The original article won't load but I disagree. While building your entire social life around work and work friends can be a bit dangerous, I think ERGs have an

The original article won't load but I disagree. While building your entire social life around work and work friends can be a bit dangerous, I think ERGs have an important role to play in combating loneliness at work. Work can be a bit isolating when you have a very different background from a lot of your coworkers. Having a group that shares some aspect of your background that you can talk to about that shared perspective with can help a lot. Companies should go a bit farther than making groups that are built race/religion/gender lines to bridge that gap. I've been at a lot of companies where there was some shared activity that "everybody does" after work - something that not literally everybody actually does. There should be other ways of including those people. Often something like that can reflect a cultural background or gender (be it "everyone" is in a fantasy football league or "everyone" is competitive about a certain video game or "everyone" goes out drinking on Thursday). If you're a member of a small group, be it because you're black, female, LGBT, have children (or don't), whatever it might be - it's easy to feel lonely and marginalized and like you don't have a community at the workplace; it helps if the organization promotes a way to feel like you do. So that it's not just "oh everyone is talking about that thing I don't do again".