Work and the Future by Linda Nazareth |

January 22, 2025 Episode 128: Will Returning to the Office Solve the Loneliness Epidemic?

Will ordering workers to return to the office make them less lonely? To talk about that Linda Nazareth is joined on this episode by Jim Frawley, the CEO and founder of executive development firm Bellwether. Jim is a consultant and coach who has studied and written about the the way that in-person work might be good for our mental health.

Guest:

Jim Frawley, CEO Bellwether

https://www.jimfrawley.com/

Announcer

Welcome to Work and the Future, a podcast about tomorrow with your host, Linda Nazareth.

Linda Nazareth

Hello and thank you for joining us today. Well, it’s 2025 and one theme of the year is back to the office. I have some mixed feelings about that and we will explore those on the podcast this year as we go forward. But there are definitely some positives to being around people and interacting with them without using a screen.

Now, we’ve been hearing a lot about loneliness lately, and it would seem that being around people, even if it’s just at work, is an effective way to deal with that. But just showing up at work is not necessarily really enough when it comes to forging real connections.

My guest today has studied and written about the way in -person work might be good for our mental health. His name is Jim Frawley, and he is a coach consultant and the CEO and founder of Bellwether. That’s an executive development firm. Jim talked to me about the ways that workers can make connections at work and why that can be a very positive thing. It was a really interesting discussion.

Please stay with us to hear it.

(upbeat music)

Linda Nazareth

Well, is going back to work going to solve the loneliness epidemic? To talk about that, I’m joined by Jim Frawley, he’s CEO and founder of Bellwether. Jim, thanks so much for doing this.

Jim Frawley

Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

Linda Nazareth

Well, it’s 2025 and everything is changing. Looks like one of the themes might be end of remote work, but we’ll come back to that in a second. I’m interested, first of all, in your background, because you’re talking about some interesting topics. How did you end up doing this?

Jim Frawley

Yeah, background in a nutshell. I spent about almost 20 years in corporate, everything from executive communications to corporate training to business strategy. I jumped around, couldn’t really find my fit, was very frustrated with it. Turns out I’m very hostile to authority, so I decided to go out of my own. But I really earned my chops in corporate doing executive communications in the financial industry during the financial crisis in 2008. So I got really good access to senior leadership in terms of what are the decisions that need to be made? How do we communicate this under intense pressure? And I use that a lot, helping people

navigate through change today.

Linda Nazareth

Well, one of the things we’re supposedly navigating now is this loneliness epidemic. You see it everywhere, right? Male loneliness, or loneliness in general, we’re not connecting, screens are the problem. What’s your perspective on that first?

Jim Frawley

Yeah, I think it’s, you know, it really came to the, it’s been a challenge for a long time. It really came to the forefront with COVID, even though I don’t like to reference COVID because it was so long ago.

But what people realized, I think, during COVID was that they were stuck inside and they were forced to have conversations with themselves that they weren’t ready to have. And then when we think about, we look at what technology is telling us in terms of you’re a terrible person because I’m so great. Like we internalize these things where we just become overwhelmed with this idea of being social. We don’t know who we are as individuals. We don’t know how we present ourselves to other people. We don’t know how to be social. We don’t know how to have the small talk, how to, you know, we’re told how come up with your elevator pitch at a networking event and you have to have this script and everything’s got to be packaged. And we have lost, I would argue, just the comfortable space to be with other people with no agenda. And I think that’s an important focus point for me anyway for 2025.

Linda Nazareth

Do you put this down to work? How important is work when it comes to making day -to -day connections?

Jim Frawley

It’s incredibly important. I would say it for two reasons. It’s not just, so I put work under one of the categories of social interaction that you need. We need these micro interactions to feel part of something bigger. So when we’re having these interactions in the kitchen, we’re having these interactions with people in the hallway, whatever we’re doing, it reminds us that we have just these little tiny interactions even on the commute, the bus driver, that we’re part of a bigger community, but it also helps us articulate who we are as people. It helps us build resilience, and we nfight for the things that are important, and we go toe -to -toe and we interact with the people. We’re social beings, and so we need to interact with people in a social way, and when work takes up such a big portion of our lives, we need that big portion of our life to have the social component built into it, because it’s also, as we argue, work is such a big part of our purpose that we need to almost actively create a sense of community when we package so many things into the work that we do, our identity, our purpose, our time, or whatever else, our money, our income, everything, that we now have to actively put extra social work into that so that we can make it a more substantial and meaningful part of our lives.

