There’s a conversation happening in HR and People circles that deserves more attention.
It’s not about engagement scores or retention strategies, though both are connected to it. It’s about something quieter, and in our experience considerably more corrosive to a strong, profitable company culture.
Loneliness at work. And, specifically, where it tends to hide and who’s carrying the heaviest load.
The data is hard to ignore
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report (with data collected throughout 2025 across more than 140 countries) found that loneliness continues to rise. In the US and Canada, half of all employees now report significant daily stress (where loneliness is a factor). This is the highest rate anywhere in the world.
Buried inside that headline is a finding that rarely surfaces in leadership conversations: middle managers are among the loneliest and most stressed of all; often more so than the people they manage.
A major 2025 review published in the Journal of Management, All the Lonely People, synthesized 233 empirical studies on workplace loneliness. The findings are worthy of exploration. Researchers from the University of Toronto, Portland State, and the University of Exeter found that the effects of loneliness in leadership don’t stay contained. Lonely managers are not only less effective but also their disconnection actively harms the well-being and productivity of the people around them. That means those they manage!
As the researchers explain:
“Ultimately, the effect of increased digital connectivity and decreased face-to-face interactions, along with growing competitiveness and pressure in society, has served to isolate individuals in both their personal and work lives…This is deeply concerning, as humans have a fundamental need for interpersonal connections and belongingness.”
All the Lonely People also found that stress and loneliness reinforce each other in a feedback loop.
Stress becomes a barrier to receiving support, which deepens isolation, which compounds stress. For middle managers, who are structurally exposed to both isolation and stress in generous quantities, this cycle can become self-sustaining. Sadly, it’s largely invisible to the people above them.
A middle manager’s typical day
Picture a typical Tuesday.
7am emails before the school run. A 9am with the leadership team where the message is clear: do more, with less, and do it faster. Back-to-back calls through lunch. A one-to-one with a team member who’s struggling. The manager listens, supports, tries to hold space, and, most likely, absorbs their stress. An afternoon of performance admin. A late message from their senior director asking for something by the end of play.
At no point did anyone ask how the manager was doing. At no point were they treated as a peer, rather than a function. They were a conduit for information, for pressure and for someone else’s anxiety, and rarely the recipient of the kind of genuine human connection that makes work feel worthwhile.
This isn’t unusual. For many, it’s simply another Tuesday.
Most organizations, when they recognize this problem, reach for familiar tools. A leadership development program, a well-being initiative or a pulse survey to measure the problem they’re not quite sure how to fix, or define.
All these tools have their place. But they rarely address the underlying deficit, which is simply the experience of feeling genuinely connected to other people in a shared moment.
There’s a magical power in saying “I see you.” “I see your contribution.” “I recognize you.”
What we’ve observed at SongDivision across thousands of events, in organizations of every size and sector for the last 22 years, is that shared creative experiences do something that structured programs rarely achieve. When a manager participates as a contributor rather than an organizer, as an equal creative voice rather than the person responsible for the outcome, a shift can happen.
They’re seen differently by their team. More importantly, they have a chance to see themselves differently. And that recalibration, however brief the moment that sparked it, tends to have a longer tail than anyone expects.
It can be genuinely transformational, for them, for their team and for the business.
All the Lonely People concludes,
“By fostering a culture that prioritizes connection and empathy, organizations can enhance employee well-being, boost morale, and ultimately drive productivity, profits and organizational success.”
Our point? The people holding your culture together may be the ones most in need of some good old-fashioned human connection.
That seems worth designing for.
