Robert Putnam is famous for his 1995 essay “Bowling Alone” and subsequent book by that title describing how Americans were increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors—with more Americans bowling, but not doing so in leagues.
His research has special relevance these days for workplaces on numerous levels, pointing to avenues for reducing high levels of loneliness among workers, for addressing political polarization, and for understanding the expectations that people have for their employers, given the reduced frequency of collective experiences outside of the workplace. This week we spoke with Putnam, an emeritus professor at Harvard. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited for space and clarity:
What role do workplaces have in contributing to social cohesion and reducing loneliness?
There’s pretty good evidence that the water cooler at work was a real phenomenon where people did spend historically a lot of time talking with their friends. They were talking about the wrestling match on television last night, or they were talking about the local schools. Part of it was just fun and part of it you might call ‘civic discourse.’
Unions were a significant part of that. Unions historically were not just a bargaining agent to affect your wages and working conditions, but they were also places where people hung out. A lot of bowling leagues were based on unions or workplaces. The evidence was pretty clear that was actually good for the firm. In a company where there was a bowling league and the workers learned to trust each other while they were sitting in the semicircle at the back of the bowling alley, that did actually affect how they helped one another at the workplace.
Then came the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, when there was a lot more pressure from the bosses to just stick to what you’re doing and don’t horse around. What I know from just talking to people—this is not scientific fact—is that made the workplace much more a site of anxiety and therefore it became a net negative with respect to the total sum of social cohesion or social capital. There’s a whole literature trying to weigh, ‘You made them work a little harder and that maybe increases efficiency.’ But on the other hand, they don’t trust each other so much. They don’t pitch in and help when somebody’s out for a day.
I read that literature as saying, on balance, they were more efficient when they could hang out at the water cooler and therefore learn things accidentally. It’s this sideways learning. It breaks up the silos so that—I’m making this up—at the water cooler, the guy in marketing would talk to the woman who was in product development. They’d learn things they wouldn’t normally learn.
So it’s now 2020. From one point of view it seemed much more efficient. I know that going forward it seems almost certain that there’s going to be more working at home that is in a loose sense working via Zoom. Why is that? It’s not mainly coming from the firms, who you might think would say, ‘We wouldn’t have to have so many offices,’ and they could save a lot of money that way. But I think it is true that firms don’t feel that way. They are now coming to realize actually that water cooler was really important. And they’re late converts to the idea, which I long felt was true, that there was actual serious stuff being done.
Post-pandemic, as people are working more flexibly, with more remote and hybrid work, is your concern that virtual teamwork or collaboration isn’t a substitute for in-person cohesion and trust that’s formed?
That’s my view. But not merely is that my view, it’s now the view of many firms. They would like to get people back. But why can’t they get people back? Because they’re in a competition for talent.
For the large part of the American economy and the large fraction of American workplaces where the job can be done virtually, it will be increasingly that’s the kind of workplace, and I think that will be net negative for social solidarity in the workplace, but also in the world.
But people are at home and maybe they’re actually going to school more often, working in a PTA if they’ve got kids, or going bowling with other people. Maybe they’re using that additional spare time to build more social capital outside. That would be the optimistic view. That would be a little bit like the 1950s in the sense that you had more free time and therefore you’re more likely to join the PTA or the Elks Club or whatever.
But that is not true. It’s more screens. The evidence says that all the time that people gain from work, what work crowds out, is not other social cohesion building activities. I mean, it is just screens all the way down. So you can see I’m a real pessimist about this whole topic you’re talking about.
If I’m a team leader or an employer, what would you recommend based on your research that would help contribute to greater cohesion and reducing loneliness?
A lot of what I’m talking about, I believe, but actually the scientific evidence for it is remarkably thin. So I’m not backing away from everything I’ve said, but actually now, if I were a CEO, I would invest a fair amount of time actually in examining experimentally the very questions we’re talking about. This is not like rocket science, probably the HR people know how to do what I’m suggesting.
