We Keep Building Culture. Why Are People Still Lonely at Work?

Belonging is not created by proximity, perks, or a full social calendar. It grows from how people experience one another—and the organization—while doing the work

Written by: Adelee Penner

Abstract

Organizations spend extraordinary amounts of time trying to build culture. We articulate values. Plan retreats. Create staff events. Develop recognition programs. Redesign offices. Bring people together. And increasingly, ask employees to return to those offices partly in the hope that proximity will restore connection. Yet workplace loneliness remains. Current research suggests one reason may be that we have confused being together with belonging together. Loneliness is not simply the absence of other people. It is the subjective experience that the relationships we have do not match the quality or quantity of connection we need. People can therefore work alone without feeling lonely, and sit in a crowded workplace feeling profoundly disconnected. Recent research also gives us a more useful way of thinking about organizational culture. Culture is not only the values an organization espouses. It includes the deeper meaning people attach to organizational norms, while climate reflects what people infer from the decisions, behaviours, priorities, and practices they experience every day. Perhaps the leadership question is therefore not: How do we get people together more often? It may be: What are people repeatedly experiencing here that tells them whether they are known, trusted, included, needed, and connected? That question changes the culture conversation.

We talk about organizational culture a lot. Probably more than we ever have. Culture appears in strategic plans. Recruitment materials. Leadership meetings. Employee surveys. Retention strategies. Office designs. Onboarding. Wellness initiatives. There are culture committees. Culture surveys. Culture days. Culture decks. Culture-building activities. And after several years of disrupted work arrangements, there is renewed interest in getting people physically together because somewhere underneath the return-to-office conversation is often an understandable concern: People need one another. I agree. I am just less convinced that putting people in the same place necessarily solves the problem. Because people can sit ten feet apart for eight hours a day and barely know one another. They can attend every staff meeting and never feel safe enough to ask for help. They can receive a hundred messages and still feel as though nobody has actually spoken with them. They can participate in every team-building activity and still wonder whether their contribution matters. They can work for an organization whose mission they genuinely believe in and feel profoundly disconnected from the people around them. That is the part of workplace loneliness I think leaders need to understand better.

Loneliness Is Not the Same Thing as Being Alone

This distinction is foundational. Bryan and colleagues define loneliness as a subjective dissatisfaction created by a mismatch between the relationships someone wants and those they actually experience. Their mixed-method systematic review and meta-analysis examined 49 studies and found workplace loneliness associated with lower job performance, lower job satisfaction, poorer worker-manager relationships, and greater burnout. Importantly, they also found associations with modifiable aspects of the workplace environment. (OUP Academic) That definition changes the conversation immediately. Loneliness is not: How many people are around me? It is closer to: Are the relationships available to me the relationships I need? That explains something many of us intuitively know. Some people can spend much of their day working independently and feel wonderfully connected. Others can work in busy offices and feel invisible. Solitude can be restorative. Loneliness rarely is. Which means that if an organization measures connection primarily by attendance—

• people are in the building,
• people attended the event,
• people joined the call,
• people came to the retreat— we may be measuring the wrong thing.

RESEARCH DEEP DIVE

233 Studies Tell Us This Is More Complicated Than “People Need to Socialize More”

McCarthy, Erdogan, Bauer, Kudret, and Campion undertook what is currently one of the most comprehensive examinations of loneliness and work. Their multidisciplinary review identified 213 articles containing 233 empirical studies across management, organizational psychology, sociology, medicine, and related disciplines. They integrated those findings into a model examining antecedents, mediators, outcomes, moderators, and interventions—including influences operating across employees, teams, and leaders. (Sage Journals) That scale matters because it makes one thing difficult to maintain: the idea that workplace loneliness has one obvious cause. The research literature includes issues involving relationships, work characteristics, leadership, status, remote work, ostracism, organizational support, team processes, and individual differences. Sarah Wright's 2025 review of the rapidly developing literature makes another striking observation: 74% of the work-loneliness articles identified in the broader review had been published since 2020. She also cautions that the field still struggles with conceptual and measurement inconsistencies, so leaders should resist simplistic prescriptions. (ScienceDirect) In other words: We know enough to say workplace loneliness matters. We know enough to say working conditions and relationships matter. But we should be very cautious about declaring that one organizational intervention—returning to the office, adding social events, creating buddy programs, or increasing digital contact—will somehow solve it. Loneliness is relational. And relationships exist inside systems.

