Loneliness has been on the rise in the U.S. for decades. By one estimate, more than two out of three working adults consider themselves lonely. 

This ‘epidemic,’ as it’s been called by the U.S. Surgeon General, among others, comes at a significant economic cost, in the form of lost productivity at work and increased spending on physical and mentalhealthcare. Medicare alone spends an extra $6.7 billion per year caring for socially isolated older adults, according to AARP.

The health insurer Cigna has been crunching the numbers on loneliness in the workplace. “Lonely workers had significantly higher rates of stress-related absenteeism,” said Anne Bowers, a senior health-services researcher with Cigna. “They missed more than five additional work days per year than workers who are not lonely. They were twice as likely to report intention of quitting their jobs in the next twelve months.”

Bottom line, said Bowers: “We found that loneliness costed employers approximately $154 billion annually, substantially contributes to worker job-withdrawal and has negative implications for organizational effectiveness and costs.”

There’s a cost to those experiencing loneliness as well. 

Esther Prentice is 36 and lives with her cat in a small apartment in Portland, Oregon. She’s experienced depression and loneliness since childhood, and plays piano to keep her spirits up.

She’s passed through a series of service jobs over the years, some better for her loneliness than others.

“I worked in special ed as a teacher’s aide,” said Prentice. “That job was fairly good for my mental health, because of the relational aspect, caring for people and seeing the struggles that other people were going through. I felt connected.”

She’s also had some really bad jobs, she said, like working as a bus driver for the city’s public transit system. “That was the worst not only job, but the worst thing I’ve ever done for my mental health,” said Prentice. “The level of stress, while also being sedentary, and you are alone.”

She lasted several years in the job. One thing that helped her make it that long, she said: “I will never forget what other drivers did for me, and the feeling of, like, brothers in arms.”

Employers can help mitigate some of the loneliness people experience at work, according to Norway-based author and human connection consultant Unni Turrettini.

“At the weekly team meeting, for example,” she said, “if you take five or ten minutes — and this can be remote or in-person — and you just go around, and have one person each week that gets to share something about their life that most people don’t know about them, something that is perhaps not work-related. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, it doesn’t have to be deep. That makes people feel seen and heard and valued.”

Fostering interpersonal connections among coworkers is becoming more challenging, said Turrettini, in an an era of work-from-home and nonstop screens. “There’s something missing when we’re in Zoom,” she said. “It’s the body language — all those subtle ways of communication that we’re missing online.”

Turrettini recommends scheduling teams to come to work in-person on a regular basis to improve productivity and morale. “People need to be working together in the office at the same time, so spontaneous interactions and idea-creation and brainstorming can happen,” she said. “We need to have those interactions. Innovation happens in community, it happens through friction, discussions, disagreements.”

According to Anne Bowers, Cigna’s research has found that “workers who had the job resources of social companionship, good work-life balance, and satisfaction with communications were 53% less likely to be lonely than other employees. Creating a healthy work-life balance for employees is very important—doing the flexible work schedules and email blackout periods, these can all foster better balance.”

Sometimes, it’s the job itself you have to get right, to break the loneliness.  

Esther Prentice found the one for her: she’s now a barber in a small salon.

“I love being at work,” she said. “I have my hour with each person. They’re there to be cared for. They’re getting their head shampooed, and for some people it’s the first time that they’ve been cared for and they’ve been touched in a while, which can be very powerful. It’s a little bit of connection for both people for an hour, that is extremely good for my mental health.”

It keeps her on an even-enough keel to keep coming back to work, day after day.

Additional reporting by Trina Mannino