Just as you look at any other business issue, what are the actual effects for my employees, both for my firm and for the wider society? Does it actually reduce social isolation and loneliness if I force them to be here or doesn’t it? Or do they get a greater sense of social connection if they’re working offsite? So that’s my plea as an academic: there’s so much we do not know here and firms have both the ability and the incentive to investigate that.
Next point is that the key is it can’t be spinach. Whatever would help to make people less lonely, it’s got to be fun. It can’t be preaching and it can’t even be negative. Like if you don’t show up, they’ll dock your pay or something—that’s not going to work. It’s got to be fun.
Back in the day, that’s what employers knew. They didn’t have the term social capital at all. But let me take Standard Products. Standard Products was a real firm in my hometown, little town of Port Clinton, Ohio. In the 1950s, the biggest employer in town was Standard Products. Standard Products made the rubber gaskets around car windows. There were several Standard Products bowling leagues, and on their site there was a little league field where I personally played. Anybody could come to the Standard Products Thanksgiving turkey feast and so on.
Now, I do not think that everything in the 1950s was good, and I don’t want to say let’s all go back to the 1950s. I want to however focus on the fact they first of all believed in the importance for their products, for their productivity of having workers feel connected to each other and to the firm and to the larger community. And they thought they could do that by using positive incentives. That’s jargon for saying free turkeys and the little league field and the bowling league and so on.
If I were advising a CEO, I’d be trying to think of how can we get what I really want, which is people connecting with fun, not with mandates.
Is there any role for workplaces or business leaders to contribute to this sort of social cohesion that is effective at reducing political polarization?
The first thing I’d want to say is I’m not talking about the management taking a substantive position on political issues. I’m going to assume that their object is actually both to help the company internally and to contribute to social cohesion and depolarization outside in the broader society. And for that reason, for that purpose, the crucial thing is ‘bridging social capital.’ Bridging social capital just means connections between two unlike people. And the opposite is ‘bonding social capital.’ My ties to other elderly white male Jewish professors, that’s great. But bridging social capital are my ties to people who have a different political party or a different age or a different gender or a different religion or a different whatever.
What we need now is more bridging social capital. We need more opportunities in which people meet face-to-face with other people who are different politically from them. In the workplace in principle that ought to be possible as long as the management is not trying themselves to impose a particular political view.
If I were the CEO worried about political polarization, I would be thinking about how can I begin to bring people together across party lines. That’s almost certainly not bringing them together to talk about politics. And therefore the last thing I would want to do is to try to bring people together to say, ‘Let’s all talk about who’s going to win this year’s election or who should win this.’ That will not build mutual understanding.
What you really want is people to be able to put themselves in the shoes of somebody else. So again, it’s back to this connecting people about something that cuts across party lines. Like for example, the Celtics. There are both Republicans and Democrats at a Celtics game. If you can get people talking about the Celtics and then discover that the person who has your view about who should be playing and who should be dumped from the team is a member of the other party, that will turn out to be politically bridging social capital. But you didn’t start off talking about politics.
This bridging capital means that people are less likely to take polarized stances because they’re more empathetic or connected to people who don’t have the same views as them and more open to situations of compromise and agreement?
That’s exactly right. You, for example, discover that you share a view with a person about how awful the Red Sox are this year, and they are really awful and that they ought to fire the owner. But you’re a blazing liberal and that guy or gal is a deep conservative. Well, they can’t be all that awful because they know that the Red Sox owner should be fired.
In the workplace context, it makes me think of things like corporate volunteering and organizing people around the Olympics for activities…
That’s right. It’s by indirection. I hope your objective in the long run is to help depolarize American society—that’s desperately needed. But you don’t start off by saying, ‘Here we have this depolarization initiative, and some person in HR is in charge of reducing polarization in the workplace.’ That’s not the way to go.
Read a full transcript of our conversation, including a discussion of the historical context for workplaces and social cohesion.
Read a recent New York Times interview with Putnam. Buy his 2020 book, The Upswing.