Remote Work Did Not Invent Loneliness

It certainly changed some of the conditions around it. And for some people, remote work can contribute to isolation. But I think organizations should be careful about turning loneliness into an argument against flexible work. Gajendran, Ponnapalli, Wang, and Javalagi's 2024 meta-analysis offers a useful corrective. Their model found two opposing pathways associated with greater remote-work intensity. Remote work can increase autonomy. It can also increase isolation. Those two pathways can affect the same employee outcomes in different directions. (Wiley Online Library) That complexity matters. If an organization responds: People are isolated, therefore everyone should return to the office, it may strengthen one relational condition while reducing another important psychological resource: autonomy. And being in the office still does not guarantee a high-quality relationship. We are back to the same problem. The question cannot merely be: Where are people working? It also needs to be: What happens relationally when they work?

More Contact Is Not Necessarily More Connection

This may be another assumption worth interrogating. Modern workplaces rarely suffer from a lack of communication. We have email. Messaging. Video calls. Project-management platforms. Shared documents. Notifications. Chats. Channels. Meetings. Meetings about meetings. Many of us are in almost continuous contact. Yet contact and connection are different experiences. Recent research by Hou and Cai involving 531 public-sector employees found empowering leadership associated with lower workplace loneliness, partly through employees' confidence in their capacity to contribute beyond narrowly prescribed roles. Importantly, leader-member conversational quality strengthened that relationship. (Frontiers) The distinction is significant. It was not simply communication frequency. It was conversational quality. Mutual cooperation. Trust. Constructive feedback. The ability for employees to communicate their needs. The ability to understand what their leaders intended. (Frontiers) Perhaps we have become extremely good at transmitting information— and less deliberate about creating conversation.

Being Needed May Matter as Much as Being Included

There is another part of the Hou and Cai research that I find particularly interesting. Empowering leadership appeared to reduce loneliness partly by strengthening role breadth self-efficacy: employees' confidence in their capacity to take on broader responsibilities and contribute beyond a narrow job description. Employees with greater role breadth self-efficacy were more inclined to engage with colleagues, assist others, and become embedded in workplace relationships. (Frontiers) That raises an interesting possibility. Perhaps belonging is not only: Someone includes me. It may also be: Someone needs something I can contribute. There is a difference between being invited to the room and having a meaningful role once you arrive. I think leaders sometimes overlook that. We try to create belonging through social inclusion while designing work that remains highly individualized. We invite everyone to lunch—then return to workplaces where people have little reason to depend upon one another. But relationships often deepen through useful interdependence. I know something you need. You see something I don't. We are solving something together. I helped. You noticed. We need each other to accomplish something that matters. That is social connection embedded in the work itself.

A Strong Brand Is Not Necessarily a Strong Relationship

LaBella and van Knippenberg's 2024 study makes another interesting contribution. They examined whether employees' relationships with more abstract aspects of work might compensate when high-quality peer relationships were lacking. They found that higher-quality team-member relationships were associated with less workplace loneliness. Work centrality—the importance of work in a person's life—could provide some substitution when those relationships were weaker. But organizational identification did not substitute for high-quality peer relationships in the way they hypothesized. (Wiley Online Library) I would be cautious about generalizing from one study. But I think it raises a very useful question. An employee can believe deeply in the organization— and still be lonely inside it. They can love the mission. Wear the logo. Believe in the purpose. Recommend the organization. And have no one they feel they can call when the day goes badly. That should matter to leaders. Because sometimes we mistake organizational commitment for human connection. They are not necessarily the same thing.

