In the last week Melbourne has seen a disturbing surge in double digit increases in new cases of COVID-19. Many people that continue to work from home seem to be feeling uneasy, uncertain and are kind of living in limbo. We seem to find ourselves in a situation where the novelty of the work from home situation has well and truly worn off.
Many companies have really stepped up to support employees in the initial stages of working from home. Some have provided staff the equipment they need, allowances for increases in utilities being used at home and some companies have even been sending bottles of wine to their employee's front door monthly as a thanks for persevering with this situation! Despite all of this the problem we seem to face is that people are experiencing COVID fatigue and disconnection in a big way.
It’s hard to gauge how people are doing even when you are checking in regularly with staff. How can you really know how teams are doing when we are all working from our own respective homes 100% of the time? Yes, you can run a pulse survey but how much do people want others to know they are struggling, really struggling. Whilst remote work and isolation does not have to equal loneliness and depression, weakening social connections can be very bad for mental and physical health.
Dr Vivek Murthy is the former Surgeon General of the United States and he rather intuitively (pre-COVID) researched the role of loneliness on our health. In his newly released book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, Dr Murthy states that “loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity. Loneliness is also associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety. At work, loneliness reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making”. Wow.
As we continue to grapple with COVID-19 globally we are all aware of the importance of social distancing but are we staring down the barrel of a “social recession”, as Dr Murthy calls it? What COVID seems to be doing is uncovering an underlying loneliness problem that already existed that is now magnified. This raises the issue of how we maintain connection to others in a time where we are most at risk of feeling disconnected, experience loneliness and could even find ourselves in a “social recession”
What can we be doing to help our people feel more connected?
To really begin to help people feel connected in an isolated world we have to look for and acknowledge what others are feeling. Leaders of teams employing emotional literacy with their people is the solution. And employees need to learn how to recognise and communicate that. Dr Marc Brackett is a professor at Yale University and founder of the Yale centre for Emotional Intelligence and in his wonderful book Permission to Feel he outlines a system called RULER that helps us attune to the feelings of ourselves and others. It involves:
Recognising emotions in oneself and others
Understanding the causes and consequences of emotion
Labelling emotions with precise words
Expressing emotions, taking context and culture into consideration
Regulating emotions effectively to achieve goals and wellbeing
Using the RULER system we cultivate emotional intelligence in ourselves and our people because there is no doubt that our emotions influence our health, performance, and overall wellbeing. We can now hope that the return to the workplace for those that need it and crave it happens sooner rather than later because we know how much connecting with others makes a difference to how we feel and think.