Feeling lonely in a crowded office

Is your #office looking fuller and fuller these days? Almost hitting pre-pandemic levels?

And yet Gallup's 2026 global workplace report, published this month, found that, although physical presence has increased in offices globally, daily loneliness among workers is still a struggle. 5 years after the pandemic, with people back in buildings, the emotional state of the workforce is worse than before COVID hit.

#RTO mandates were supposed to fix this. But they didn't.

Here's what a typical day at the office looks like for most people:

You badge in. Grab a coffee. Say hello to a few colleagues. Sit at a hot desk, put your headphones on, join a call from the office, and leave by mid-afternoon.

This has a name now: coffee-badging. Millions of employees are doing it, because showing up doesn't feel worth the commute when nothing meaningful happens once they're there and they feel just as isolated as they do working from home.

Loneliness is about the quality of relationships, not the number of people around you.

And the numbers confirm this with 1 in 4 employees saying they don't have a single friend at #work. As for leaders, the people expected to create connection for others, report more daily loneliness than their own teams.

So what's driving this phenomenon?

• Digital efficiency: #AI now answers the question you used to ask a colleague. Slack replaced the walk to someone's desk. Each of those moments was small, but they were the tissue that held working relationships together. A 2026 meta-review in the Journal of Management specifically names technostress and AI integration as emerging drivers of workplace loneliness.

• Organizational changes: The people who used to hold teams together, the managers who checked in and created space for the conversations that didn't have an agenda, are either gone or stretched so thin they can barely keep up with their own workload. Research shows the #manager relationship is the single strongest workplace predictor of loneliness.

• Emotional capacity: Restructures, AI mandates, shifting priorities. When the pace of change exceeds what people can absorb, the first thing to go is the energy for connection. You protect yourself, keep your head down, and get through the week. That's survival. It's the opposite of belonging.

To be honest, I don't know what the macro-level fix looks like. I don't think anyone does yet. But I do know what I would do, and have done, as a leader, which is having real conversations about non-work related topics, checking in with my team with actual interest and consideration, and planning meaningful, quality time together as a team. Let's call this food for thought.

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Sparking Leadership # 46: a weekly series on human-centered, sustainable #leadership. Lead with spark!