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In a post-pandemic world defined by speed, digital overload, and constant disruption, a quiet crisis is threatening the foundation of our workforce: loneliness. Once dismissed as a personal issue, social disconnection is now a public health emergency and an escalating business risk. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthys 2023 advisory equated the health risks of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But beyond its devastating impact on health, disconnection is eroding culture, driving attrition, and stalling performance. For boards and executive teams, the question is not whether to act, but whether they can afford not to. The data is alarming. Social isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32%, and dementia by 50%. In the workplace, loneliness fuels disengagement, absenteeism, and burnoutcosting employers an estimated $154 billion every year. And that number is only rising. At CHCs recent “Fostering Connection as Medicine” Innovation Roundtable, we hosted C-suite leaders and board directors from some of the worlds most influential companies to ask a critical question: What if connection was treated not as a perkbut as a board-level strategy essential to performance, culture, and risk mitigation? The answer is clear: When people are connected, businesses are stronger, more resilient, and more competitive. Supported companies perform better Employees who feel seen, supported, and part of a community are more engaged, more productive, and more loyal. Connection is not fluff; its fuel. It enables collaboration, accelerates innovation, and anchors organizational resilience. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that workplace loneliness significantly undermines engagement and job satisfaction. A Wharton study showed that disconnected employees receive lower performance ratings and are less emotionally committed to their work. The American Psychological Association reports that 95% of employees who feel psychologically safe also feel a strong sense of belonging which is a critical driver of retention and morale. Belonging is a leading indicator of business performance. And yet, too many workplaces are still designed for efficiency over empathy, for output over humanity. This is not accidental, its structural. And the solution must be structural too. The cost of inaction is not just cultural, its financial. Disconnected workplaces lose talent, suffer reputational damage, and struggle to adapt. For boards and leadership teams, the imperative is clear that we must build cultures of connection, or risk falling behind. 4 things you can do Heres how companies can act: 1. Design for intentional connection. Belonging is built in daily moments like spontaneous chats, shared lunch breaks, team rituals, and peer recognition, just to name a few. Especially in hybrid or remote environments, these micro-interactions must be planned and protected. 2. Embed psychological safety at all levels. Leaders who listen, affirm, and empower create trust. Trauma-informed leadership, inclusive decision making, and transparent communication are now baseline expectations, not luxuries. 3. Hardwire connection into organizational systems. From onboarding and benefits to space design and scheduling, every policy signals what the organization truly values. Is your system designed to support family caregivers (there are 63 million of them)? Neurodiverse talent? Cross-functional collaboration? If not, you’re leaving potential on the table. 4. Measure what matters. Belonging must be tracked like any critical KPI. Use pulse surveys, connection metrics, retention data, and feedback loops to continuously evaluate, adapt, and improve. What gets measured, gets managedand what gets ignored, gets lost. To what extent are you asking your employees if they feel seen, heard, and that they truly belong? What systems are in place to capture that dataand act on it? Board leaders must demand the same rigor around human-centered metrics as they do around financial ones. This is more than a wellness issue. Its about strategic leadership in a new era of work. In a time when isolation is rising and trust is declining, the organizations that lead with empathy and design for belonging will be the ones that thrive financially, reputationally, and culturally. When people feel like they belong, they dont just fill roles, they fuel missions. They show up fully. They drive innovation, loyalty, and impact. Human connection is the glue that holds society together. Let it also be the strategy that secures our companies futures. For board directors, CEOs, and executive leaders, the call to action is urgent and clear: Build belonging. Lead with intention. Measure what matters. Because the cost of disconnection is no longer invisible and the ROI of connection has never been greater. Jean Accius is president and CEO of CHC: Creating Healthier Communities. Alexander Cole is a pre-med student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and scholar-in-residence at CHC.
