Help Your Employees Get a Life

At the end of the movie It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey realizes his life isn't so bad after all because he has many friends in Bedford Falls who are ready and willing to help him.

The rest of us might not be so lucky. A survey of nearly 1,500 Americans conducted earlier this year by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona found that our circle of confidants -- the people with whom we feel comfortable discussing our most important issues -- has decreased by nearly one-third over the past 20 years. When we want to talk, we're relying more on our closest family members: The percentage of Americans who confide only in family members has zoomed from 57% to 80% since 1985, and the number of Americans who feel they have no one to confide in has more than doubled. The researchers concluded that the greatest loss has been in our web of nonfamily connections.

Talk to experts about why this is happening, and they'll list the usual suspects. Americans move a lot and change jobs frequently, severing already shaky social ties. We're spending more time playing video games and surfing the Internet, where our interactions with others are usually anonymous and often not very civil. We work long hours that leave us too tired to call old friends who live hundreds of miles away. We promise to keep in touch, but before we know it, months turn into years, and all those e-mails, invitations and holiday cards eventually stop flowing. When it comes right down to it, modern friendship takes hard work.

Not Close, But Connected

The irony is that Americans feel more socially isolated at the same time that technology is offering more and faster ways to communicate with people near and far. As a result, Americans have "fewer people they feel really close to, but there are still dozens and dozens of people they're connected to," says Howard Aldrich, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who researches social relations in the workplace. "These 'weak ties' are just that: people they know and can contact but aren't necessarily people they'd invite over if they had a crisis in their life."