Which Brings Us Back to Culture

What exactly do we mean when we say: “We need to work on our culture?” A major 2026 review by Schneider, Ehrhart, and Macey revisits decades of research on organizational culture and climate. They make a useful distinction. Culture research has traditionally been interested in the deeper meaning employees attach to organizational norms and values. Climate research has focused more on people's shared interpretations of organizational conditions and particular outcomes. The authors argue that bringing these perspectives together gives us a better way to understand how people interpret organizational decisions, actions, and what the organization considers important. (Annual Reviews) That feels particularly relevant to workplace loneliness. Because culture does not exist only in what the organization declares. People infer culture. They watch. They experience. They interpret.

People Are Constantly Asking: What Kind of Place Is This?

Usually not out loud. But consider the questions an employee answers through experience: When I need help, what happens? When I make a mistake, what happens? When I disagree with my manager, what happens? When I am new, who notices? When I succeed, who notices? When I am struggling, who notices? When information is important, who gets included? When there is an interesting opportunity, who gets invited? When somebody contributes quietly rather than visibly, does it count? When I speak, does anyone build on what I said? When someone leaves, does anyone care? When leadership says people matter, but workload becomes unreasonable, which message should I believe? Those experiences teach culture much more powerfully than a poster ever could. This is where I think the contemporary integration of culture and climate becomes practically useful. Leaders need to understand both: What do we say matters here? and What are people learning actually matters here from what repeatedly happens? The distance between those two answers may tell us a great deal about loneliness.

Culture Is Not the Social Event

I am not against social events. Far from it. Lunches can be wonderful. Staff retreats can create connections. Celebrations matter. Shared meals matter. Play matters. Informal conversations matter. We have already talked about the importance of joy and serious fun at work. But an event cannot carry the relational weight of an entire organizational culture. Imagine an employee attends an excellent staff retreat on Friday. Everyone laughs. People talk. There is good food. The CEO gives an encouraging message about the importance of connection. Then Monday arrives. Their manager cancels their one-to-one for the fourth time. Nobody asks for their perspective on a decision that directly affects their work. Their team communicates entirely through transactional messages. An email asking for help receives no response. A colleague takes credit for something they contributed. They discover an important change through someone outside their team. Then HR sends the photographs from Friday with the caption: “Our culture in action.” Which experience is the culture? I think the employee already knows.

Culture Programs Cannot Compensate for Relational Systems That Do Not Work

This is why I would shift the emphasis away from culture programming and toward what I would describe as relational infrastructure. I am using that phrase deliberately as a practical synthesis of the research rather than as the name of one particular published model. By relational infrastructure, I mean the routines, expectations, work design, leadership behaviours, and opportunities through which people repeatedly encounter one another as useful human beings rather than simply adjacent workers. It includes things like: meaningful one-to-one conversations, shared problem solving, peer support, access to information, reciprocal help, good onboarding, mentoring, feedback, collaboration across roles, psychological safety, autonomy, and work that creates legitimate reasons to rely upon one another. Culture events sit on top of that infrastructure. They cannot replace it.

A Current Approach to Culture Needs Both Data and Meaning

There is another implication in Schneider and colleagues' culture-climate integration that I think organizations should pay attention to. We love culture surveys. And surveys are useful. They can tell us:

• how many people feel connected,
• whether trust is changing,
• which teams report low belonging,
• whether employees believe leadership communicates effectively. But numbers cannot always tell us what those experiences mean. Culture also requires listening. Stories. Observation. Conversation. Qualitative inquiry. Asking people: Tell me about a time you felt you really belonged here. What was happening? Then: Tell me about a time you felt alone here—even though you were surrounded by colleagues. What was happening then? Those two stories might tell leaders more about culture than another generic engagement score. The current research suggests we gain different insights from climate and culture approaches and that integrating them gives organizations a richer basis for understanding change and effectiveness. (Annual Reviews) So perhaps the contemporary culture audit needs both: What are people reporting? and What are people experiencing?