Linda Nazareth

You know, before I ask you about the types of connections that we are making or should be making, I’m going to ask you about remote work. I’m actually, I have very mixed feelings on this. I’m mostly in favor of at least a hybrid workforce. I know other people feel differently. What’s your big view on this?

Jim Frawley

It depends. I’ve seen some small organizations have complete remote work and they work incredibly well. Because they’ve been able to hire people who are capable of working remotely incredibly, incredibly well. What I’ve seen is the more people go back into the office, the more the business benefits. And so there is a benefit for the individual for the loneliness component and all of this. I think the big challenge is one individual might be more productive at home is a big argument. But the collective group is not necessarily more productive as a group, as when they’re all working together in the office.

Now, organizations now have to create meaning to coming into the office. You’re not just going to come into the office, it’s sent on a Zoom call to waste of everything. So the reason people come into the office is to collaborate and to challenge ideas and to have different types of conversations with people from different departments that you normally wouldn’t see. There are a lot of benefits to the business, but there are also a lot of benefits to the individual.

You get more exposure passing the senior executive in the hallway, maybe she’s the head of marketing and that you wouldn’t normally see on a call because we’re so narrow in our groups with who we speak to, that getting more visibility in the office is a really, really, it’s a really good thing. So I’m pro back to the office to a point, but I understand why people don’t want to go either.

Linda Nazareth

Yeah, it’s an interesting point. You’re right. The visibility helps careers, but, well, is that

how we should be deciding? I mean, this is not a subject that we can really delve

into. It’s like a big question. Are we talking about people’s work? Are we talking

about how they interact?

Jim Frawley

And they’re both important, right? Yeah. And one thing onthat is it’s an important question that I ask most of my clients is, How are you defining a person’s salary? Is it 40 hours at a desk in a cube or is it the productivity that they’re able to create and how do you measure that? When you get to scale, it’s a difficult conversation.

Linda Nazareth

Let’s get back to how we interact and the loneliness part of this. I saw your article in Fast Company, actually. You talk about three different types of interactions we have. The first one is the support system. tell us about them.

Jim Frawley

Yeah, I would say everybody needs three groups of people when we’re managing change, just to give a context. Responding to change requires a focus on the individual and how do we prepare ourselves for managing change? And I say that there’s a physical component, there’s a mental component, mental preparation, and there’s a very important social component that people tend to ignore. And I think a lot of people, we call it social work, I call it social work, it’s not really social work, but it’s your personal social work.

You need three groups of social people that are going to help you as you navigate change, and it’s building your own personal resiliency. And one of those, the first one is support system. And you need a small group, never more than 10 people, probably more like five, who only want the best for you with no agenda attached. And these could be a spouse, it could be a friend, it could be a co -worker, it could be siblings, It could be parents, maybe it’s not family, right? A lot of people will automatically lean into that. So if you were to pause and think, who are the three to five people where I, when I need a push or I need help, or I need just someone to kind of put the arms around each other, who are those people going to be? So everybody I think really needs that, that support system that they can lean on when they really, really need it.

Linda Nazareth

And that is often outside work, right? Some of the other categories are more related to work. You talk about newbies?

Jim Frawley

Yeah, newbies. I think if you’re going to, the reason I love newbies, newbies, I call

them newbies, they’re new experiences. New people to challenge your belief system in

the way that you think. One of the most important parts of change management or responding to change, adapting to change is to have a belief system in place. But I argue you can’t have a belief system until you can understand why other people believe something differently, right? Beliefs are not truths. And so we need to interact with new people so that we don’t live in this echo chamber of everyone telling us that we’re right when the world just doesn’t operate that way. And I think you see that a lot with people graduating college. They haven’t been challenged in the right kind of way. They’re all kind of like -minded individuals in the same type of school, same type of people. So we need new experiences to open up our belief system to challenge what we actually believe and maybe have to adapt that and evolve our belief system over time.

