Good morning,
The Nation’s Doctor finds that loneliness has “risen to the level of being a public health crisis,” and focusing on rebuilding social connections in the workplace is essential.
“The pandemic has had a number of invisible costs on our country,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, said during Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in Marina Del Rey, Calif., on Wednesday. “And the increase in loneliness, the increase in mental health strain, these are part of those costs, and they're invisible because we can't see them every day. But I do worry that in the rush to move past the pandemic, we may lose sight, that there are these challenges that we still need to address.”
Murthy discussed with Fortune CEO Alan Murray how the workplace has a “profound impact” on our sense of connection and community and mental health. “When people feel a greater sense of connection to each other in the workplace, it positively impacts their creativity, their productivity, and actually their engagement, which has downstream impacts on retention," Murthy said.
Relationship building
A typical strategy for a business may not always include "how to strengthen and invest in social cohesion beyond a holiday party or happy hour," Murthy explained. But creating regular opportunities for people to build relationships with each other, is "not just nice to have; it's actually good for businesses as well," he said.
For example, each week, during his all-staff meetings, for 10-15 minutes, a staff member interviews a colleague about topics unrelated to work such as hobbies, their families, or even their childhood, he said. “During those 10 or 15 minutes, we come to know people often with greater depth and feel a greater intimacy and closeness to them than we had felt perhaps in many months of working side by side with them,” Murthy said.
Some companies are thinking up new ways to keep regular meetings engaging. For example, Walmart recently had an outside-of-the-box morning meeting that put CFO John Rainey in the hot seat. “One of Sam Walton’s rules of business is ‘don’t take yourself so seriously,’ and that’s something we take seriously at Walmart,” Rainey wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. “In between the day-to-day of running the business and meeting the needs of our customers and members, it’s important to celebrate one another and laugh together—and we all did just that at our most recent morning meeting when I was surprised with an impromptu, 'Hot Ones' interview. As you can see, I experienced a wide range of emotions. I like to think that I don’t sweat the small stuff, but that last wing was hot!”
Hot Ones is a YouTube talk show where host Sean Evans asks his celebrity guests questions while they're eating chicken wings coated in hot sauce, and the sauce gets hotter each round. Rainey included photos of his experience.
“There's no substitute for in-person connection," said Murthy, the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. But he also noted that there are reasons people may need to work remotely, and being in the office alone doesn’t make social cohesion automatic and alleviate the loneliness crisis.
“If you have a population that needs to be a hybrid, and working remotely from time to time, you have to be more intentional about creating opportunities for them to build connections with one another,” Murthy said.
As retaining talent continues to be a concern of CFOs, how are you building connections with your teams? Send me an email and let me know.
You can learn more here about the topics covered at Brainstorm Health.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
