Explore the evidence linking workplace connection to employee health and performance, the trends changing how people connect, and how employers can respond.
An employee can move from a team meeting to a manager check-in, respond to messages throughout the day, and collaborate with colleagues on a shared document. From the outside, their workday appears full of interaction. Yet none of those moments necessarily gives them the sense that someone knows them, supports them, or would notice if they were struggling.
That distance between contact and connection has always existed. But changes in how work gets done may be making it easier to overlook.
More tasks can now be completed without the interactions that once happened naturally throughout the workday. Distributed teams have fewer unplanned encounters. Growing expectations for output and responsiveness can leave less room for conversations without an immediate purpose. These shifts can bring greater speed and flexibility while also changing where relationships form and how they’re sustained.
“Connection shapes how people feel, work, and stay well,” says Dr. Mary Odafe, licensed clinical psychologist and clinical and scientific affairs liaison at Modern Health. “Research increasingly links it to mental and physical health, as well as engagement, attendance, teamwork, and retention.”
Understanding that evidence begins with a distinction between two related experiences.
Loneliness is the feeling that arises when there’s a gap between the connection someone wants and the connection they experience. A person can feel lonely while surrounded by colleagues, friends, or family. Approximately one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness.
Social isolation describes a lack of contact, relationships, or participation. Someone can have few social interactions without feeling lonely. Globally, approximately one in five people experiences social isolation.
The two can overlap, but they don’t always. Meeting counts, event attendance, and message volume can show whether contact occurred. They can’t tell an employer whether those interactions gave people the quality of connection they wanted or needed.
That distinction changes what leaders may want to look for. The question isn’t simply whether employees have opportunities to interact. It’s also whether the way work is designed gives relationships, trust, and mutual support room to develop.
For someone experiencing loneliness, the effects may extend beyond an unpleasant feeling at the end of a quiet day. The experience can be intertwined with how they sleep, cope with stress, care for their physical health, or find the energy to reach out to someone else.
Research is making those connections more visible. Among people with high levels of loneliness, 53% report fatigue and 48% report headaches, compared with 24% and 25%, respectively, among people with low levels of loneliness. Poor social relationships, social isolation, and loneliness have also been associated with a 29% higher risk of heart disease and a 32% higher risk of stroke.
The evidence also links disconnection with longevity. Loneliness is associated with a 14% higher risk of early death, while social isolation is associated with a 35% higher risk. An advisory from the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General compared the mortality impact of social disconnection with smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
These findings don’t mean loneliness causes every health concern with which it’s associated, or that a workplace initiative can resolve a complex health experience. They do place connection within a broader workforce health conversation.
“Social activities alone aren’t a solution to complex mental or physical health needs,” says Dr. Odafe. “But when disconnection can affect well-being, it deserves consideration alongside other factors that influence workforce health.”
Loneliness is deeply personal, but some of the conditions around it can surface in outcomes organizations already monitor.
Twenty-two percent of employees globally report feeling lonely during much of the previous day. Research from the McKinsey Health Institute found that lonely employees miss nearly six additional workdays each year. Workplace loneliness has also been associated with lower performance and greater burnout.
The relationship isn’t one-directional or simple. An employee who feels disconnected may find it harder to ask for help, contribute an uncertain idea, or recover from a difficult interaction. Burnout, health challenges, or an unsupportive team environment may also make it harder to maintain relationships. Over time, these experiences can reinforce one another.
Positive work experiences may offer some protection. Gallup found that engaged employees were 64% less likely to feel lonely than employees who weren’t engaged. Employees who felt their opinions mattered were 39% less likely to feel lonely.
Employers can’t prevent every experience of loneliness. People’s relationships and circumstances extend well beyond work. Still, the evidence gives HR and benefits leaders reason to consider connection when they examine attendance, engagement, collaboration, trust, and retention—and to look beyond visible interaction when assessing how employees are doing.
People haven’t stopped valuing connection. What’s changing are some of the conditions that made it more likely to develop during the workday.
Remote and hybrid work remain far more common than they were before the pandemic. Among college-educated, full-time employees across 40 countries, 25% of workdays are now performed from home. In the U.S., the share of paid workdays completed from home is roughly five times its pre-pandemic level.
For many hybrid and remote employees, that means fewer conversations before a meeting, over lunch, or while working through a problem. Individually, those moments may seem incidental. Repeated over time, they can help people learn how a colleague thinks, find common ground, and build enough trust to ask for help.
