Social Connectedness and its Relationship to Health, Engagement, and Productivity in a University Employee Population

Background: The United States Surgeon General’s Advisory, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, was a call to action for key stakeholders to promote social connection. Aims: This quality improvement project provided an important step to better understand social connectedness in a university employee population as a basis for interventions that could promote health, engagement, and productivity. Methods: This cross-sectional analysis used health risk assessment (HRA) data from 7,666 university employees. The HRA asked employees about how socially connected they felt to family, friends, and colleagues, and about other health behaviors, self-perceived health, and work engagement and productivity. Spearman’s test was used to assess associations. Results: Social connectedness had significant positive associations with vegetable and fruit intakes, exercise, self-rated health, work engagement, work productivity, and work ability (p < 0.0001 for all) and inverse associations with BMI (p = 0.0001), alcohol (p < 0.0001), tobacco use (p = 0.0016), and missing work due to sickness (p < 0.0001). Conclusions: The findings that social connectedness was positively linked to healthy behaviors, self-perceived health, work engagement, productivity, and work ability provide a rationale for employers to build a social infrastructure to promote a healthy, engaged, and productive workforce.