Caroline Ellison, former CEO of the trading firm Alameda Research, returned for a third day of testimony in the fraud trial against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, her one-time friend, boss, and romantic partner, last week. On the stand, she described the aftermath of her final breakup with the FTX founder: avoiding one-on-one meetings with him and only communicating on the encrypted messaging app Signal, but adding that, outside of work, “We lived together, so we did talk.”
The FTX trial is about financial malfeasance, but as one witness after another has taken the stand, a secondary story has emerged, about the close-knit inner circle of young people who ran the sister firms FTX and Alameda Research. This was a group of idealists, ranging in age from 27 to 31, who lived together, worked together, and socialized together, all in pursuit of a higher mission.
Extensive research before, during, and after the pandemic has shown that young people are lonely in the workplace, see work as core to their identity, and are strongly motivated by values they care about. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this particular group of people gravitated towards a company like FTX that promised friendship, collaboration, and a meaningful purpose.
Idealism, Loneliness and the Workplace
Today, more than 50% of American adults describe themselves as “lonely.” Young people today are more than twice as likely as senior citizens to say they feel lonely. In the workplace, a similar demographic pattern emerges: more than 80% of workers under age 24 want stronger workplace friendships and relationships, as compared to roughly 47% of people over age 54.
The youngest generations in the workforce, Gen Z and the Millennials, have also experienced the erosion of community outside of work. People under the age of 29 are the most likely to say they are involved in no community groups. Perhaps as a result, many of today’s workers see career as core to their identity. McKinsey found in 2021 that 70% of American employees feel, “their sense of purpose is defined by their work.”
A Healthier Attachment to Work
It’s a good thing that young people are drawn to mission and community at work — and employers can help them realize this objective (while, of course, grounding the workplace in solid ethical values). Here’s how:
1. Put Connection First
Interpersonal connection is the lever that unlocks collaboration, culture, business outcomes, and everything else. (Disclosure: the author of this piece is the CEO of a company focused on building culture.) Teams that foster friendships see real business benefits: Gallup has found that having a “best friend” at work is highly correlated with better performance, stronger engagement with customers, and even improved workplace safety rates.
Companies can strengthen these connections by making time for social connection in the course of meetings, routinely scheduling offsites or other events with a team bonding element, supporting affinity groups (often called Employee Resource Groups or ERGs), and creating norms for how they collaborate and connect.
2. Recruit for Relationships
Alex Mandry, a Millennial who runs an IT consulting firm and previously worked at the dental health start-up Dandy, described the company’s recruiters as “matchmakers,” bringing minds together, both to solve complex business problems and collaborate, but also to form a unified social whole. She adds, “You spend so much of our time in this place, you want to make sure that you get along with the people that you’re going to be with.”
In designing a talent strategy, companies should focus not on culture fit — which can enable homophily, or the tendency to be biased towards people who are familiar or similar to you — but on cultural cohesion. In other words, they’re not looking for a candidate that is similar to existing employees, but one that is complementary, meshing with the collective to create a richer, more diverse, and more innovative community.
3. Stand for Your Values
The younger generation of workers requires more than a corporate responsibility page. In a 2022 report on women in the workplace, McKinsey found that younger workers are more diverse than previous generations and care more about commitment to DEI and wellbeing than their own advancement.
It’s important for employers to meaningfully and consistently take action to prioritize both their internal values — like committing to high-impact DEI initiatives and offering wellbeing policies in the benefits package — and external ones, like reorienting their overall company strategy around a tangible real-world mission, as Patagonia has famously done.
Workplace as Community
The performance consultant Jessica Pryce-Jones once estimated that the average adult will spend roughly 90,000 hours of their life at work. It’s not surprising that many people, perhaps younger people in particular, expect a high return on the investment of one-third of their life’s hours. They want and demand meaning, connection, and satisfaction from their work.
It’s a righteous hunger, and when it’s not met, companies lose promising young people (and they might lose them to leaders that promise a community they can’t deliver on). When companies care for their culture, hone their mission, and design with the collective in mind, they do their part to call the bright, lonely young people of the workforce to a community they can call their own.
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