How to feel connected while working from home
You can work from home without feeling so lonely. Here are some great ways to stay connected with your team.
Problem solved, USA TODAY
Aries López Salm, who lives in a small North Carolina town near the U.S. military base where her husband is employed, is one of the 35 million Americans who work from home.
Lopez Salm, who is pregnant with her second child, said morning exercise classes help her stay healthy instead of an hour-long commute. When her 6-year-old son finishes summer camp during his lunch break, she can take a break and pick him up. Even when her rheumatoid arthritis returns, she is able to work in a more comfortable position on the carpeted floor of her home office.
“Working from home is everything to me,” López Salm said. “It’s the results that matter, not being physically in the building.”
The coronavirus pandemic, which has shuttered offices across the country, has changed the way people work, and many Americans say it’s for the better.
No more long commutes during rush hour. Parents can accompany their child to pediatrician visits and soccer games. The sandwich generation can care for elderly or sick parents without skipping work. People with disabilities get more job offers. Remote workers may have more babies.
Working from home also has its disadvantages. About half of remote workers say they feel less connected to their colleagues. Young employees have fewer opportunities to find mentors and absorb knowledge. Work often impacts home life.
Now, a study by researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Virginia, and Harvard University published in the journal Science has raised new concerns that remote work is worsening mental health.
Does remote work make people unhappy?
Emma Harrington, one of the authors of the study, which was based on data from more than 588,000 workers, said more Americans are lonely today, and the way they work is contributing to feelings of loneliness.
The study found that nearly nine out of 10 employees in “remote-enabled” jobs spend their workdays completely alone, are less sociable after work, and go whole days without any face-to-face interaction, compared to jobs that require in-person work. They experienced higher rates of distress, visited mental health services, and were prescribed antidepressants, the researchers concluded. The study estimates that remote work will account for one-third of the increase in mental distress from 2011 to 2024, especially among people living alone.
“Everyone is feeling an increase in the amount of time they spend alone, primarily due to work hours,” said Harrington, an economics professor at the University of Virginia and co-author of the forthcoming book “In Personal.” “However, for those who live alone, it is likely that they will spend the entire day without any social contact and without ever leaving the house.”
The researchers’ methodology and findings sparked heated debate online and backlash from fellow academics who pointed to the vast body of research showing that remote and hybrid work actually improves happiness.
For example, two randomized trials conducted by Stanford University economist Nick Bloom found that workers’ mental health improved, not worse.
“The simple story is that when people can work from home, commuting becomes less stressful, they have better control over their time, and they have more time to spend with friends and family,” he said.
Bloom said remote work affects different people in different ways. Some people crave company and prefer to be in the office five days a week, while others prefer to be completely remote. For many people, hybrid work is a means to happiness.
In Bloom’s opinion, what is the best way to improve people’s mental health? Let them choose the option that works best for them.
“If someone feels that working from home is not an issue, they can always come into the office or change jobs,” he said. “Then I don’t understand how something that employees like and choose repeatedly can be bad for them.”
“Many of us see each other even less.”
Harrington’s study is not the first to examine psychological distress among remote workers.
As part of Newton Chen’s 17 years of work overseeing health and performance programs at Google, he conducted research to understand the feelings of isolation and loneliness that come with working from home.
Chen experienced this firsthand when he quit his job and started his own business last September. He missed office chats and FaceTime.
“I think the evidence clearly shows that hybrid work and remote work can really benefit people’s health and well-being. But for me personally, remote work feels kind of isolating,” he said. “If you let me be free, I can sit in an office and just research, read and write, and not see anyone for days at a time. So I have to find other ways to interact with people and spend my time, or I start to feel lonely.”
Chen arranges in-person meetings whenever possible. If I don’t have to work from home, I try to go to a coffee shop or library and strike up a conversation.
He takes his two kids every week to bond with other parents in his West Los Angeles neighborhood, as the pizza truck sets up shop in a nearby park on Tuesday nights. A competitive powerlifter, he often trains at friends’ gyms rather than lifting weights in his own garage, allowing him to connect with people who share his passion.
“I don’t think work should be at the top of the list of places you go to make friends, but that’s the reality for many of us. It’s the only place we meet,” Chen said. “Right now, many of us are not meeting in person as much as we used to.”
Are we lonely at work or just lonely?
Gemma Dale, a researcher and specialist in flexible, hybrid and remote working, said the mental health crisis was a global problem.
Long before the pandemic, Americans began spending more time alone and less time socializing in person. For a time, the bonds they formed at work helped compensate for their reduced participation in community activities such as church, neighborhood associations, and sports teams. Recent workplace changes have exacerbated the loneliness epidemic.
“The worst symptoms in this report are being experienced by people living alone, highlighting what we’ve known for decades: the experience of remote work is context-specific,” Dale said.
Ruth White, a psychotherapist and workplace mental health consultant, says she has been working remotely for nearly 10 years and loved it. She traveled the world visiting friends and family, went sailing on Wednesdays, and took walks on nearby lakes almost every day. However, during her actual work, she saw a different side. That means workers rely on the office to meet all their social needs.
“When work becomes primarily virtual, opportunities for connection can be lost and many people can feel lonely and experience depression and anxiety,” she wrote on LinkedIn.
That’s why she works with clients to help them build a social life outside of work.
“The healthiest workplaces of the future are not the ones that force everyone back into the office or completely abandon face-to-face contact,” White said. “They will be the ones who intentionally create opportunities for employees to build meaningful relationships, whether they work remotely, hybrid, or in-person.”
“Engineering the moments that matter”
Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward and publisher of the Flex Index, thinks so.
“It’s a tall order to ask offices to solve the loneliness epidemic,” he told USA TODAY. But employers can and should do more than that.
“The problem is that most companies are treating remote work as the default, rather than as something that needs to be designed around connectivity. Companies are cutting back on gatherings, travel budgets, and training,” Elliott wrote in FlexIndex. “Nobody’s checking in. Nobody’s engineering the big moments.”
He said the study found that people who live alone experience almost twice as much mental distress when working remotely, but that’s not an argument for everyone to return to the office.
Simple fixes help bring people together. For example, a recent study found that when remote workers come into the office one day a month, productivity increases by 8% and turnover rates are reduced by a third, while increasing job satisfaction and improving communication.
Harrington said he’s not saying he’s rewinding the clock to 2019, when most work was done in person or in an office. Instead, employers and employees should set aside “purposeful, time-consuming face-to-face time,” such as weekly one-on-one meetings or regular off-sites.
“Pre-pandemic offices weren’t necessarily social spaces, people were just working in their cubicles,” she says. “If we can be more intentional about how our days are actually being spent, we can potentially accomplish more in fewer days.”
