Men, are you lonely? How your workplace could help

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Men, are you lonely? How your workplace could help’

Max Dickins
Men don’t like talking about it ’cause to say you’re lonely is to say you need someone. And to need someone is to be weak.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times with me, Isabel Berwick. In this episode, we’re asking why are so many men lonely. Isolation in the workplace is part of it and a big issue. But could employers be part of the solution? Max Dickins, who you heard there at the start of the show, is a speaker, playwright and author of the memoir Billy No-Mates: How I Realised Men Have a Friendship Problem. As well as hearing from Max in this episode, I wanted to turn to two of my colleagues for their take on the matter. Jonathan Black’s the author of the FT’s Dear Jonathan careers advice column and he’s director of Oxford university’s Careers Service and a regular on Working It. Jonathan, hello.

Jonathan Black
Hello.

Isabel Berwick
And Ethan Wu is host of the FT’s brand new Unhedged podcast and is based in New York. And this is your first time on the show, Ethan.

Ethan Wu
Yes, it is. I’m happy to be here representing Generation Z.

Isabel Berwick
You’re Gen Z. Fantastic! So we heard at the start of the podcast from Max. I met up with him in the FT’s canteen as groups of colleagues and workplace friends had lunch around us and I asked him how he embarked upon his loneliness odyssey.

Max Dickins
So what happened was I was gonna propose to my girlfriend, went as far as shopping for a ring. Someone said to me, who’re you gonna have as best man? And realised when I made a list that the cupboard was pretty bare. I worked with half the people. I thought they’d think it was weird if I asked them to do that job. The rest of these people I hadn’t seen for two or three years maybe. I just thought, where have all my friends gone? And when I looked into it I thought, gosh, lots of other guys are in the same position which kind of begs the question, you know, what was going on?

Isabel Berwick
And as you started, what surprised you most as you went along?

Max Dickins
That loneliness doesn’t look like people think it looks like. So if you met me, I’m early 30-something, outgoing, I would say, guy, it’s not meant to be me, but it is. It’s meant to be elderly people, but it affects everyone increasingly now. And I often would hear this phrase from people: “weekend loneliness”. So where they were busy during the week, everything was fine. Then when they had some space to kind of play with, they didn’t have anyone to hang out with.

Isabel Berwick
I hadn’t really given this subject that much thought, but when I wrote about it, I got a massive post by probably bigger than I’ve ever had about any other topic. Why? It’s obviously a huge unmet need. Why is this just not talked about? I know you’re talking about it, but it’s huge, isn’t it?

Max Dickins
It’s huge. It’s two reasons, I think The first one is that it’s just embarrassing. So you don’t really wanna talk about it. It’s a real double-edged sword being the face of a book called Billy-No Mates, I’ve got to say. There’s always a stigma attached to loneliness if it’s male, female or whatever. But it’s, I think men don’t like talking about it because to say you’re lonely is to say you need someone and to need someone is to be weak. And it’s one of the absolute imperatives of masculinity, is that you’re strong, you’re independent. But also, fundamentally, male friendships are different to female friendships, and we need to take that in consideration. So male friendships tend to happen side-by-side, they’re based around sharing space, sharing activities generally in groups. They’re quite superficial, casual. If you ask a man who’s your best friend, he’ll generally name a team of people. It’s modelled on the club, male friendships. Female friendships tend to be face-to-face, based around talk, a lot of emotional disclosure. Ask a woman, do they have a best friend? They’ll often say yes, they can name one. They often know this person more intimately than their romantic partner. They are quite different. So if you wanna solve the problem, you actually need to come up with slightly different solutions.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
So Ethan, Max describes a weekend loneliness there. Do you think it’s common that men have colleagues at work but maybe have failed to keep up the friendships that see them through the weekend?

Ethan Wu
I do, and I don’t think it’s necessarily just men, but you can imagine some reasons that it might be more prominent among men. I mean, you know, here in the US, the sociologist Robert Putnam decades ago wrote Bowling Alone, about how the US was undergoing a decline in social capital, how civic groups were fraying. I think this is a long-running trend in American society and one might daresay in developed countries more broadly.

