The Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week

Written by Gorillas

31st January 2025

The Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week

Could 2025 be the year that companies start tackling employee loneliness — both within and outside their office walls?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer may be yes. “Progressive organizations,” writes the Harvard Business Review in a recent article on nine work trends to look out for this year and beyond, “will take steps in 2025 to mitigate loneliness as they would any other business risk.”

Although many may consider loneliness a well-being issue, HBR emphasizes that its impact on a company’s bottom line shouldn’t be ignored. “When employees are lonely,” they write, “their engagement levels lag and their performance suffers. A 2024 Gartner survey of 18,000 employees revealed only 29% of employees globally feel satisfied with the interactions they have with coworkers, down from 36% in 2021.”

This doesn’t, however, mean that employers should implement a return-to-office mandate and call it a day. “Proximity alone will not cure loneliness,” HBR notes. What’s more, the Gartner survey revealed that onsite employees were actually less satisfied with their interactions with coworkers than hybrid or remote workers.

A better approach may be to target how workers interact with each other. This could involve not only identifying the types of connections that employees desire but also providing training opportunities to help employees interact more positively with their coworkers — a skill that may have picked up some rust during the isolation of the pandemic.

Additionally, some companies may want to tackle loneliness beyond the eight-hour workday. HBR cites one company, the dating app Hinge, that doles out $100 a month to employees to encourage them to go out — for dinner, a movie, a date night — to build relationships with people outside the office.

To learn more about tackling loneliness — and eight other trends that may shape the future of work — be sure to check out HBR’s piece at the top of our list below of must-read articles for talent professionals. And further down our list, you can also find out why there’s confusion around what it means to be a fractional worker; why content isn’t the future of learning and development; and why “FOBO” is the latest business buzzword.