to get to know one another. Mentoring, employee communities, manager practices, and thoughtful work design can all make connection more possible.
They can’t manufacture trust, determine whether an employee feels lonely, or counter every personal and societal force that shapes someone’s relationships. A calendar full of events may create opportunities without changing the experience of the person who finds it difficult to join. Even an inclusive culture may not be enough for someone navigating social anxiety, depression, grief, conflict, or a major life transition.
That’s where benefits play a different role. Personalized or clinical support can help an employee work through what makes connection difficult, strengthen communication skills, navigate a relationship, or address mental health concerns that occur alongside loneliness.
Neither side can substitute for the other. A mental health benefit can support an individual, but it can’t correct a chronically isolating culture. Workplace initiatives can create openings for connection, but they can’t provide individualized or clinical care. Looking at both gives clients a more realistic picture of what support requires.
Clients may not need a new point solution or a separate connection program. Often, the more useful starting point is to look across what they already offer and ask where the pieces meet.
Belonging, loneliness, relationships, and social support may appear in engagement surveys, well-being assessments, employee listening, absence data, manager feedback, employee resource group participation, and mental health benefit reporting. None provides a complete picture on its own.
Bringing those signals together doesn’t require forcing unlike measures into a single score. It can help a client understand who sees which part of the issue, whether anyone can recognize patterns across it, and where responsibility for acting on those insights currently sits.
A benefit doesn’t operate separately from the workplace employees experience each day. Before focusing only on vendor capabilities, consultants can help clients look at how employees build relationships during onboarding, whether managers create room for candid conversation, and how hybrid or distributed employees encounter one another outside large events or highly structured meetings.
This distinction helps clarify whether the client is looking at a benefit need, a workplace-design need, or both. It also prevents a mental health program from being asked to compensate for conditions it can’t change.
Access, provider-network quality, clinical outcomes, privacy, cost, and global availability remain essential evaluation criteria. A connection lens adds another layer: whether employees have options that reflect the different ways social challenges may show up.
Useful questions include:
The breadth of options matters because there’s no single path into connection. One employee may benefit from hearing others talk honestly about a shared experience. Another may need the privacy of one-on-one care before joining a group or reaching out to someone in their life.
A relevant service has limited value when employees don’t understand that it applies to what they’re experiencing. Someone who thinks of a mental health benefit only as a resource for crisis or a diagnosed condition may not consider using it for loneliness, relationship strain, or difficulty connecting after a life change.
Consultants can ask how a vendor helps clients communicate about those experiences in language that feels approachable, rather than overly clinical or stigmatizing. Campaigns, timely programming, manager guidance, and adaptable materials can help employees see a reason to engage. Communication response, resource use, session participation, and employee feedback can then provide different signals about what is reaching people, though none alone demonstrates that employees feel more connected.
Utilization shows that employees used a service. It doesn’t show, by itself, whether loneliness improved or whether the benefit changed workforce health.
When a vendor presents connection-related evidence, consultants can help clients distinguish among:
It’s also useful to ask what was measured, which participants were included in each analysis, how engagement was defined, and whether the study design supports causal conclusions. Those distinctions don’t weaken a credible outcome. They tell the client what the evidence can help them understand.
A peer-reviewed observational study of adults newly enrolled in Modern Health examined loneliness alongside depression, anxiety, stress, well-being, and social support.
At baseline, 58% of the study participants were categorized as lonely. At the three-month mark, for those who were lonely at baseline, average loneliness scores improved by 10% over three months.
Engagement offered another useful distinction. Those who engaged with at least one form of care through Modern Health experienced a greater average reduction in loneliness than those who didn’t engage.
The study also looked at a different group: participants who moved from the lonely range at baseline to the non-lonely range at follow-up. Within that group, average depression symptoms decreased by 39%, anxiety symptoms by 37%, and stress by 20%, while average well-being increased by 28%.
The study shows that loneliness can shift during the course of mental health care, and that those changes can occur alongside meaningful changes in other aspects of mental health and well-being.
This data reflects experiences a client may already recognize: the employee whose depression has made reaching out feel difficult, the person whose anxiety turns a group gathering into another source of strain, or someone whose support system changed after a move or loss.
Measuring loneliness alongside more familiar mental health outcomes can make more of that experience visible.
The most useful opening may be a small set of questions that helps a client see its current strategy differently:
The answers may point to different opportunities: a workplace condition that makes relationships harder to form, a relevant benefit employees don’t know how to use, a measurement limitation, or simply a lack of coordination among efforts that already exist.
Social connection doesn’t have to become another isolated initiative. It does benefit from clearer attention across the strategies that already influence it.
Consultants can help clients distinguish what belongs in workplace culture from what belongs in benefit design, then consider how the two can reinforce one another without overstating either one’s role. At a time when every investment is being examined closely, that perspective can lead to a more useful discussion: whether employees have both the conditions in which meaningful relationships can develop and support for the moments when connection is difficult to find.
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