What Modern Health research reveals about loneliness — and where HR and benefits leaders can make a difference
An employee can spend hours each day in meetings with colleagues and still feel alone.
That’s part of what makes loneliness so difficult to recognize at work. A full calendar can look like connection from the outside. So can an active Slack channel, a well-attended event, or a team that talks throughout the day. But none of those things tells us whether someone feels known, supported, or able to turn to another person when they need to.
And many people don’t. Despite the many ways we can reach one another instantly, social isolation increased globally after 2019 and remained elevated through 2024. Loneliness now affects one in six people worldwide.
Explore the research and trends shaping workplace connection—and what they mean for employers.
For HR and benefits leaders, loneliness occupies complicated territory. It’s personal, shaped by far more than someone’s job, and beyond any employer’s ability to solve. Yet the workplace can make connection easier or harder to find. And when loneliness becomes intertwined with anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, or other mental health needs, the support available through work can make a difference.
This is where culture and benefits meet. One shapes the environment in which relationships form. The other gives employees somewhere to turn when opportunities for connection aren’t enough.
Bringing those pieces together begins with understanding why loneliness can be so difficult for employers to see.
Loneliness isn’t determined by how many people someone encounters. It reflects the difference between the connection a person wants and the connection they feel they have.
Social isolation describes something related but different: an objective lack of social contact. Someone with a small social circle may feel genuinely supported, while someone surrounded by colleagues may feel that none of those relationships provides the closeness or understanding they need.
That difference creates a measurement challenge for employers. Participation can show that employees attended an event, joined an employee resource group, or used a workplace program. It can’t reveal what those interactions felt like or whether employees have people they trust.
This doesn’t make participation data unhelpful. It means the numbers need context. A highly attended event may create valuable opportunities to meet others without resolving loneliness for every person in the room.
Modern Health’s research offers a closer look at the experience that participation alone can’t capture.
An observational study of adults newly enrolled in Modern Health followed participants’ experiences of loneliness and mental health over three months.
At baseline, nearly 58% of participants were categorized as lonely. Greater loneliness was associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress, as well as lower well-being and perceived social support.
Among the participants who began the study categorized as lonely:
The study also looked at participants whose loneliness improved enough that they were no longer categorized as lonely at the three-month follow-up. On average, this group experienced:
What the findings offer is a picture of how loneliness may change during mental health care. For some participants, feeling less lonely was accompanied by improvements across several parts of their mental and social health.
That relationship makes sense when we consider how loneliness often shows up in people’s lives.
People don’t necessarily seek support because they’ve identified loneliness as the problem.
Someone may reach out because they’re struggling with depression, without immediately recognizing how much they’ve withdrawn from relationships that once sustained them. Anxiety might be making it harder to initiate conversations or participate in groups. A move, a caregiving role, a conflict, or another life change may have quietly disrupted a support system.
Even when someone knows they feel lonely, knowing what to do next can be difficult. Reaching out requires energy and vulnerability at a time when both may be in short supply.
This is why another social event isn’t always the answer. The employee may need help rebuilding confidence, working through a difficult relationship, understanding patterns that leave them feeling disconnected, or addressing depression or anxiety that has made connection harder.
Mental health support can reach some of these personal and interpersonal needs. Workplace culture reaches a different part of the experience.
A coach or therapist can’t change a team culture that leaves little room for trust. A supportive manager can’t provide clinical care. A well-run employee resource group may create community, but it won’t be the right setting for every employee or every concern.
Supporting connection means understanding what each can contribute.
Many workplace relationships are built through unremarkable moments: asking someone for help, continuing a conversation after a meeting, learning how a colleague thinks, or discovering a shared experience.
No single interaction creates trust. Familiarity and mutual support usually develop through repeated contact over time.
Some workplaces naturally create more of those moments than others. Team structure, workload, manager behavior, location, psychological safety, and employees’ sense of inclusion can all affect whether interaction has room to become connection.
HR and benefits leaders might look across the employee experience for places where that process can happen:
Remote and hybrid work add another layer to these decisions. Flexibility can make work more accessible and sustainable for many employees. It can also reduce the informal exchanges that once helped colleagues become familiar with one another.
Bringing people into an office doesn’t automatically restore those relationships. A commute followed by a day of video calls may create proximity without connection. In-person time is more likely to help when it leaves room for shared experiences, informal conversation, and work that benefits from being done together.
Virtual connection also works best when it’s designed around how relationships develop, rather than simply adding more meetings. The aim isn’t to require employees to socialize. It’s to make connection possible without asking people to overcome unnecessary friction to find it.
Even in a supportive workplace, some employees will feel lonely. Their need for connection may have little to do with work, or it may be entangled with challenges that workplace practices can’t reach.
A mental health benefit can give employees different ways to begin, depending on what feels manageable and what kind of support they need:
The value of offering different paths isn’t simply that employees have more choices. Loneliness doesn’t look the same for everyone, and the first step toward support won’t look the same either.
These options also protect an important boundary. HR leaders and managers can respond with care without being asked to diagnose loneliness, counsel an employee, or become responsible for the person’s relationships.
An organization may offer all of these resources and still leave employees unsure where to turn.
Culture initiatives and mental health benefits often reach people through different channels, with different language and at different moments. A manager may encourage stronger team relationships without knowing what to suggest when an employee needs more support. A mental health benefit may include resources for relationships and loneliness but appear in communications only as a general reminder to “use your benefits.”
Employees shouldn’t have to translate a list of services into an answer for themselves, particularly when they’re already struggling.
Communication becomes more useful when it connects resources to experiences employees recognize. That could mean:
The goal isn’t to label employees as lonely. It’s to make the paths to support easier to recognize when someone decides they could use one.
Participation is often the easiest part of a connection strategy to measure. It’s also only one part of the story.
A registration count can show whether an event attracted interest. Utilization can show whether employees accessed care. Neither tells an organization, on its own, whether employees feel supported or whether their well-being improved.
A broader view might bring together several kinds of information:
No individual measure can fully capture connection. Even taken together, these signals won’t tell HR leaders everything about employees’ relationships, nor should they. They can help reveal whether the organization is creating useful opportunities, offering appropriate support, and making the relationship between the two clear.
There will always be limits to what an employer can know about loneliness and what the workplace can change.
Within those limits, organizations still make choices that shape employees’ experiences. They decide whether work leaves room for relationships to develop, whether managers know how to respond with care, whether employees can access support for different levels of need, and whether those resources are understandable when someone needs them.
Modern Health’s research suggests that mental health care can contribute to this larger effort. Among participants who began the study categorized as lonely, those who engaged with Modern Health experienced greater reductions in loneliness than those who didn’t. Participants whose loneliness improved enough that they were no longer categorized as lonely also improved across several measures of mental and social health.
Culture and care play different roles in that story. The opportunity for HR and benefits leaders is to help them work in concert: creating space for connection where work can influence it and offering support for the parts of loneliness that workplace culture alone can’t reach.
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