Category:
E-Commerce
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has faced a lot of backlash recently. Once celebrated as a win-win solution that tackled systemic injustice and boosted business performance, DEI has become politicized and scrutinized within an inch of its life. As it was happening, those of us working to advance DEI didnt adjust as the ground shifted beneath our feet. DEI was recast as an anti-meritocratic overreach that prioritized identity over skills or qualifications. Whether or not it was true (it wasnt) didnt matter. The new narrative gained traction and dismantling DEI became a political talking point. Then it became policy. Ever since executive orders promised to revoke federal funding from organizations committed to DEI, there’s been a scramble to pivot, roll back, or rebrand DEI programs. My colleagues have been forced to figure out how they can still create space where diversity can flourish and avoid the ire of political actors with dubious motives. The replacement: Pluralism? In a recent The New Yorker piece titled “What Comes After D.E.I.?” writer Emma Green floated a new term as a possible successor: pluralism. Unlike DEI, it has no political baggage, and its academic name and origin give it an air of neutrality. But I believe that neutrality may be a massive problem. I knew pluralism well from my days in seminary. Pluralism is, in the words of Harvard University’s The Pluralism Project, “an ethic for living together in a diverse society: not mere tolerance or relativism, but the real encounter of commitments.” It promotes the enthusiastic embrace and discussion of all viewpoints. When viewpoints clash, pluralism says you should seek to understand opposing perspectives and ways they are valid for those who hold them. Maybe that’s why I bristled when someone first suggested pluralism as a suitable alternative to DEI in business. In academia, there’s an understanding that students are there to learn how to think, reason, and engage differences. Its a space tailor-made for the kind of thoughtful conversations pluralism promises. For pluralism to function there must be grace, and a classroom can offer that in spades. But business is different. Our hiring teams aren’t admissions departments; they’re hiring people for practical skills we expect them to already have. When someone falters in the workplace, a business’s prerogative isn’t to extend grace. It’s to fix the problem, move on, and minimize risk. Pluralism may offer compelling language for navigating systemic injustices, but real social change demands structural and cultural commitments that pluralism isnt designed to make. Pluralism assumes a lot that isn’t often true in business: that we enter dialogues on equal footings, that all perspectives are welcome, that harm can be explored intellectually, and that participants have significant self-awareness and emotional intelligence. But in a workplace, harm is realit is lived and carries consequences. Im curious if the sudden interest in pluralism isnt because its a logical next step from DEI, but because it seems easier. While it isn’t equitable, you can see how well-intentioned execs could sell it as such: “agree to disagree” as corporate policy. But that’s the problem. Pluralism isn’t designed to address inequity or redress harm. It’s a posture for conversation without accountability. It feels like we’re circling back to well-intentioned but misguided thinkinglike the “I don’t see color statements that sought to solve systemic injustices by ignoring they exist. A Band-Aid on an open wound. Create space for real conversations In 2020, many people were shocked to learn there was an infection under that Band-Aid. For some business leaders, the protests following George Floyd’s murder were the first time they felt just how much their colleagues of color were suffering under systemic inequity. For others, it was the first time they asked: What’s my responsibility? How can I be an ally? But people were looking for something they could do in that moment, and DEI was the obvious answerexcept creating a true culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion isn’t something that can happen overnight. It cant just be handed off to HR. When people raised issues some legitimate, others less so we shrugged them off. Without realizing it, we created new divisions that metastasized into today’s backlash. The problem was never DEI; it was how we as leaders chose to implement it. Simply swapping DEI for “pluralism” is punting the real issue. Replacing a word in corporate handbooks won’t build equity culture, and it won’t keep workplaces from falling apart when real conflict hits. As leaders, we’re ultimately on the hooknot for adopting new vocabulary, but for showing up every day with clarity, honesty, vulnerability, and intention. This is the only way to create workspaces where hard conversations aren’t just allowed; they’re expected. If pluralism has anything to offer the business world, it’s as a complement to DEI, not a replacement. Natasha Nuytten is CEO of CLARA.