But, you know, when it comes to male friendships, I do think that you had a huge change in gender roles in a relatively short period of time. And I think that’s left a lot of men with kind of an absence of social scripts in a new context. Without that kind of built-in knowledge, you know, socialised from a young age of how to be, how to behave, how to relate to other people. And I think that, you know, work used to be a place where more marriages started, you know, a place where you’d meet people, but it wouldn’t be your entire social circle. And a lot of those things have changed. You’re not going to, like, Putnam refers to a bowling club on the weekend. You’re not part of a union. You know, unionisation rates have declined drastically.

So I think it’s not utterly surprising that we’re hearing more and more people talk about a so-called loneliness epidemic, or, as Max puts it, a weekend loneliness, which I think is very apt, that it’s not that people are so socially incompetent that they can’t create connections with people when in a social setting. But it’s about what are you doing in your downtime? What connections have you been able to maintain over a longer period of time when it’s not kind of set up for you, when it requires some emotional labour to be able to maintain?

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I think that’s right, and that kind of wider societal point. And Jonathan, bringing it to the workplace, I wanted to read out a comment from a reader that I got after I wrote about this topic in the Working It newsletter. This is a man who works in financial services. He says, “There are strong supports for women in my industry as they are under-represented. I toil away, have an excellent performance review, but I’ve never had a single interaction with management outside my group and there are lots of women’s-only events. They tend to be smaller and more intimate and I know there’s a gender pay gap and women are under-represented but I believe that the policies to attempt to rectify women’s underrepresentation are leaving men behind”. And what struck me about that comment as well was that a lot of these networking events for women, you know, are an opportunity for social ties as well. Jonathan, is that something you’ve come across in your work?

Jonathan Black
Well, there’s a lot to unpack there, isn’t there? Let’s back up to the fact that this person who wrote to you is typical of many, putting lots of emphasis on what work and what the employer will do for people. And yes, men kind of feel left behind. I think managers probably do overlook it and don’t see there’s a problem. There’s this whole difference between fitting in versus belonging. And men are really good at showing that they can fit in, but they often are feeling they’re not truly belonging to the group that are there. There are sort of three levels of friendship that you want, and you really need each of them. One is some 1 to 1 relationships. Another is small groups, which I suppose could be represented by book groups or small teams that you play with. And then the third one is larger community. You may not be seeing them all the time, but it might be your entire work or it might be your old college or university or your rugby club or whatever. So having members of each of those teams can be important.

Isabel Berwick
That’s a great point. Ethan, what role do you think workplaces could play here?

Ethan Wu
Yeah. I wanna go off Jonathan’s point about belonging. You know, I think belonging comes from repeated shared experiences. Are there activities in the workplace that somebody who’s not really much of a talker can participate in and feel a sense of bonding with other people around them? You know, here at the FT New York office, we have a softball league, and it’s certainly not just all men that are in that softball league. You know, you need a variety of activities that a variety of people can enjoy with others. And there’s not just one mould that will come in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
It can be really hard to foster old friendships or make new ones. So I asked Max for some of the tips he learned while researching successful friendship networks for men.

Max Dickins
So I spoke to a guy who had loads of friends, loads of male friends, and I said to him, what’s your secret? And he said, well, my friends call me the Sherpa because I organise everything. And if I didn’t organise everything, we’d never see each other. And I thought, what a great, simple tip. Be the sherpa in your social life, so be the one who sends the text, goes over and suggests, shall we go and have a drink? Do you wanna go out for lunch? I think people are desperately wanting to socialise, but they’re not wanting to go first. And the second tip would be to kind of expand your toolbox a little bit of how you relate to people. So I was always leading with jokes, basically; banter, you might call it. I learned maybe to be a little bit more vulnerable, to talk about a variety of things, and that gives the other person permission to do the same. And suddenly you can go from the more sort of superficial relationship to something a bit more meaningful a lot quicker. And that is something you can do and start small.

Isabel Berwick
Do you think people are held back ’cause they’re worried about rejection?

