Fighting Workplace Loneliness By Design - with Nigel Oseland
How do our workplaces and practices impact loneliness? How can you design for connection of all kinds? In 2019, 61% of U.S. working adults reported experiencing loneliness, which is tied to decreased productivity, work satisfaction and turn over. Yet, we rarely ask the question of how to design for connection in our workplaces as a priority. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Nigel Oseland who shares design strategies for fostering four types of connections in the work environment!
Dr. Oseland is an environmental psychologist, workplace strategist, change manager, researcher, author, and international speaker. He works with his clients to redefine their work styles, and create cost-effective, space efficient workplaces that enhance concentration, collaboration, and creativity. I was first introduced to his work through the Centre of Conscious Design. His lessons about loneliness and the workplace are exciting and important. We hope you enjoy this episode!
Episode Show notes
(Transcript from our interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.)
Erin: So, I want to start with just talking about sort of what your earliest memory was, when you think of a place of connection growing up, what comes to mind?
Dr. Nigel: I think it goes back to my days of walking, hiking, and camping. As a child, I was a cub scout, and then a venturer scout. I met a lot of friends through that. Where I was brought up in the Midlands, we were only two hours from Wales, which has got lots of mountain ranges. Most weekends we would spend walking, hiking and camping in Wales. So, for me, you know, there's always an image of mountains and lakes and blue sky, although it did rain a lot, but you don't remember that bit. You actually do remember. I do remember putting that tent up in really bad weather. For me, I think, being outdoors has always been attractive and nowadays, I'm into my mountain biking. So quite often, I'll spend weekends away cycling in the mountains.
It started with scouts and being part of the troop and, obviously you’re chaperoned and so on, but then later on, it just became with groups of friends and ex-scouts and then it became just a group of us, who used to enjoy going camping. Then [at] university I met up with some rock climbers, so occasionally we'd go climbing, actually they introduced me to some quite decent mountains as well, proper mountaineering with gear and ropes, but it is a bit scary.
Erin: That's awesome. So, talk about sort of, how you got to where you are today from, you know, what you just talked about; spending a lot of time outdoors to this counter we oftentimes think of as the workplace and spending time thinking about the workplace. How did you first kind of get into this field? Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Dr. Nigel: If I tell the truth, it's quite a long story. Sometimes I'll give people the edited highlights, but I'll tell you where it all started. Actually, at school, I didn't go on into what we call A Levels, an advanced kind of exams at school. I actually left and went to college. Part of the reason I went to college is because it was what we call ‘Block Release’ that you only go for 14 weeks a year. Then the rest of the year, they put you into places to work and you get paid a little bit of money and it was for the NHS, for the hospitals. So, I was actually trained to be a physiological measurement technician. We're the people who measure things like brainwave activity, heart rate, galvanic skin response, and that's where I started. I worked at St. Bartholomew's hospital in London, teaching hospital and research hospital. I was working alongside psychologists, because I was there to do the physiological monitoring when they were dealing with patients. We wanted to know if there was a link between measuring stress and, therapy. We did something called Alpha Feedback therapy, where we trained people to calm themselves, using feedback signals from the brain. All interesting stuff that got me to psychology. So, then I went off to university and did psychology. So that's how I got into it.
After the degree, [I was] looking for jobs and I knew I wanted to do research and I applied to two jobs. One was with the Transport Road Research Laboratory. I was looking to get a job, to look at the effect of alcohol on driving, which I thought would be really fun. The other job I looked at was with the Building Research Establishment, and that was working for their human factors department looking at how the built environment impacts on comfort, performance, wellbeing, and so on. Although we didn't talk much about wellbeing there, but certainly comfort and health. So, that's how I actually got into exploring people in buildings. Then after 11 years of the Building Research Establishment, and they were very good to me, they put me through my master's degree and my doctorate. Then I said, well, I can't carry on researching the rest of my life. I need to go out and practice. What I want to do is take some of the things I'd learned over that 11 years and put them into consulting practice and help people actually design buildings.
Erin: I love that. That's just so unique. I love hearing people's stories because you're like, wow. I did a tiny bit. I was a research assistant and did a tiny bit of that galvanic skin response that you're talking about. I think that it just says so much about how you approach your work now. I think it beautifully summarizes kind of, understanding that measurement as a foundational piece, but then that want to serve and understand and call to action and to change that you talked about.
