The Cost of Working Alone

THE COST OF WORKING ALONE Tom McDowall on the cognitive price of isolation, and the critical value of working with others.

Think about how much has changed about work in the last decade. Hierarchies flattened, then reassembled themselves into new shapes. Career pathways that used to run in a reasonably straight line now zigzag across organisations, sectors, and job titles. Where we work, when we work, and how much of the week any of us spends in the same building as our colleagues has been rewritten, unwritten, and rewritten again, and the way we build relationships at work has changed with it.

Any one of those changes is survivable. A single wave hits the shore and the shore is fine; it's the ten thousandth that matters, because erosion isn't the story of any individual wave. Nobody stands on a cliff and watches it happen. They come back years later and find the coastline has moved.

The L&D teams I work with are increasingly fully or largely remote, and often I run a workshop and discover it's the first time some of them have met their colleagues in person, despite having worked together for years. None of them dislike working from home; most value the flexibility it gives them, and as a long-time work-from-home advocate, I have absolutely nothing against this. But, almost every one of those teams, having spent a couple of days in a room together, then makes a deliberate effort to create more in-person time. There was never a deliberate, considered decision to stop spending time together, but as the ways in which we work and connect with each other have changed, it seems some things may have fallen through the cracks.

What isolation does to our thinking

I want to be careful about how strongly I put this, because ours is a field with a long history of big brain-related claims, but there are some things that we know.

Isolation appears to degrade the quality of our thinking. More specifically, complex reasoning and effortful logic take a hit, while routine processing carries on more or less untouched (Baumeister, Twenge and Nuss, 2002). This means that we're okay answering emails, Slack messages, and anything else that comes our way, but the harder, more cognitively demanding work that we do suffers. Unfortunately, it's the lightweight communications work that people tend to look for warning signs in, meaning this is often missed until it's too late.

Ultimately, we're a social species, running on hardware built for a world in which separation from the group was a serious threat, where shelter, defence, and the care of children all depended on staying connected to other people, so we came equipped with an alarm that goes off when connection looks at risk (Hawkley and Capitanio, 2015). It's unpleasant by design, and it hasn't been updated for video calls and asynchronous messaging.

That signal doesn't stay in the emotional register; isolation is associated with heightened vigilance for social threat, distortions in how we read other people's behaviour, poorer sleep, and weaker executive function (Hawkley and Cacioppo, 2010).

Note: It's important to note that this effect seems to be driven by perception, which is why even someone working in an office surrounded by other people can feel profoundly isolated and suffer these same effects. Whilst others might feel perfectly well connected and suffer no ill effects working remotely three days a week! As with all human considerations, this is not simple.

For us as people professionals, effortful reasoning is most of what our job consists of. Whether it’s working out whether a performance problem has anything to do with knowledge at all, interrogating a request that turns up fully formed as a solution, or deciding what evidence would change our minds, it’s the work that separates performance consulting from order-taking, but it's also one of the first things to suffer under the effects of isolation.

Narrowing networks

It's become a little old hat to focus on the importance of the individual's professional network, but I often find that old hat is really just a rebadging of really important, so it gets talked about a lot. Sustained remote working makes collaboration more siloed and more static, with fewer connections bridging different parts of a business, cross-group collaboration falling by around a quarter, and new working relationships forming more slowly (Yang et al., 2022). The network doesn't vanish, but it stops growing outwards, and it stops surprising you.

For those of us who work independently, or who sit as a team of one, or who belong on paper to a group we see twice a year, that's the ordinary condition of the job. Our ideas get tested against our own judgement and the preferences of whoever is paying us, which is a small and forgiving sample, and assumptions that go unchallenged for long enough risk starting to be seen as fact.

I found that the most useful connections are the moderately weak ones, people with enough common ground to understand your situation and enough distance to know things you don't (Rajkumar et al., 2022). Those are close to impossible to build from a desk, and a conference or a round table is one of the few places where a room holds fifty of them at once. I go for the people who recognise the situation before I've finished describing it, and because somebody will disagree with me, which is a service I can't buy anywhere else.

