Over the past year, there’s been a concerted effort by bosses to get employees back in the office.

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While there’s been an enormous amount of coverage regarding employee pushback to these return-to-office mandates, there’s been much less coverage of what this new era of office work actually looks like.

Which is why it was so striking to get survey results back that found that 2 in 5 office workers feel lonely at work.

That figure really stands out. It becomes even more noteworthy when combined with another finding from the report by Kahoot - that 30% thought their workplace relationships were actually better during the pandemic when, for the most part, they had zero face-to-face contact.

Three obvious questions jumped out at me when I first saw these dramatic findings. Why is this happening? What effect is this having on workplaces? And what can we do to remedy it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

The answer to the first question is an extremely complex mix of factors, all of which influence the overall picture, but I’ll highlight some of the most prominent elements.

Firstly, while we can’t disregard hybrid working as part of the puzzle, many workers are now either back in the office full time or spending more time in the office, and our data suggests people felt closer to their colleagues during the pandemic, when generally they weren’t in the office at all.

It is clear that some practices that were picked up during the pandemic (like instant messaging or emailing someone instead of speaking to them) have stuck around and are affecting organic communication.

Our survey........

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