There is an "epidemic of loneliness" that is sweeping across the world, especially in the workplace after the Covid pandemic with six in 10 people with less than five years of work experience feeling lonely all or most of the time, according to a 2023 Glassdoor report. Employees' social lives are yet to recover from the pandemic and one in four people say that companies are more antisocial now than they used to be.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says he has a "brilliant" solution for this.
Speaking with Wharton psychologist Adam Grant during his ReThinking podcast, Chesky suggested bosses find two employees who perform well together and put them on the same team.
“I often do pair people,” he said. “Four years ago, we hired two creative directors. They worked together as like a duo... It worked so well that I started thinking about this notion of duos in other areas.”
The Airbnb CEO shared that what had started off as a productivity strategy turned into something more in time.
“Sometimes it’s just hard for one person to be a unicorn, to be able to do everything, but if you could create duos, they could cover each other’s strengths,” CNBC quoted him as saying on the podcast. “So giving people a shared journey to be on together I think is really important... It’s a brilliant idea.”
Responding to this, Grant said that having one friend at work is enough to significantly reduce the odds of loneliness. “And what really hit home for me... was the idea that I don’t always need to have a deep connection with everybody on my team. I need to have one person who I know has my back, who relies on me, as well as being someone that I can rely on,” the psychologist said. “I think that we’ve designed so much of work around teams that we’ve overlooked the importance of relationships of pairs,” he continued.
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