Linda Nazareth

And so we’re talking about this in a work context. These are the people who challenge you at a meeting or the manager who doesn’t want to go along with your suggestion?

Jim Frawley

Yeah, in a work context, it could be that because if you’re able to articulate a belief system or to stick up for an idea that you have, the workplace gives you this parameter around the right way to do it, right? And how do you interact in a group setting or a small setting and

interact with these other types of people who are going to challenge you? That’s ultimate resilience in terms of what are you believing or what are you pushing forward in? Is this actually the right decision? And then swallowing it or accepting it when you’re not correct. That’s a big part of the vulnerability. There’s so many buzzwords in the workplace, resiliency, vulnerability, all of these types of things. Vulnerability isn’t sharing your problems over the weekend, it’s admitting when someone might have a better idea than you. And we need these new challenges. That’s why diversity is so important in the workplace. That’s why we want these different, these perspectives and histories and angles and all of these things. That’s why in -person interaction is so important because we get these different types of perspectives to challenge the decisions that we’re going to make.

Linda Nazareth

What about getting them online? If you were interacting with people through Zoom or through whatever conferencing app or speaking on the phone or email or whatever, what portion do you think you get from that?

Jim Frawley

You can get some because people are sharing perspectives. What people don’t understand about communication is that we communicate with much more than words. When you’re in a room and you just see the side eye somebody gives to somebody else who’s not on camera. Or you give the slumping chair, or you see the body language of all these people. You know when you walk into a room, and everybody’s done this, you walk into a room and you feel tension in the room, you know that there’s something up and you need to adjust the way maybe that you’re communicating or presenting your information or seeing how people actually respond who aren’t speaking on camera. There is a big collective learning that you get from seeing how two people interact that aren’t on your call. But you see how their body languages and how they respond and how people are talking about. Did you see how that person talked about that and blah, blah, blah? It’s a big component of in -person social interaction is a big communication lesson for us, as we’re looking about our belief

systems, how we communicate and how we interact at the office.

Linda Nazareth

The final category you talked about is micro interactions. You mentioned this earlier, this is the casual encounters.

Jim Frawley

Yeah, casual encounters are important, are very important because they’re very relaxing as well. They kind of separate us from our work. They are the small talk that nobody likes to do, but you get to see and connect with people on a different type of level. There are many people who interact, and this was a challenge with COVID also, is people went home, they lost all the social interaction they have for people who don’t necessarily have a support system, for people who don’t necessarily have new experiences and meeting new people who might be incredibly introverted and might not do the small little tiny letting a person go in front of you on the elevator, holding the door for someone, meeting someone in the lunchroom and saying, “Oh, thank you for sending that email,” whatever it is, these things, it’s not just for you, it also builds the collective group in a way that makes you feel connected. It builds productivity. It gets people excited. It really does help on many different human levels, not just for the work, but just from a human interaction type of level.

Linda Nazareth

So for an organization who wants their workers to get along and be productive and create

relationships, what should they be doing? I mean, we’ve seen lots of things tried the last few years during COVID. They kind of stupid online games and then coming back to the office, let’s all have free lattes and you guys stay in line and chat. What are the things that are effective?

Jim Frawley

One of the ones that I saw that was incredibly effective is people could go out for a happy hour. You invite three other people. You can’t pick the same people each time and work will give you like a hundred bucks to go do it with no work agenda.

And so I think if you’re going to be bringing people back to the office, it’s not the days of the pizza party areover. Like people who are kind of hip to the kind of false motives on saying,

“Oh, well, we’ll give you free coffee if you come into the office and yada, yada, yada.” What we’re ultimately looking to do is there are really three things that work needs to be thinking about when we’re thinking about AI and change and all of that.