Dr. Nigel: It's a really good point. I mean, I didn't really think about it like that, but you're absolutely right. I think my consulting practice is founded in evidence-based design and it's human centric. So, it's a focus on people, but it's using data and information. This is not about gut feeling, [like] ‘oh, that looks cool, that'll work, I think that's nice.’ It's about, ‘okay, what's the data, what's the information.’ They're also using feedback from the actual people themselves, the occupants, rather than assuming, you know, how they feel and what they want. So, you're right. I think that both the hospital physiological measurement, very objective data, and then the research that followed with the BRE has definitely steered my view on how we should go about designing spaces.
Erin: Yeah. Wow. Well said, I love that. So, talking about work, I think that and sort of loneliness in this topic that, you know, sort of first introduced me. I think a lot of people think of loneliness as a personal issue and that's completely separate from work, and I'd love to hear you talk about that.
Dr. Nigel: I'm quite happy now to know that the work's being done. I'm quite happy to be on the record. I have to be on records, some of how that came about, because I was approached by Lendlease to do this piece of research, to look into workplace loneliness. At that time, I was like, so what, go down the pub, have a drink, call someone what's the problem? Yeah, I didn't get it. The reason I didn't get it is probably because I'm not affected by that. I'm quite fortunate. I don't mean I'm like immune to it. I mean, now the circumstances I'm in, I'm quite fortunate that I am surrounded by my family and I've got lots of connections and friends. [I’m] also quite extroverted and a little bit gregarious. I'm happy to go out and just meet people, talk to people I've never talked to and all of that. So, you know, the problem with loneliness is your circumstances can change. Tomorrow you might lose your family or your loved ones. You would be in a completely different situation. That's a trigger for loneliness perhaps, or you're having some change or, anything. So, when they approached me, I kind of didn't get it.
What I recognized is that it was similar to privacy. For my masters, I did research on privacy. What is privacy? Privacy is very personal. Privacy is about you controlling the level of interaction that you want. If you don't get enough interaction, you feel isolated. If you get too much interaction, you feel overburdened, overwhelmed, overcrowded, whatever. So, I kind of thought, oh, maybe it's a little bit like that, and certainly when I looked at the research, it does seem to be like that. Loneliness is different for everyone; the physical element is just one part of it. You can be sat amongst a crowd of people and feel lonely and equally you can be on a desert island on your own and not feel lonely. It depends on what you're trying to achieve, and the level of interaction you require at that time. Loneliness is a big thing in the UK and in America as well. It's on the agenda because of the health consequences, and so on. It's linked to heart disease, stress, and all sorts of things. Workplace loneliness, loneliness in the work context is less talked about. There are studies out there and certainly our study did show that there's a percentage of the population. It's big numbers again, that are in the report.
There is a great piece of research again, it's because what I did was a literature review initially done by the Co-op and Lendlease, and others, and they just found that workplace loneliness was costing our industry billions. [This is] partly because people are going sick with it and having time off or because they're having to look after people who've got it. It just means that sometimes they're just not performing so well at work, so they end up having to leave and then obviously, then they have to be replaced, recruited and so on. Back to my story, I didn't recognize it. I think a lot of managers, a lot of workplace leaders are probably in that situation. They’ve probably never heard of it, don't get it. We ignore it or they ignore it. So, the first step is really just recognition that this is a thing, it's out there, it's real and it has a big impact.
Erin: Yeah, totally. One of the follow up questions, I've so many coming out of that, but one would be just, if there's anything that you can share around the generation age divide around some of that loneliness, because I find some of that really surprising.
Dr. Nigel: It can get quite complicated as so many factors or precedents as they call them. But, we normally associate loneliness with elderly people, who've lost loved ones, and they find themselves in a situation where they're on their own. When it comes to workplace loneliness, it's probably more to do with young people, starting a new job in a new town, not knowing people around them, probably living in pretty cheap and nasty accommodation in a rough part of town. So, they don't want to go out and socialize but then, they feel isolated, they feel trapped. I mean, in my industry, the workplace industry architecture designer, it's quite common for people to come from different countries and work on pretty low basic salaries to begin with. And obviously that means then that they can't afford to be in these great, lovely places and they haven't got their belongings around them or their family. So, I think that is again, something that came out that the research was that portion of the population that we kind of don't really think about because we tend to think of loneliness with elder elderly people.