Category:
E-Commerce
When Austin, Josh, and I started Civic Roundtable in 2022, we never thought we’d be an AI company. We had worked in and around government for about a decade, seeing that public servants doing critical work were underserved by technology. We saw opportunities to make it better. In the public sector, the stakes are high: If an agencys technology fails, real people dont get the health services they need, disaster recovery efforts get delayed, and communities lose access to services they rely on. But we also know the right technology can empower public servants to have a bigger impact. Fast forward three years, and AI is everywhere. Chatbots abound and AI widgets appear in new applications daily. But rather than integrating AI for the sake of AI, wed like to suggest a different path: Start listening. Weve spent the last year on the road asking public servants, If technology could free up an hour of your time every day, how would your work change? Weve toured state agencies in California and Texas and met with county officials from Oregon to New Jersey. Weve run brainstorming sessions with public health officials, spent hours learning alongside election administrators, and strategized with emergency management professionals. The result? Some clear ideas about how AI might actually help the public servants behind the healthy functioning of our communities. So for anyone eager to put AI tools to work in support of the public sector, please steal these three lessons, free of charge. 1. AI must address an actual need Starting with AI capabilities puts the cart before the horse. Public servants know their own needs. Some processes are not the result of some imagined inefficiency, but arise from intentional, legally mandated processes. Similarly, certain government functions require human judgment for ethical or democratic reasons. This is a good thing. AI built for public servants should reflect the reality that specific agency workflows differ based on their departments function. For example, officials administering elections have different duties than those implementing programs to provide relief from extreme heat, and these require different technology functionality. Still, useful AI need not limit itself to specific departmental use cases. In our conversations with public servants, we heard again and again that they see clear value in finding information faster. Another area where AI can empower public servants is for repetitive, format-driven tasks, like budget analyses, stakeholder mapping, and memo drafting. A granular understanding of, and empathy with the public servants who best understand this work, means the difference between another AI tool and technology that meets public servants where they are, to help them do more. 2. AI must be reliably accurate One federal official confessed to us, Ive heard that AI is very good at lying. We cant have that. Hes right. AI deployed in government agencies needs to be reliably accurate. Even outside of government, people worry about hallucinations, like when Googles AI confidently told a user to use glue to keep the cheese on pizza. When the stakes are higherpublic health, emergency management, homelessness responseirrelevant or inaccurate information is a deal breaker. One technique to minimize errors, particularly well-suited to government tools, is intentionally limiting the content underpinning AI responses. This means restricting AI tools to exclusively reference resources that are vetted and approved by the government officials themselves. A second approach to enhance trustworthiness is ensuring that responses come with cited sources. When its clear where information is coming from, and easy for public servants to validate those sources, government officials can stand on the firm ground of actual policies, documentation, and their own data without worrying about trusting what AI says. Its okay if a purpose-built government AI tool cant tell you what Taylor Swifts most-streamed single is but can provide state agencies exceptionally precise answers about the resources, points of contact, and proper processes they need to execute their mission. 3. AI must be easy to deploy Deploying AI within a government agency can be a complex effort requiring significant work and IT expertise. AI tools that can specifically query an organization’s own data (known as RAG for retrieval-augmented generation), are a powerful way to increase the accuracy and relevance of AI outputs. But implementing RAG LLMs demands substantial technical competency and careful coordination with information technology teams. Most government agencies, especially those on a state, county, and local level, don’t have teams of developers waiting to integrate a custom API or put in work to configure a new platform. They need solutions that work from day one with minimal implementation overhead. Government workers are sophisticated users with complex needs, but they don’t have the luxury of a complex implementation. Technology that serves them well is ready to work immediately, with sensible defaults and clear documentation. Let public servants point the way These practical requirements underscore something deeper we learned on the road: You can’t build for government if you don’t listen to government workers and understand that they’re working toward a mission, trying to make a difference, and striving to have an impact. Sometimes this looks like visible acts of heroism, such as responding to natural disasters. Sometimes this work is largely invisible, like ensuring adequate distribution and funding for medical care and services in areas most in need. This should inspire technologists. Its profoundly rewarding to build tools that help people navigate complex systems to get the help they need, or that make it easier for dedicated public servants to do their jobs well. Every efficiency gain translates to faster disaster response, better benefit processing, or improved community services. The public sector deserves technology that’s built for the mission, not retrofitted from consumer applications. When we take the time to understand that missionand the real requirements that come with itwe can build tools that don’t just work, but actually make government work better for everyone. Madeleine Smith is cofounder and CEO of Civic Roundtable.
Category:
E-Commerce
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