There are a lot of advantages to working from home. There’s no commute, no need to dress up. It may be possible to run a load of laundry on the side. And being home is a good way to thwart porch pirates.
But there are also downsides, including the possibility of losing connection with colleagues, missing opportunities for advancement and blurring the split between work and life. And a recent study pointed to other big problems: a loss of social contact and rise in mental distress.
This space has argued that a hybrid arrangement, with a few days a week in the office, is best. But it works only if both employees and their employers find it beneficial. And a number of companies are instituting stricter back to work policies. Rogers Communications requires employees to be in five days a week and big Canadian banks typically require four.
The federal government is insisting on four days a week in the office for civil servants, starting earlier this month. Some departments were still scrambling to find places to put the returning workers, though, and civil servants continued to protest the policy.
While workers may fear a gradual return to an expectation of being in the office all week, they should be glad that the days of doing their jobs entirely at home are in the rearview mirror. The harms associated with remote work are not to be dismissed.
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The new study, published last month in the journal Science, compared isolation and mental health changes in U.S. workers whose jobs could be done remotely with those whose jobs had to be performed in person.
It found that jobs that could be done at home led to more solitude – an extra 72 minutes a day on average. Unsurprisingly, the effects were most pronounced for those living alone, some of whom spent the whole day without human contact. Interestingly, these people did not compensate by socializing more outside of work hours. In fact, they did so less, suggesting that isolation can be self-perpetuating.
This rise in solitude was associated with greater increases in mental distress. The Kessler measure – a self-reported assessment of psychological state – revealed that mental distress “rose precipitously” for those in jobs that could be done remotely. For those in other jobs, mental distress rose “marginally,” the study found.
There are some drawbacks to the study. It did not assess whether individuals were themselves working from home, rather whether they had jobs that could be done remotely. And even though it sought to filter out exposure in the workplace to artificial intelligence it relied on data that end in 2024, before the fears about AI-driven job losses began to mount in a serious way.
However, the study is strengthened by the fact that it excludes the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, a period so unusual that it could skew results. And the data are drawn from very large surveys conducted over 13 years, totalling nearly 600,000 people.
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“Remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone,” the authors write. “Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate.”
In other words, people may love remote work without connecting it to an associated decline in mental well-being. It’s possible that people would prefer working from home, even if they knew its harms. Still, that is a trade-off that should be approached with full knowledge of the downsides.
While the value of workplace social contact may seem debatable to people who don’t particularly like their colleagues, humans are social animals and spending time around others makes them happier and healthier. Even casual greetings at the coffee shop or elevator on the way to work – a few words of inconsequential chat with a stranger – add up to valuable social contact that boosts health.
Conversely, loneliness can increase the risk of cardiovascular problems, depression, suicidal behaviour, dementia and premature death.
The pandemic was a frightening and lonely time for many people. It would be tragic if one of its main legacies was the persistence of a remote-working culture that entrenched that isolation, with all the mental health problems that can flow from it.