Max Dickins
Yeah, I think so. If you look at kids in the playground, they don’t think twice about it. They go up and go, Oh, this person is going to wanna play with me, it’s gonna be fun. We become adults and we think everyone’s gonna think I’m weird if I want to socialise and I’m probably gonna have a bad time anyway. There’s a lot of research about that, but we know that anecdotally, right? So there is a fear of rejection. There’s also kind of, maybe we want socialising to be perfect, convenient, entirely on our own terms. That was certainly true of me and I think that’s exaggerated in a world of digitally mediated friendships.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
Ethan, I wanted to talk to you as you know, someone who’s quite new in the workforce. You grew up online, I’m guessing. Is it harder to move over into meeting offline and face-to-face and becoming closer friends? You know, is it particularly an issue for men or might it be generational? You know, people like you who’ve grown up online might find that to be their natural social space.

Ethan Wu
Yeah. I just wanna say, because I think we may have some listeners who imagine the internet as this place that, you know, basement dwellers go to and disappear into the metaverse or the internet superhighway or whatever it is. I know people who have internet-first social lives, and they really seem fully fulfilled. I do think having an internet-first social life is quite difficult and that for a lot of people’s situations, it’s not a full substitute for in-person social activity. And I think the one temptation that an online space offers that can be a little dangerous is, you know, a simulacrum of connection, just enough connection to get you through the day and make you not totally hate yourself, but not enough to really feel fulfilled or like you’re part of something broader or that you belong. One potential advantage for young people is that having grown up in the internet era, we’re used to some of the tools. But I’ve noticed just among my friends there’s a whole set of different problems that come with being young and not having, you know, grounding in in-person spaces, face-to-face spaces, growing up and being able to retreat into the internet as a teenager, you know, especially after the pandemic. Sometimes you don’t necessarily have all the skills that, you know, someone who grew up without those options might have developed. So I think there’s, you know, a bit of a transition period coming, especially as Gen Z enters the workplace. And I think the answer is people have to learn and have to adapt to a younger generation of workers. It’s not impossible. It’s just going to take some time and some work.

Isabel Berwick
Thanks, Ethan. That’s really interesting. And I know Jonathan, you’re an expert on face-to-face interaction and networking. And Max was talking there about learning to be the organiser. What would you say to listeners about moving from networking to actual friendships? How can we do this?

Jonathan Black
And also, Max was talking about vulnerability and, like, they reminded me of the wonderful work that Brené Brown’s done. It’s OK to feel vulnerable. And she tells us off as a society for trying to numb vulnerability, because if you numb that because you’re feeling shame and fear of not belonging then you numb the chance of joy and happiness and all the rest of it. So it’s OK to be vulnerable. And in that it’s about small talk with people. And I agree, the Gen Zs have grown up building relationships with people online. That is not at the same pace as if you’re having to do it face-to-face. And so there is a lesson to be learned there. And don’t expect everything to be perfect. Yeah, those first meetings with people can be a bit imperfect, and that’s fine.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, because it takes hundreds of hours actually to move someone up from being a colleague or a contact into a friend. And of course, work’s a crucial place for many of us to make friends. And Max pointed out to me how the big change in our working lives since the pandemic has affected men’s friendships in particular.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Max Dickins
So you’re looking at the moment where work has been hollowed out as a social space. Because we’re in work less often, we’re in work at inconsistent times, so our schedules aren’t lining up, there’s less work socialising. I think that affects men more than women because it’s such a crucial part of where they make friendships. So there’s this idea. Richard Reeves expressed this well the other day, the academic. He says that male friendships rely on more institutional support than female ones, more scaffolding. So if you look not just at work but across culture, across society, these spaces where friendship-making happens, especially in groups and around shared activities, they’re dying off, and work is part of that. It’s not the only one. So what can workplaces do is put on more events and get people in the office a bit more.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
Jonathan, we’ve talked a bit there about shared spaces for men. Is it true they’re dying off, are there some new ones?

Jonathan Black
Well, the shared space can be online with gaming communities and so on. And for more physical spaces, I think they’re just different. The rugby pitch, the boat building course that people have gone on, the dance classes, it doesn’t really matter so much. Say yes to everything and go and try things out.

