Getting out there can become a good habit

ALSO: Beware of the terrible HBR article slamming hybrid work

At the start of the year Derek Thompson wrote about the rising trend of elective isolation, most clearly seen in the trend of young people choosing to spend an extra 100 minutes a day alone than they were a decade ago. He didn’t talk about the implications for work but I’ve spoken to a lot of leaders who recognise the challenges of this social trend when it comes to building team cohesion.

While Thompson recognises that we all crave the agency to live our lives in the way that choose, he says that this isolation leads to an impoverished existence. In his Atlantic article he cites a famous piece of research by Nick Epley which invited participants to talk to strangers. When questioned afterwards participants expressed their surprise in their enjoyment of the interactions, when they’d expected to prefer keeping to themselves.

Epley concluded:

“A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people. And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

When asked by NPR Thompson’s advice was very simple ‘you leave your house, you hang out with people’. ‘I think that our little decisions about spending time with other people, these decisions scale’. I’ve witnessed a lot of organisations in the last year or so who have told me that young workers have got out of the habit of participating in social activities - this is a real issue - for work and for society.

This week I was delighted to speak to Aon Cholnipa, someone who has enchanted my social media feed for the last few weeks. Aon’s TikTok chronicles her 100 days of Rejection Therapy, a process of overcoming our fears of rejection by confronting them head on.

Rejection Therapy was invented by entrepreneur Jason Comely but was popularised by an hilarious TED Talk by Jia Jiang ‘What I learned from 100 days of rejection’. Jiang realised that by willing to risk strangers rejection he became more confident in who he was.

Aon told me about her own journey, documented by her social media posting. She said she was ‘frustrated by whatever it is in my head is stopping me from doing things’, preoccupied by ‘what people were going to think of me if they said no’ to her.

Cholnipa, Thai-born but UK based for the six years of her studies, said she’d be ‘super shy’ and capable of ‘overthinking everything’. She added that ‘there was a period where I almost hated people’ and went out of her way to avoid interacting with them.

This was particularly a challenge because doing her studies required conducting interviews with strangers. After her first day of interviewing people she was overcome with dread, ‘After I did it that day, I reflect that maybe I'm not going to do this anymore because I think it's too much for me’. She’d set upon the experiment with Rejection Therapy as a means of rebooting her approach.

In her TikToks it’s Aon’s gentleness that is so beguiling, she’s initially uncomfortable about her asks but doesn’t want to pass her discomfort on to the people she approaches.

TikTok viewers will delight in her success in asking strangers to reenact paintings, asking for movie posters in a cinema, asking to use a ice cream machine or challenging strangers to a race.

Aon’s biggest video is her request to use the Tannoy system to wish travellers at Seven Sisters Tube a happy weekend. The request feels audacious but viewers in the comments express their delight when staff say ‘yeh, go on then’. Their happiness is only matched by the beam of joy that emanates from Aon herself.

Aon says she’s been transformed by her experience, ‘my confidence has gone up… I tend to speak up more and overthink less’. Cholnipa has just graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture and despite being awarded Architectural Student of the Year in 2023 she’s braced for the rejections that come from entering the job market. She’s happy that the experience has hardened her for what’s to come: ‘I'm glad I'm doing this now because I'm in process of applying for jobs, I thought I would like try to practice building out from small rejections out to the big rejections that might hurt me’.

As we contemplate building cultures in a world that Derek Thompson describes as entering an ‘age of withdrawal’, there’s almost certainly lessons for us of putting ourselves out like Aon Cholnipa. But critically we also need to recognise that some of our teammates need to be nurtured back to participating in group activities.

Check out Aonsarchive on TikTok

@aonsarchiveDay 24/100 Can't believe they actually let me do it!! So fun! #rejectiontherapy Asking to speak over the intercom at London underground station #exposuretherapy #socialanxiety #courage #london #tube

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• The CIPD (the body for HR professionals) released a report into work in 2025. It reminded me that one of the biggest factors of whether we like our job, would recommend our employer and whether our mental health is good is whether we are able to ‘keep up with bills without difficulty’. It reminded me of Zeynep Ton’s work saying that company values mean nothing to workers who are struggling to get by. Also high autonomy at work correlates with improved mental health. Worth a read

• Not worthy of a read was a new cover story in the Harvard Business Review titled ‘Hybrid Still Isn’t Working’. (Article archived here) If your colleagues read HBR brace yourself for them citing arguments that Professor Nick Bloom says are a ‘terrible’ misrepresentation of the data. The article claims there is growing evidence that hybrid working is failing organisations and that its reaching crisis point. Brian Elliott did a very thorough teardown of the article looking at the research papers cited. For example HBR claims that productivity has fallen based on a study of Indian data entry workers in peak Covid when in fact there are plenty of other surveys that show the opposite. Embarrassing that HBR would choose to put this on their cover

• For a long time I’ve been saying that the large businesses that seem to be the greatest state of equilibrium are those who ask for teams to be in the office for 3 co-ordinated days per week. That’s not to say that teams can’t have a cohesive culture with fewer days together but with some firms there is a co-ordination cost of being big. HSBC and John Lewis seem to be the latest organisations to come to terms with this: HSBC hasn’t yet announced it but are using the press to prepare employees, John Lewis have told head office staff they need to be in the office for three days a week. (Elsewhere unionised workers at the University of Liverpool have gone on strike over their 3 day mandate).

  The issue that a lot of these organisations have is that they want to have their cake and eat it. On the one hand HSBC are boasting that they’ve saved 40% of the cost of their head office and on the other they want colleagues in 3 times a week to improve the sense of connection. Almost without exception these policies lead to the horrors of hot desking, never seeing colleagues outside of meetings and a sense of work being depersonalised

• The Guardian followed up on the research from last week about an ‘infinite workday’ by speaking to workers: ‘With constant meetings and collaborative work filling the day, evenings are often the only time [workers have] to catch up on individual tasks’

• I enjoyed this report on productivity by Employment Hero (you don’t need to put your phone number in). Its conclusion is that if we want to fix productivity we need to focus on improving job satisfaction: workers want to feel seen, feel like they’re being improved and that their jobs have meaning - a good read. If you enjoyed the interview with Zach Mercurio a couple of months ago his research certainly has an impact - the research found that feeling recognised reduced retention issues by 40%

• I’m currently reading Lucy Foulkes book about teenagers (not because I have any teenagers myself, I don’t, but because I’m wondering the connections of what she said to work). I loved this TikTok she posted:

‘if you ask a group of students to tell you anonymously who they like the most in their class the people who end up at the top of the list tend to pro-social, they’re kind, they’re friendly, they’re good fun to be around, they don’t bully other students. But if you ask the same group of people who is the most popular: they tend to be the most socially visible, they’re kind of the celebrities of the school, they tend to be risk takers, they break the rules, they do ‘pseudomature behaviours’… but they also tend to be aggressive… relationally aggressive. Popular students often use gossip, social exclusion and rumour spreading strategically to manage their own social position’.

Fascinating - lots of application in the workplace for sure

• Right up my street: Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study podcast this week covers why private equity ruins everything we love

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It’s so over.