Here’s how “Unity with Others” can make or break our experience in the workplace.
Since the pandemic, quality relationships in the workplace have been growing scarcer—and increasingly more important to us. With one in five employees saying they feel lonely every day, it’s high time we found new ways to meaningfully connect. To get started, we used the Map of Meaning’s “Unity with Others” pathway to ask a few honest questions about the state of belonging and connection in the workplace.
Lean in close, reader. I’m about to give you the key to happiness—at least, according to the findings of one of the longest-running studies on the subject. The nearly 80-year Harvard Study on Adult Development, which tracked participants from 1938 to 2017, found that the biggest factor in determining happiness wasn’t wealth, or success, or even a genetic predisposition toward a sunnier outlook on life. It was having quality relationships.
This shouldn’t really surprise us. We humans are social creatures, after all. For millennia, our survival has hinged on our ability to form connections and build communities. Although most of us have traded our hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a job and a paycheck, our need for quality relationships hasn’t diminished. In fact, this need has only become more pronounced in the five years since the Covid pandemic changed work as we know it. In 2021, these changes even prompted the U.S. Surgeon General to declare loneliness a “health crisis” and an “epidemic.” In 2024, one in five of us reported feeling lonely on a daily basis—an improvement from one in four, the numbers reported during the height of the pandemic, but still not great.
What to do when such a fundamental need—meaningful connection—eludes many of us? Well, since most of us spend a huge portion of our days working (and don’t necessarily get to choose our colleagues) it’s worth starting our inquiry there. In this piece, we’ll examine the way work is affecting our ability to maintain high-quality relationships—what the Map of Meaning* framework calls “Unity with Others.” Then, we’ll use the Map to shed some more light on this subject. After all, it’s not just happiness that’s at stake here, but our overall experience of meaning at work.
Positive social relationships in the workplace are looking scarcer, and even more valuable to us, in 2025 than they were in 2019.
What the pandemic taught us about meaningful connection at work
The ongoing global experiment in remote work might have something to teach all of us—remote worker or not—about the impact of quality relationships on our worklife.
Though remote and hybrid options remain quite popular among employees, the move away from the structure and built-in camaraderie of a physical workplace has also produced feelings of isolation and alienation in many of us. However, a Gallup study has seen one rather endearing
effect emerge from these changes: having a friend at work is more important to us now! It’s true: since 2020, having a best friend at work has been having an increasing positive effect on things like job satisfaction, retention, and willingness to recommend an organization as a great place to work. Workers with best friends at their organization also tended to get more done in less time, were more innovative, and had more fun (aww!), per the survey.
Admittedly, the term “best friends” here might be a bit off-putting: many of us have enjoyed wonderful working relationships with colleagues with whom we have precious little in common outside of work. In fact, the ability to unify people from different backgrounds may be one of the beautiful things about work, when it’s going well. But the underlying truth to be gleaned from this “best friend” study, as well as the data on loneliness during this period, is this: positive social relationships in the workplace are looking scarcer, and even more valuable to us, in 2025 than they were in 2019.
Additionally, since many people surveyed in the Gallup study were working remotely, these findings show that it’s possible to build and maintain strong bonds in a remote environment—we just need to go about it more intentionally (more on this later).
Unity with Others is about feeling supported in a workplace—knowing that your team believes in one another, has got your back during difficult projects, and wants to enable you to do your best work.
Applying the Map’s “Unity with Others” pathway
Of the Map of Meaning’s four pathways, “Unity with Others” feels most closely aligned with the topic of workplace friendships—though, as we mentioned above, you don’t have to be besties with your colleagues to enjoy a high degree of unity with others at work. In a recent interview, we asked the Map’s creator, Dr. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, to explain the “Unity with Others” pathway, and she had a simple answer ready.
“The fastest, easiest way is to explain that is, ‘What is the quality of your relationships?’” Lips-Wiersma said. “Some of us experience high-quality relationships at work. And high-quality relationships are signified by things like having a sense of belonging.”