Isabel Berwick
Excellent. I think that’s a great tip. Jonathan and Ethan, thank you so much for coming on. And Ethan, best of luck with the new Unhedged podcast, which has had a stellar first week and a billboard in Times Square, I understand.

Ethan Wu
Yes, it’s been big. We’ve had tens of thousands of downloads in our first week. It’s way more than anyone was expecting. Listeners can get us anywhere. You can get your podcast. We come out Tuesdays and Thursdays, all the top minds at the FT newsroom on markets and finance twice a week.

Isabel Berwick
So Ethan, as the price for plugging your show, you’re gonna have to give me one last tip for men to help them foster friendships.

Ethan Wu
(Laughs) I think I would say I’m glad that Jonathan mentioned gaming because this is a huge pastime among younger folks. And I think for anyone over maybe 40, it will feel, again, associations with basement dwellers or this is what children do. That’s not true anymore. Today it’s an industry that’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Professional gaming events get higher viewership than the US NBA. And I think, you know, a lot of organisations would do well to meet people where they are, especially men, because it to me fits under the umbrella of sports. Not that it’s physical, but that it’s a shared competitive experience. And I think that’s a great place to socialise, to bond, to get to know each other and to develop those connections.

Isabel Berwick
So that’s a great idea. So we’ve got a games room here at the FT HQ. I don’t know if you’ve ever been. It’s hidden in the basement.

Ethan Wu
I didn’t know that. OK.

Isabel Berwick
But it has a pool table and some board games. But actually what we really need is some up-to-date games consoles. Yes?

Ethan Wu
That’s right. We need a Nintendo Switch. We need Super Smash Bros. (Laughs) You know, this is hardware the FT can get for $250 easily.

Isabel Berwick
That’s a great idea. And Jonathan, one last tip from you.

Jonathan Black
Well, the only other tip someone gave me when I asked colleagues here about this issue was get a dog.

Isabel Berwick
(Laughs) That’s true.

Jonathan Black
’Cause it gets you out, it’s very calming that you meet people. It gives you a routine and they’re always happy to see you.

Isabel Berwick
That’s so true, Jonathan. So to give the final word this week to Max, he’s a fan of one particular initiative aimed at fostering men’s friendships.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Max Dickins
So what has been the number one intervention that’s worked worldwide for male loneliness? It’s Men’s Sheds. So it’s a thing started by a guy called Dick McGowan in Australia. So what happened was the Australian local governments were putting on these events for lonely older people and coffee mornings essentially, and no men would show up and Dick McGowan, (laughs) who in a classically sort of archetypal direct Australian way said, there’s no wonder no one’s showing up to this if they’re male. Blokes are not into this. What you need to do is shove a shed in. Get them to making men’s stuff. And everyone thought it was a bit sort of clichéd, I mean, like, OK, but we’ll give it a go, a trial. Massively successful, they’re all over Britain, they’re all over America, Australia. They really work because they are branded in a way that is accessible to men and they’re based around this shoulder-to-shoulder-style socialising. So I think one reflection I would say if you’re trying to solve this in your own workplace is what’s the branding of the events you’re putting on? What’s the content of those and what is the representation of the group that is deciding on that calendar?

Isabel Berwick
So this episode has really opened my eyes to something that’s hidden, I think, in workplaces and society. Loneliness is far more widespread than we think among men, and it’s not talked about enough.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ve heard from Max and Jonathan and Ethan about some of the things that managers can do to help men make friends through work. All sorts of ways that we can connect with each other in real life and sometimes online too. And Ethan’s point about gaming rooms is a brilliant one, and I hope people will listen to that. And there are things you can do in life, both for men and women, to foster new friendships. You know, be the sherpa in your friendship group, organise events, prioritise friendships, and don’t be afraid of rejection. You know, we all worry about that, but it’s something that’s really important.

With thanks to Max Dickins, Jonathan Black and Ethan Wu for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please do get in touch with us. I’m isabel.berwick@ft.com, or always find me on LinkedIn. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for the Working It newsletter. I bring you the best workplace and management stories from across the FT and our office therapy advice column. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. This episode of Working It was produced by Audrey Tinline. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s head of audio. Thanks for listening.