Erin: So there has been a great deal of speculation around ‘virtual vs. in person’, and I know that you were talking about this even prior to COVID related to an employee's loneliness and sense of connection. What does the research say?
Dr. Nigel: So again, you're right, because we did the research before this terrible pandemic, but what our research showed is that people who work from home extensively, are certainly more likely to suffer from loneliness. So, we got people to find out some of the standard loneliness scales, and then we looked at their primary workplace and we've certainly found a correlation between people spending more time at home or more time out in the office and loneliness. For me, it's definitely when you drill down, it's more to do with people being alone at home than people say, being mobile and working on clients' sites and traveling and all of that. Yeah. So that's what we found before lockdown and the other end of the scale, we also found high levels of loneliness for people who were in the office, but in a private office on their own. There's also a thing about ‘it's lonely at the top’, because what you find is senior leadership, they tend to have their own spaces, they lock and close the doors, or they're kind of in and out of meetings. They're not seeing their colleagues or their team, so they can suffer from loneliness. But yeah, definitely the excessive homeworking for particular people can lead to loneliness.
So again, this [is] conflicting research, because when you start looking at personality types and all of that, some people can cope better with homeworking and therefore don't suffer loneliness because of a personality or personal circumstances. So, it's like all these things, it's a matter of balance. I mean, I think the first thing is to recognize that people are more prone to this than others. So, some people are going to be seeking that interaction, socializing in the office, not just interaction, collaboration, what I need to work with my colleagues, teamwork, although the creativity thing is a big part of it. It's just coming into the office to socialize, to catch up with people and to chat and that's a big part of work, actually, and it's through those interactions we build trust, and then we go on and start to work with people. There's certainly people who are more prone to missing out on that socializing than others, and they're the ones that are going to be more prone to suffering from loneliness.
Erin: So, you talk about four different types of relationships that workplaces can foster. I'd love for you to talk about that, maybe there's four, maybe more and how should we design differently for them?
Dr. Nigel: Yeah, [four different types of relationships are] meeting people, business relationships, social relationships, and belonging. That was born out of both the survey work and then some follow up workshops that Lendlease conducted. So yeah, meeting people, basically what you're trying to do there is create spaces, where people can come together, bump into each other almost. So, we found lots of different ones, but the top four that came out of that was large tea-point breakout spaces. Sometimes it just has to be the best tea-point because when people are waiting for the kettle to boil or waiting for the cup of tea, that's when they've got a common purpose and they're start asking questions and getting to know each other.
Then spaces for activities, so again, where people come together and they've got a shared purpose, so they can do activities. It's not always about the foosball, tennis tables, or ping pong tables. Think about the people who kind of liked to play chess, cards or video games, There's other ways that people can interact together. The game spaces, they seem to be quite interesting. Then maybe those multifunctional spaces can be used for things like yoga, other classes and things like that. So, if you've got a large space, that you can use to have some kind of social events, interaction classes but make them varied. You know, it's not always about sports, there's [also] other things that people enjoy. Another big one was kind of garden terrace, becoming more and more popular now in the UK, despite our rubbish weather. People do like their outdoor spaces, which is where we started the whole biophilic thing. People do like outdoor spaces and it's just something about being outside and in that informal setting, people open up to each other and have a chat.
Business relationships as you can imagine, that's more about how you arrange the office itself. [Such as] providing dropping tables for visitors, lots of informal meeting areas, on floor breakout spaces, where people come together and chill, but that they might just start conversations, intimate, quiet spaces and so on. Things like team notice boards and when you come into a team for the first time, hopefully you will have some kind of induction and you'll be shown around the space, introduced to people, to your teammates, but that doesn't always happen, but just having something like a board with all the team’s faces on it and their names. It just means you can approach them, like what are you doing? Or if people see you looking at that board, they might come over and say, Oh, hello, are you new? Are you part of the team? So, it does seem a bit basic that sometimes we forget. You can imagine now, when some people have been working for a year and they still haven't been in the office and met their teammates yet.
