WORK FRIENDS CAN BE HARD TO FIND. HOW TO COMBAT LONELINESS IN THE WORKPLACE

Twice each month, executives at the dating app company Hinge gather for a team meeting. But rather than dive into discussions about metrics or revenue, they begin by simply talking.

For the first 30 minutes of the two-hour meeting, these coworkers reveal hopes and anxieties — what they worry about, what they’re grateful for, what they’re feeling. Even at a company focused on connecting people, forging real relationships in the workplace takes effort, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod told an audience at the South by Southwest conference earlier this year. He was co-presenting at the event with Ann Shoket, whose initiative to combat workplace loneliness is called “10 Minutes to Togetherness.”

As America navigates what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy described last year as a loneliness epidemic, employers and employees across the country are trying to address what for many people is a lack of real friendships at work.

REMOTE MEETINGS OF `LITTLE HEADS IN SQUARES’

The problem of loneliness has been bubbling for decades; Robert D. Putnam documented it in his groundbreaking book “Bowling Alone” nearly a quarter-century ago. Remote work has only intensified the problem, for extroverts and introverts alike, says leadership expert Michael Bungay Stanier, author of “How to Work with (Almost) Anyone.”

“People have this desire to be seen and be heard,” Bungay Stanier says, but on video calls, the group gets right to the business at hand rather than having the natural, informal interactions of a real room. It reduces people to “little heads in squares.”

It’s not easy to talk about this lack of friendship at work “because it feels like a shameful confession,” Bungay Stanier says. But his clients are beginning to bring up the subject.

Awkward as it may be, these are conversations worth having, according to psychology professor Laurie Santos, creator of Yale University’s well-known class “The Science of Well Being.”