Number one is social interaction. We want people to interact socially in person so that they can drive whatever with no agenda. There has to be no agenda. So just put people together, match them up. There’s a, I know one app called Bria that will just match people up in an organization just for coffee where they’re like, you both run marathons, you both have kids in college and you both have dogs. Here are three things to talk about and you just go meet for coffee. And no agenda, no kind of work and there’s no kind of pitching anything or any just honest social interaction

is a good place to start. That’s one is social. Two is critical thinking. How do we get people to think about what they want and what they believe and how do they learn to articulate this amid other people? So facilitating these types of discussions, it’s a popular training that a lot of organizations are looking to now is what’s a leadership philosophy? How do you build a personal philosophy and do that’s a really good investment that’s not the normal, right? Let’s work on listening skills. And then the third one is buying power, which I’m not going to get into, but that’s everything’s getting more expensive. People feel stressed and we’re ultimately looking to lower the stress. So understand where humans are coming from. They don’t want to commute. It’s a bigger expense. They’re losing time with their family. So how do you make the time in the office worth it for them so that they can actually feel connection with other people?

Linda Nazareth

And if you were talking to one of those workers who says, “Yes, I don’t want to be away from my family just to commute. I don’t want to go in just for a free coffee, which I can get for $2. What would you tell them in terms of trying to make them understand there’s value

here?

Jim Frawley

Yeah, there’s value. I think it’s, again, it would depend on the individual. I think we have many of us have shifted priorities over the last five years, where the need to go into the office, sit in a cube, sit in an office for so much time, just isn’t necessary when you have little kids or commuting from Westchester County into Manhattan, down into Brooklyn. It’s going to take you two hours each way, five days a week, it’s just not gonna happen. I think people are willing, people are asking now, is the money worth the sacrifice? And what is the balance now and Do I change? Do I make a change? And so the first question I would say to someone is, what ultimately is your priority today and tomorrow? And how do you look at that? And honestly, for some people going back into the office, it could be, it’s just dead in the water. They just don’t want to. And that’s okay. I would say that’s okay if that’s not going to fit.

But many of them are saying, I’ll just go get a remote job. There are no remote jobs. The remote jobs are going away. So like, I want people to have a realistic view on what their decisions are going to be, but I do think a lot of people are sacrificing a lot to work in offices, jobs that they hate for a long period of time, and they would be much happier and better off if they had gone and done something different for a little bit less money. And I think that’s fine. I think we do a lot of things just because what the Joneses tell us, we’re supposed to do. But there is a benefit to going back into the office. If you enjoy the work you

do, if you enjoy the company you are working for, going into the office, there is immense benefit to getting that social interaction.

Linda Nazareth

And I agree with you that the jobs, the remote jobs are gone, but maybe that’s not

forever. I really think this is something that’s evolving and it’s going to look

different as we go through the next one year, two years, five years. What’s your

view? Where are we going to to be in one year, where are we going to be in five

years?

Jim Frawley

It’s going , I mean, it’s almost like a new wave. Everyone worked from home for a short period of time. Now people are testing out the hybrid and some people are going to be bringing everyone back this year, I know Amazon already announced to bring everyone back into the office. Nothing is as good as you think it’s going to be, nothing is as bad as you think

it’s gonna be.

So I think they’re going to take their lessons, they’re going to see what happens. In my dark view of what’s going to happen, I think a lot of organizations are realizing they don’t need all of the people that they have. And so once they call the herd and they realize that they only need 50 % of their workforce, then there might be, you know, these 50 % of the people are the really valuable people that we’re going to keep. Then you might see some more flexibility coming back in on saying, all right, well, you’re really valuable. I know you’re providing it. We figured out it’s not the 40 hours that we need from you a week. It’s this productivity. Here’s how we’re going to measure it. Technology is going to help with that a lot. So I think that’s probably where we’re going to be in the next couple of years. Some people will get their special exemptions, but there’s going to be a wide kind of everyone come back now, and then we’re going to see what happens from there.

Linda Nazareth

Interesting times, Jim. Thanks so much for talking to me.

Jim Frawley

Thanks so much.

Linda Nazareth

Jim Frawley is CEO and founder of Bellwether.

Well, that’s it for today. If you want to know more about Jim and his work, please take a look at our show notes. You’ll see some links there. If you want to connect with me, I’m on Instagram @lindanazarethknotespeaker. I have a website, lindanazareth .com, and I’m also an X at @relentlesseco.

Now, if you did like this conversation about the future of work, please take a moment and leave a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help people to find us, and that will help keep this going.

Thanks so much for listening, and thanks as always to Stoakely Audio for Audio Production.

The post Episode 128: Will Returning to the Office Solve the Loneliness Epidemic? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

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