Erin: The first time I heard you speak of that, I instantly thought we did this exercise as a team at HKS where we all took StrengthsFinder, and then we posted that for our teams on the walls. It's so powerful because you know, I'll have an interaction with someone or I'll be planning a meeting, we have, you know, fairly large teams and sometimes, I haven't worked with these other members. So, I go there and I look like, okay, this person's high in achiever or high in organization like input. I'm like, okay, I need to speak in that language so that I can help to meet them where they are and not like get mired in the details, or I need to give them all the details so that they fully get it. I think that, that can be so helpful to both identify as a team and build that, and then also to learn about your team members.
Dr. Nigel: I’d suggest that, and it happened when I worked for architect’s practice, we used to have every Thursday, we would down tools at may be four o'clock in the afternoon, and then we’d go to the, you know, the big boardroom or whatever, and someone would be presenting. We'd all be given a beer if you wanted it. We'd listened to someone talking and we always got someone that was more experienced talking and then we'd get a junior member of staff to do a presentation. What are they working on? Or if they've not, if they've only just joined, tell us a little bit about yourselves and what were your previous projects and that kind of thing. That gets them known and gets people noticed and okay. [Although] some people might not be so comfortable doing full-on presentations but there's other ways of sharing their working and getting them known by people. So, you know, we want to create spaces that allow people to meet each other, that might then foster these business relationships or social relationships. As as I said earlier, my other research I've done [shows that] collaboration requires trust and respect, and the way to gain trust with people is to get to know them. Normally, that's through social interaction, social relationships. So again, provide those multifunctional spaces, garden terraces in the staff restaurant. Some people might want to sit on their own, or they might want to sit in little groups of two, but also think about those kinds of large, we call them ‘Wagamama stall tables’, [where] groups of eight might want to come together. It can be daunting if you're not part of that age, which is why we don't say, just have tables of eight. Sometimes you need the smaller tables as well, because otherwise people may feel a little bit overwhelmed by it.
Then the final one is that sense of belonging. As I mentioned that the team boards came out particularly important for that, with the photos and showing what work's going on in the team and showing who's running the projects that so on. Spaces for people to bump into each other and kind of bump into each other naturally, you don't want to force it too much. You want it to feel like it's a natural thing to do. You don't want it, kind of contrived and sometimes that puts people off as well.
Erin: I think that's so well said, bump into each other naturally and not to force it and that sort of why that shared activity or that, you know, focal. So, to recap, the [four different types of relationships are] …?
Dr. Nigel: Bringing people together, business relationships, social relationships and sense of belonging.
Erin: Yes. All right. I just want to picture all of those connected back. Okay. So real quick, kind of follow-up to that is, let's say that you're, you know, a small office, small budget, what are some of those little tweaks that you can make?
Dr. Nigel: This doesn't have to be expensive. We're not talking about big grandiose things. I mean, obviously space itself is expensive, but as I said, there's no reason why a meeting space can't be used for lunchtime, social events or classes, or if you're going to put tables and chairs in there and make sure that they can be folded and they're flexible or they're on wheels, so you can create a space for yoga. Actually, back in my BRE days, where we started, we were really big into our social events. I was actually the chair of the social committee, so we were always running the events. We were running events all the time. You know, quizzes, bands, music, disco and stuff, but also the sports scene was also very big. We had volleyball, we had tennis, we had snooker, table tennis, football, and rugby. Most lunchtimes people were out doing some kind of sport or one of the other social events. I got to know a lot of people because that site had about 18, 20 different buildings, and this is real siloing, like each department had its own building and never got to know the people in the building, unless you were like playing them. Then, you suddenly realize that when you've got a work problem that you can't resolve, you think, oh, but they might know the answer because normally they were different discipline. So, that kind of social and sports event is really important. Back to what can you do? It's a small space, I said, first of all, you're probably gonna have a meeting room. So, see how you can adapt that to use for different things. You've got to organize the events or to be honest, even just be social after work, that's as good for many. Then, you know, we have to provide some kind of event and tea-point area. Put a few tables and chairs around there and make it a pleasant enough to sit there or even better, if you have got access to the outside, kind of make that available. So, you might be in a building on a business path, but you might have a picnic table outside. If you've got quick access to that, and people can take their teas and coffees out there, that doesn't cost you any extra money. It's just having that little bit of accessibility.