Making the day count

Anyone can turn up at a conference or exhibition and have a fun day out, but that's not what we're going to events to achieve.

• Arrive with a live problem. Take the thing you're stuck on, boil it down to a question you could put to a stranger in ninety seconds, and treat finding three answers as the objective for the day.
• Choose the format, not the line-up. Don't just book events with big celebrity or industry name speakers. Look for interesting topics and formats of discussion. Consider whether you want to attend a keynote, seminar, round table, group discussion, un-conference, or workshop. These are all completely different to each other and will enable you to explore the same problem in different ways.
• Talk to people outside your sector. Be willing to attend events and speak to people who do not work within your industry. Just because you work within a service provider doesn't mean the world of manufacturing hasn't faced the same problem and solved it in a way entirely novel to you. Some of my biggest leaps in terms of my long-term practice have come from hearing about interventions people have created in organisations I would never dream of working in. From their experience, I've been able to draw insight that's unlocked a new way forwards for me.
• Stay in touch. Take the time to connect with and stay in touch with those that you meet at events. The conversation you have on the day, in the space, is an opening. It helps you identify who might have some insight for you, but it doesn't have to be the end of that collaboration. Reach out in an email or direct message and continue the conversation. Follow up on that incredible idea that they shared, or if they told you about a challenge they're facing, reach out and offer some help.

Does this apply to you?

Realising that we are becoming isolated or overly institutionalised is not always easy. In my experience, those most in need of exposing themselves to new ideas and ways of thinking are the least likely to do so, and many organisations will actively try and prevent this.

Below are some of the questions I like to regularly ask myself to ensure that I'm not boxing myself in and am having enough contact with a diverse range of professionals.

• When did somebody last tell me I was wrong about something in my work, and what did I do with it?
• Whose judgement, other than my own and my stakeholders', has tested my last three design decisions?
• How many of the people I've discussed my work with this quarter sit outside my organisation or my sector?
• What am I currently stuck on that I've never said out loud to another practitioner?
• Which of my working assumptions have gone a full year without being challenged?
• If I could attend only one event this year, which problem would I want it to solve?

Look, I'm an unapologetic believer that conferences and events underpin huge potential improvements in our collective practice, but I'm also biased because I run some of these very events. So don't take my word for it!

Over the coming 12 months, consider running a series of short experiments. Identify using these questions or questions of your own, three or four key areas of your practice that you would like to deepen or improve in some meaningful way. 

Go out into the wondrous world of the internet and identify one or two events, depending on their scale and cost and logistical challenge, that you believe might aid you in meeting those goals.

Get them in your calendar now.

Attend them.

Engage with them.

Stay in contact with the people that you meet.

In twelve-months' time, ask yourself simply and honestly: did they help improve your practice in the ways in which you had set out to do so? It might also be worth asking yourself: did they improve your practice in ways you didn't set out to achieve?

Whilst this might indicate that your aim is off, it may still validate that events have value in terms of your long-term development.

References

Baumeister, R.F., Twenge, J.M. and Nuss, C.K. (2002) 'Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), pp. 817-827. 

Hawkley, L.C. and Cacioppo, J.T. (2010) 'Loneliness matters: a theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms', Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 40(2), pp. 218-227.

Hawkley, L.C. and Capitanio, J.P. (2015) 'Perceived social isolation, evolutionary fitness and health outcomes: a lifespan approach', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1669), 20140114.

Rajkumar, K., Saint-Jacques, G., Bojinov, I., Brynjolfsson, E. and Aral, S. (2022) 'A causal test of the strength of weak ties', Science, 377(6612), pp. 1304-1310.

Yang, L. et al. (2022) 'The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers', Nature Human Behaviour, 6(1), pp. 43-54.

Tom McDowall is a proponent of evidence-informed practice for people professionals, a consultant, speaker, and writer. He runs Evolve L&D, the evidence-informed practice consultancy, chairs the IDTX event series, and shares insight articles on the Instructional Design Tips Substack.