She continued, “I just came back from six weeks of being overseas, and I walked into my workplace, and it felt like home. It felt like, I just belong there. And people were happy to see me.”
Unity with Others, Lips-Wiersma went on to say, is also about feeling supported in a workplace—for example, knowing that your team believes in one another, has got your back during difficult projects, and wants to enable you to do your best work.
Finally, Unity with Others has to do with your ability to openly share and discuss your values. According to Lips-Wiersma, having a healthy measure of unity at work doesn’t mean everyone always agrees; it means colleagues can speak openly about their values. (This aspect of Unity with Others links up naturally with Integrity with Self, another pathway we recently wrote about on the blog.)
If you realize you’ve been dreading workplace interactions that you once looked forward to, this might be a great opportunity to reflect on what’s changed.
What to do if unity is missing?
Do you feel a sense of belonging at work? Are you surrounded by people who cheer one another on? Do you feel comfortable speaking about what matters to you? If you’d been away from your colleagues (or clients, or students) for a while, how would you expect to be welcomed back?
Your responses to these questions are not as important as how those responses make you feel. You may have a job in which you hardly interact with anyone all day…and feel great about it! Not everyone is looking for the same degree of connection at work, and that’s perfectly fine.
However, if you realize you’ve been dreading workplace interactions that you once looked forward to, this might be a great opportunity to reflect on what’s changed between yourself and your colleagues, and what you can do to get those relationships back on track. Alternatively, you might realize that, while you don’t have any interpersonal conflict to speak of, you’re not particularly close to anyone, either—what’s missing could be a confidante in the workplace.
It’s also important to consider how our meaningful connections outside of work can affect how we show up in the workplace. If I’ve decided Unity with Others is important to me, for example, but I’m limited in the kinds of improvements I can make in my work situation, I might start to look around at my personal life, where more immediate changes are within reach. A change there might be as simple as making plans with a beloved friend I’ve been “too busy” to spend time with lately. It might mean finding volunteer work that will allow me to bond with others over a shared cause. Or it could mean starting a fun creative project with people I really vibe with.
This intentional cultivation of Unity with Others in my private sphere will almost certainly have a spillover effect into my workday—making work problems seem less catastrophic and allowing me to show up on Monday feeling energized from the weekend. When people say, “get a life,” this is what they’re really talking about: When we tap into a source of meaning that’s bigger than our day-to-day dramas and frustrations, we gain perspective and worry less.
Creating a healthy worklife starts by looking inwards and reflecting on what really matters to you—not by emulating what works for others and hoping for the best.
Want more practical support?
By now, you may have discovered a desire to build more meaningful connections into your worklife, and might even be thinking of some exciting ideas for doing so. (If you need some more, you might find our previous piece on strengthening teams helpful, or this list of ways to make “work friends” in a virtual environment.)
But it’s also totally normal if you feel at a loss for solutions that fit your unique work situation. Since everyone’s worklife, priorities, and sources of meaning are different, there’s no perfect schedule, work arrangement, or set of rituals that will work for everyone. Creating a healthy worklife is an ongoing practice that starts by looking inwards and reflecting on what really matters to you—not by emulating what works for others and hoping for the best. If you’re looking to jump-start your exploration using the Map of Meaning framework, check out the Meaningful Work Inventory (MWI), the assessment tool based on the Map.
Look, we know that connection at work feels more important—and scarcer—than ever. Building meaningful relationships takes time, and the cultural shift toward remote and hybrid work has only made this even more difficult. But by identifying our need for unity, and making a series of small changes to support it, we can start to make our worklives a little more human, ourselves a little happier, and our work that much more meaningful.
*Developed by Dr. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma at Auckland University of Technology, the Map of Meaning has been used by individuals and organizations for decades as a tool for understanding how we experience meaning—and therefore, what makes work meaningful rather than meaningless. The Map comprises four pathways and three tensions which we must balance to create individual and collective meaning. This framework is the basis of MeaningSphere’s Meaningful Work Inventory Experience.