I think the real issue is the sense of awareness. You need to acknowledge that some people can suffer from loneliness, but they're not going to tell you that, and it's not always overt. They're going to hide it as well. It's a vicious circle because then those people seem like they're a little bit distanced from their colleagues or, you know, they're not very sociable or they're not joining in. This happens with introverts all the time as well, but that's just, their nature, I mean, there's anything wrong with them, it's just their nature. So, you have to be aware of that and you have to make the effort. What happens in the workplace is that people say, Oh, well, they don't join in, so then they don't get asked anymore. It might be that they didn't want to join in that first time, the second time, because they didn't feel confident. By the time they gain the confidence that actually, I wouldn't mind coming out for a drink with you guys, they feel like they've left it too late.
Erin: Yeah. and I think that's so good. You know, one of the questions I had was around like, what are outside of the built, you know, space? Like what are some other considerations? But I feel like you just really nailed a lot of those. Are there anything else that comes to mind?
Dr. Nigel: It’d say, because I think you have to do both. There's only so much you can do with design and the built environment, but a lot of it comes down to good management practices, good leadership and just that kind of awareness.
Erin: So, one of my sort of follow up questions, looping back to both of this, but also what you talked about at the beginning, that balance of loneliness and privacy. I remember the first time that we met, I was like, so blown away by that, because it had been something that I had kind of noticed, that balance of sometimes people need enough privacy so that they feel like they can have their own boundaries, so that then they can connect. Which is so well articulated, the difference between loneliness and social isolation. I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit more about that, especially in the context of the open office.
Dr. Nigel: The open office, well, there's a whole episode in itself, isn't it? I am actually an advocate of open plan design, but it has to be done properly. An open plan design doesn't just mean seas of desks with no partitioning at all. In the UK, in particular, the offices are becoming denser and denser and that causes issues. So, you're right, some people struggle more with being on show than others. Some of us are just better at knowing when people want to be left alone, to get on and not be disturbed, or just have a bit of peace and quiet and, and others just aren't so good at picking up on those cues. In fact, people wear headphones in the office as you know, but a lot of the time, they're not even playing anything. They just wear headphones, [signalling] ‘leave me alone, do not disturb.’ that's all it is, it's a do not disturb.
Erin: (laughs) I’ve never done that, if that's what you're saying.
Dr. Nigel: It's a good visual clue to leave me alone. So again, just give people boundaries and respect. If you can see that they're in the middle of typing an email or they look like they're getting their head down, or maybe they've hidden themselves in the corner, in a dark space and they are reading a book and that might be for a reason. I mean, if they kind of want to interact, they'll normally put themselves in a position where they are kind of accessible and available. If they don't want to interact, they'll kind of hide themselves away.
Erin: So, for people looking to design a space that, you know, has that open office component, but also supports the privacy, especially for introverts or other people that need it. What are just like a few quick tips that you could give them?
Dr. Nigel: So, as I said, if you can, don't make it too dense. Don't have blocks of eight, 10, 12 desks have blocks of four desks or two desks or six desks at the most. You don't necessarily have to put them in serried ranks and lines. You know break up the space and make it a little bit more interesting. Nooks and crannies is probably a good one. Create little pockets of interests, dead ends, small corners of space, use bookshelves, planting, screening, whatever, to create these little pockets of space and just break up the space. If you introduce desk sharing, agile working, what you'll find is that people start to choose the, the spaces that support them, that they they're most comfortable in. So, they might start to choose the spaces based on the acoustics, the lights, and so on. You can create areas that are deemed quiet areas, quiet zones. You may not allow phones in there, but again, you can support that by visualizing, by having a few higher partitions. I'm not saying walls necessarily. Break up the space, use bookshelf books, which are also great for absorption and just kind of creates a library, kind of ambiance to the space. There's something in the environmental psychology, so quite often when we go into a space, we know how to behave. If you go into a library or a church, because of prior experience expectations, you know exactly how to behave. So, you can kind of recreate those visual clues to set up, so when people go into certain spaces, they’re like, oh, this is a quiet space. Obviously, if you go in there's lots of small tables and chairs and this kind of the acoustics are pretty lousy, it's going to be buzzy, vibrant, stimulated, you know, that's not a quiet zone. If you go somewhere maybe the lighting's a little bit more subdued, maybe there's heavier furnishings, lots of carpets and rugs, then people go, oh, okay, this is a little bit more of a chilled domestic space.
