It was an average morning. I was up at seven, helped get the kids their breakfast and hustled them into being ready for school. They left, and I went back upstairs to get dressed for work. But that’s not what I did. I got back into bed, and lay there for another hour, staring at the ceiling.

I work in a large organisation, surrounded by clever, funny, like-minded people. I’m sure there are some tossers – there are everywhere, aren’t there? – but I’ve never met them. I have the unalloyed privilege of working in an area whose subject matter fascinates me, and which I spend a good chunk of my free time studying and talking about. My job is a fulfilment of the ambition I had when I left university 25 years ago, and everything should be rosy. So why did I go back to bed that morning?

I did it because I am lonely at work, and staring at the ceiling for an hour was about as much as I could face. I am a different generation to my immediate colleagues, and I’m their manager. They don’t want to hear about my troubles; they don’t want me being the embarrassing old bloke inveigling my way into their 6pm drinks. And I’m shy and introverted, too (that might come as a surprise to those who know me casually, who doubtless think of me as loud and bumptious, but you don’t need to be a wallflower to be an introvert), so the idea of trying to forge new relationships with people is fraught with horror, even if I know it would be for my own good.

The result is that I feel almost entirely alone at work. There’s no one at the place where I spend much of my waking life to whom I can turn when I want to confide my fears, to moan about the upper echelons, to worry away about what’s happening at home.

But who cares, really? I get paid well to do something I enjoy, and still I’m skiving for an hour first thing in the morning. I should just man up, shouldn’t I? It’s not like I’m homeless or sweeping up litter or any of the other straw men brought up whenever someone in an apparently cushy number has the temerity to say they’re unhappy.

Except it’s not that simple. Workplace loneliness is a real problem, one which is being increasingly recognised, but it’s one we don’t want to talk about – who wants to be the person who opens themselves up to derision by announcing their feeling of isolation to their colleagues?

An academic study in 2011, by professors from California State University and Wharton School of Business, explained why workplace loneliness matters. After surveying a sample of 672 workers, Hakan Ozcelik and Sigal Barsade concluded that loneliness at work has a “significant influence on employee work performance, both in direct tasks, as well as employee team member and team role effectiveness rated by both the employee’s work unit members and supervisor”. Admitting to being lonely only made things worse, because the knowledge of another’s disaffection “provided stronger and more negative cues for the co-workers about the overall quality of their relationship with the employee”. Which makes them even lonelier.

The polling organisation Gallup offers employers 12 questions that will test an employee’s engagement at work. One of them is “Do you have a best friend at work?” As Steven Miranda of Cornell University told Fortune in 2014, it all counts to a company’s overall performance because without friends, without a feeling of social connection at work, people make less “discretionary effort” – the bits of work that lift an employee past being the contributor of the bare minimum. “When you walk into the office every morning, you’re either thinking, ‘I’m pumped about being here. I’m going to get so much done,’ or ‘How quickly can 5 o’clock come?’” he told Fortune. “I would bet my bottom dollar that people who are lonely and disengaged at work deliver far less discretionary effort than people who have a support system or a go-to person [at work].”

But how prevalent is loneliness at work? In August 2014 Relate released a study suggesting that 42% of people do not have a close friend at work. Not all of them are going to be lonely, of course, but a chunk of them are. And given that the same survey found that “we’re almost as likely to have daily contact with our colleagues (62%) as we are with our children (64%)”, then it’s evident that what happens at work has an impact on our wider attitudes to life.

In my own case, I used to have two very close friends at work – the kind who you know, after one conversation, you have an important bond with. One was my lunchtime friend – our relationship fulfilled the rules of the “office spouse”. The other was my pint-after-work friend. Both were crucial, I realised, to my happiness at work. Both have now left not just the company, but also the town. And so these days I sit alone in the canteen at lunchtime, reading the paper, and I never go to the pub after work. There are people I work with who I do count as close friends, but they don’t work for my company – they’re clients, or contacts, and while seeing them is a pleasure, it’s not part of my everyday life. For 45 or 50 hours every week, I feel isolated.

Human resources experts say that employers have to tackle this. Employers should create support systems and “employee assistance programmes”, they “need to create a fun culture in order for employees to feel engaged, and this can be done by making sure there is a good balance of social events and everyday work”. That’s harder for companies to offer in an age of cuts and increasing casual work, of course, and it does raise the dread prospect of “compulsory fun”.

Advice columnists suggest having a bit more get up and go, advising that the shy might “appear aloof or uninterested even if that is not your intention … instead of focusing on your own discomfort, try to do all you can to put the other person at ease”. Right, because, we introverts have never thought of that. Or maybe we just find it almost impossible to do so, except in the most favourable circumstances. One expert advises breaking the ice each morning with a “Hi!”, as if that is a relationship builder, rather than something done by all but the most sociopathic.

I suppose that, for now, I’m resigned to being lonely at work. I wish I were a joiner, but I’m not; I wish I could banter away enthusiastically with people 10 or 15 years my junior, but our lives run on separate tracks. I’m hoping, I guess, for the moment when someone joins the company with whom I click. It only takes one person, but they’re not here now, and I feel bereft.