Recent Gallup data show that nearly one in four fully remote and hybrid employees experienced loneliness during much of the previous day, compared with 18% of remote-capable employees working on-site. Yet exclusively remote and hybrid employees also reported higher engagement than both remote-capable and non-remote-capable employees working on-site.
Both findings can be true. Flexibility can improve employees’ lives while distributed work reduces some informal opportunities to build relationships. The implication isn’t that employers should reverse flexible work arrangements in the name of connection. It’s that distributed teams may benefit from more deliberate opportunities to build familiarity, exchange ideas, and develop trust.
When an employee encounters a blank page or unfamiliar task, a colleague is no longer the only available thought partner. AI can offer an immediate answer without requiring anyone else’s time or exposing uncertainty to another person.
That convenience can improve productivity. It may also remove some of the low-stakes exchanges through which colleagues teach one another, test ideas, and build working relationships.
Evidence about AI and workplace connection is still developing. A recent international study of social-chatbot use found that greater use predicted increased loneliness over time, while people who felt less connected were also more likely to turn to chatbots later. The research didn’t examine workplace productivity tools, so it can’t tell employers that using those tools will increase loneliness. It does offer an early view of the potentially bidirectional relationship between AI use and human connection.
Deloitte’s research on AI and cultural debt likewise identifies loneliness and reduced well-being as possible consequences when organizations adopt AI without enough attention to its effects on culture. Yet only 42% of workers said their organization measures how AI affects people.
Employers don’t have to preserve every interaction simply because a person once performed the task. A more useful consideration is which interactions do more than transfer information. If an exchange also helps employees learn, build trust, or feel comfortable seeking support, leaders may want to consider how that value will be preserved as the task changes.
Connection can also become harder when the workday leaves little capacity for it.
Modern Health’s 2026 workforce research points to an environment of rising expectations and constant availability. Seventy-two percent of employees said their employer prioritizes productivity over well-being, an increase of 11 percentage points from the prior year. Fifty-seven percent felt pressure to respond to work messages outside working hours.
“These findings don’t measure connection directly, but they highlight conditions that can make it harder to sustain,” explains Dr. Odafe. “When employees are expected to maintain a high level of output and responsiveness, conversations can become more transactional. People can communicate all day without feeling known, supported, or comfortable asking for help.”
An employee may be responsive in every channel while having little time or energy to exchange ideas without an immediate deliverable, learn what a colleague is carrying, or notice that someone has begun to withdraw.
Adding social activities to an already crowded calendar may do little to change that experience. Organizations might instead look at the moments when trust and relationships are especially important: onboarding, manager check-ins, team transitions, periods of organizational change, and work that depends on learning or collaboration. Protecting some room for human interaction in those moments can make connection part of how work gets done rather than one more demand placed on employees.
The trends shaping connection don’t sit within a single HR function. Work design affects whether employees have time and reason to interact. Team culture shapes whether those interactions feel safe and supportive. Managers influence the day-to-day experience, but they can’t be expected to serve as counselors or manage employees’ relationships. Benefits can support someone when loneliness occurs alongside anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, or other needs that a workplace practice can’t resolve.
Looking across those areas can help employers see where their organization has influence without assuming responsibility for eliminating loneliness.
For work design and culture, that may mean considering whether team routines make room for genuine check-ins, whether new employees have help finding their footing, and whether important collaborative moments are being lost as work changes. Structured opportunities can make relationships easier to begin, although attendance alone won’t show whether meaningful connection developed.
For managers, the aim is less about asking them to identify loneliness and more about helping them build trust, notice meaningful changes in behavior, respond with care, and guide employees toward appropriate resources when needed.
For benefits, availability is only the beginning. Employees also have to understand what support exists, how different resources fit different needs, and where to start. Participation data can show whether people reached a program. It can’t show on its own whether they felt more supported or whether the care addressed the concerns connected to their loneliness.
A broader view brings these pieces together: the conditions that make relationships easier to build, the support available when someone is struggling, the communication that helps employees find that support, and the measures that show more than activity alone.
No single program can create connection for every employee. But employers can protect the moments that help relationships develop and make it easier for people to find meaningful support when workplace connection isn’t enough.
Modern Health’s research found that loneliness decreased alongside anxiety and depression during care. Explore what those outcomes reveal and how employers can support connection through workplace culture, mental health benefits, thoughtful activation, and measurement.
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