Erin: Totally. I love it. So, speaking of all of these tips and tricks, you have a book coming in. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Dr. Nigel: Yeah, it's called Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanising the Office. So basically, my idea is that many of today's modern offices, they're so bad. They are so dense that it feels like you're in a zoo. It feels like the zoos of old, where the animals were on display and they had very little space. Modern zoo enclosure is completely different. Actually Judith Heerwagen has written about it in the States. She talks about how office design could learn from modern zoo design and how we can design for different species, different types of animal and give them the space and the facilities that they require to thrive, rather than not. So, what I've tried to do in the book is to draw some analogies to zoos, did a deep dive into some of the psychology and what can the psychology tell us about how we design spaces for people, but I have kept it quite high level. My intention here is a 200-page book and it's intended as something you can read on the train or whatever. It's not a book for specialists. It's a book to introduce anyone who's interested in design or even people or offices or business, to just introduce them to some design principles based around human needs.
Erin: I would just say some of the things that I hear you talk about are, you know, it's almost like, okay, well that's intuitive, but also you could use your intuition to make a completely different decision. But once you're like, no, it's actually based in research and has this foundation of human subjects versus you saying, well, I'm an extrovert, I think everybody wants to do this.
Dr. Nigel: If we're not given any information, then we will design for what we want. We're all different, and I said, the first thing is to recognize the differences. [Due to] cost and space efficiency, we tend to design for the average. So, the space is a modernist based on an average, based on the norm. Unfortunately, the norm doesn't represent everyone. When I dug deep into some of the research around things like lighting, it's amazing of the range of lighting that different people prefer, but we kind of give them this number in the middle. Then you find is that, it's only the preference of a small percentage of people. People actually want, of course, they want control over lighting and temperature and all of that. You can do that to some extent but more difficulty in open plan. If you in your own little caged office, I'm not a big fan of just putting people in boxes. You can do that at home or whatever, if you're coming in the office, actually, I appreciate you do need to focus sometimes. Even more so these days, where people are working from home, the office is about bringing people together more and more. The office has to provide that, as well as all the collaboration and social space. What it reminded me because even though I'm a psychologist, you forget this stuff, you kind of, go with the flow and you get into the norms. Then I was reading research again, [and I realized that] actually the biggest problem we've got is we're designing for the average and we're not designing for everyone. That's why you end up with 80% dissatisfaction with workplaces. Only 50% of people saying that they're productive in their workplace because we're not catering for them.
Erin: If you just had one thing, that you wish more people knew and used to design for social connection. What would that be?
Dr. Nigel: Social connection, providing those social spaces and allowing people to socialize. That meeting with your colleagues and grabbing a quick coffee. It shouldn't just be a quick coffee, it could be a 20, 30-minute coffee, but over that time, you could well be talking about work anyway. You are certainly going to be getting to know each other and socialize, and that's just going to build trust and help in your long-term work relationship. Don't think of it they're kind of not working. It's kind of part of work is that social interaction, getting to know people. So, provide the space to do that. Good coffee's important and it's got to be comfortable, but I'd say more so than ever. It shouldn't be frowned upon it shouldn’t be seen as people just taking time off work, then they're taking time away from the screen. They're taking their time away from maybe some heavy computation. But what they're doing is they're reenergizing, they're refreshing at the same time, and they're getting to know people.
Erin: So that's wonderful. Well, Nigel, I can't thank you enough for sharing your time and your story with me and with everyone. It's been such a privilege and joy to talk with you.
Dr. Nigel: Yeah, you too. I really enjoyed it.
Where to Find Dr. Nigel Oseland
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigeloseland/?originalSubdomain=uk
Twitter: @oseland https://twitter.com/oseland?lang=en
Book: Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanising the Office by Nigel Oseland