Leaders Are Part of the Relational Environment

The manager relationship appears repeatedly in the loneliness literature. Bryan and colleagues' meta-analysis found workplace loneliness associated with poorer worker-manager relationships, and their review explicitly identifies manager behaviour as a potentially modifiable target for intervention. (OUP Academic) Hou and Cai's more recent study adds a useful layer: empowering leadership and high-quality conversations matter. (Frontiers) That means culture cannot be delegated entirely to HR. A culture team can organize events. It cannot compensate for every employee having an avoidant manager. A beautifully designed office cannot repair chronic disrespect. A wellness program cannot make up for never receiving useful feedback. A values campaign cannot replace trust. Much of culture happens one manager at a time. One interaction at a time. Which means leaders are not merely responsible for talking about culture. They are part of the environment through which culture becomes real.

And Leaders Can Be Lonely Too

We should not pretend this problem exists only below the leadership level. A 2024 review by Lam, Giessner, Shemla, and Werner examined 71 empirical articles on leader and leadership loneliness. Importantly, the authors conclude that the evidence base still has major conceptual and methodological limitations, so sweeping claims about “lonely at the top” should be treated cautiously. (ScienceDirect) But the question deserves attention. Leadership can change relationships. People may become less candid. Power can complicate friendship. Senior leaders can hold information they cannot readily share. The person expected to support everyone else may have surprisingly few places where they can be uncertain themselves. A culture concerned with connection should therefore ask not only: Are employees lonely? but: Where does our organizational structure create isolation at every level?

TRY THIS IN PRACTICE

Stop Measuring Culture Activities. Audit the Relational Experience.

Choose one team, department, or organization. Instead of beginning with: What culture-building activities do we offer? ask six different questions.

1. Who notices?

If an employee goes quiet, struggles, succeeds, has a new idea, or needs help—does anyone notice?

2. Who needs whom?

Does the work create meaningful interdependence, or can everyone perform indefinitely beside one another?

3. Where do real conversations happen?

Not information transfer. Conversation. Where people can ask, clarify, disagree, admit uncertainty, and be heard.

4. Who gets included?

Who receives information? Who participates before decisions are made? Who is invited into interesting work? Who remains peripheral?

5. What happens when someone reaches out?

Is help available? Does asking create connection—or expose vulnerability without support?

6. What does Monday teach?

After the retreat, staff appreciation day, values exercise, or team-building event—what do ordinary organizational routines teach people about whether the stated culture is actually true? Then ask:

Where is connection currently dependent upon luck?

That may be the most important question. Because some employees will naturally find their people. They are socially confident. Established. Well networked. Similar to others around them. Other people will not. A healthy culture should not require employees to win a social lottery in order to belong.

Do Not Make Loneliness Another Individual Wellness Problem

This is another hazard I think leaders should avoid. Once organizations identify loneliness, the response can easily become: Here are five tips for making friends at work. Join an employee group. Reach out to a colleague. Attend our social events. Turn your camera on. There may be value in every one of those things. But notice where responsibility has moved. Back to the lonely employee. Current research tells us workplace loneliness has individual dimensions—but also relational, leadership, work-design, team, and organizational ones. (Sage Journals) Someone may need to reach out. The organization also needs to ask why reaching out is so difficult. Someone may need to build relationships. The organization should ask whether the work provides meaningful opportunities to do so. Someone might attend more events. The leader should still ask whether people experience respect, autonomy, inclusion, contribution, and conversation during the actual workday. Otherwise, loneliness becomes another systemic problem we ask individuals to become more resilient against.

Perhaps the Goal Is Not Friendship

I think this distinction matters too. Organizations are not families. Not all colleagues need to become best friends. Some people actively prefer greater separation between their working and personal lives. A healthy connection should not require forced intimacy. What people may need instead is something more achievable:

• someone who knows who they are,
• someone they can ask,
• someone who will help,
• someone who values what they contribute,
• someone with whom they can think,
• someone who notices when something is difficult,
• and the experience that their work connects meaningfully with the work of other people. That is not necessarily friendship. It is relationally healthy work. And organizations can influence whether it exists.

