Nobody misses the commute. Nobody misses picking up the suit at the dry cleaner. Everyone appreciates being able to make the doctor’s appointment at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. But maybe, just maybe, working from home doesn’t really make workers happier.
Fully remote workers are less likely than the average worker to report themselves to be “thriving,” according to a new Gallup poll. They are more likely than on-site workers to describe themselves as stressed, angry, lonely, or sad. It’s on the sadness and loneliness where the gap is biggest: Fully remote workers are about 35% more likely to experience sadness and loneliness than are in-office workers. Hybrid workers generally land in the middle.
Why might this be?
The most obvious problem is the lack of boundaries. It’s harder to tell when you’re working and when you’re hanging out at home — you’re always sort of doing both. Maybe that’s not great for thriving.
Maybe it’s the loss of rituals, as Vibhas Ratanjee at Forbes suggests. He argues that even exchanging business cards carries meaning and builds a sense of worth and connection.
That’s surely part of it, but there’s a bigger story here. It turns out that what we do when we work isn’t exactly what we might think we’re doing.
That is, work, for humans, is not merely trading labor for remuneration. Sure, if you want to be reductive and quite literal, your job is where you trade your labor for currency and health insurance. But human happiness is not best understood through such materialistic and literal thinking.
Unlike, say, amoebas, we are creatures that need to believe we are needed. We need to laugh about things, even more so about banal or serious things. We also need to be able to tell people, in person, about ourselves. We also need occasional changes of scenery — how illogical is that! Why should it matter where we are sitting?!
If you need to ask a question, why can’t you just email, text, or schedule a video call? Why should impromptu interactions have any more value than planned ones?
We may not have a great answer to these “why” questions, but the data sure suggest that we can’t quite replace in-person connections with remote ones, however fast our internet is.
It turns out we may understand ourselves less than we thought we did — and so it’s good as we work through these questions to work together.