Culture May Be What Happens Between Us

Perhaps that is where I am landing. We often think of culture as something an organization has. A strong culture. A healthy culture. An innovative culture. A collaborative culture. But I wonder whether it is more useful to think about culture as something people continually make together. In every interaction. Every allocation of attention. Every meeting. Every decision. Every response to a mistake. Every welcome. Every exclusion. Every conversation. Every silence. Every moment someone asks for help and discovers what kind of organization they actually work in. If that is true, loneliness is not peripheral to the culture conversation. It may be one of the signals telling us how our culture is actually being experienced.

A Final Provocation

What if workplace loneliness persists because we keep trying to create more opportunities for people to be together instead of examining what happens between them when they are? The answer is not necessarily more office days. Nor fewer. Not necessarily another event. Nor abandoning them. Not more technology. Nor less. Those may all matter depending upon the context. The deeper work is relational. Are people known? Are they trusted? Can they contribute? Can they ask? Can they disagree? Do they have meaningful reasons to depend upon one another? Do managers have real conversations with them? When they reach out, does somebody reach back? And do the organization's everyday decisions reinforce the culture it claims to value? Perhaps the question leaders should carry is not: “How do we make people feel connected?” It may be:

“What are we doing every day that makes genuine connection more—or less—likely?”

That is a culture question.

Reflective Questions

Where in your organization might proximity be mistaken for belonging? What does an employee experience on an ordinary Monday that teaches them what your culture really values? Where does meaningful human connection emerge naturally from the work—and where is it dependent upon optional social activities? How would you describe the quality, rather than the quantity, of conversations between leaders and employees? Who in your organization is most at risk of becoming peripheral: newcomers, remote workers, senior leaders, people in highly independent roles, those working across locations, or someone else? Can employees contribute beyond their narrow role and see that contribution matter? Does your organization gather stories about culture as well as survey scores? Where are employees expected to solve organizational loneliness for themselves? And perhaps the question worth carrying into your next leadership conversation:

Where in our organization is the connection currently dependent on luck?

Let's talk again soon. Take good care of yourself. Adelee

References

Bryan, B. T., Andrews, G., Thompson, K. N., Qualter, P., Matthews, T., & Arseneault, L. (2024). Loneliness in the workplace: A mixed-method systematic review and meta-analysis. Occupational Medicine, 73(9), 557–567. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqad138 (Research Explorer) Gajendran, R. S., Ponnapalli, A. R., Wang, C., & Javalagi, A. A. (2024). A dual pathway model of remote work intensity: A meta-analysis of its simultaneous positive and negative effects. Personnel Psychology, 77(4), 1351–1386. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12641 (Wiley Online Library) Hou, L., & Cai, W. (2024). Effect of empowering leadership on employees' workplace loneliness: A moderated mediation model. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1387624. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1387624 (PubMed Central (PMC)) LaBella, M., & van Knippenberg, D. (2024). Workplace loneliness: Relationships with abstract entities as substitutes for peer relationships. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 54(10), 628–643. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.13062 (Wiley Online Library) Lam, H., Giessner, S. R., Shemla, M., & Werner, M. D. (2024). Leader and leadership loneliness: A review-based critique and path to future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 35(3), 101780. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2024.101780 (ScienceDirect) McCarthy, J. M., Erdogan, B., Bauer, T. N., Kudret, S., & Campion, E. (2026). All the lonely people: An integrated review and research agenda on work and loneliness. Journal of Management, 52(1), 283–330. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241313320 (Sage Journals) Schneider, B., Ehrhart, M. G., & Macey, W. H. (2026). Organizational climate and culture: History, current status, integration, and change. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 13, 309–335. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-020924-070545 (Annual Reviews) Wright, S. (2025). The future of work loneliness research. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 65, 101571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2025.101571 (ScienceDirect)