Remote workers feel isolated. Back-to-office mandates are not a fix

Remote work in the United States has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic. In 2019, the percentage of days people worked from home accounted for just 7 percent of all workdays; by 2023, that figure had quadrupled to 28 percent.

As a remote worker for this publication since 2019, I have been part of this sea change. And I understand both the feelings of empowerment and isolation that can accompany working alone.

Whether remote work is, on balance, a perk or a problem is something I often question. So, too, do employers, though we frequently seem to land on opposite sides of this polarizing issue. While I’ve been outfitting my home office some 800 kilometers away from my company’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, many institutions, including the U.S. federal government, have been issuing return-to-office mandates.

Social scientists have also waded into the issue, with findings on remote work and hybrid work — where workers toggle between working from home and the office — piling up in the past few years. With the research still nascent, those signals currently point in many directions. “It’s a literature that’s very divided,” says sociologist Mattia Vacchiano of the University of Geneva. 

Into that fray enters a big paper appearing June 4 in Science. The researchers crunched the numbers on five surveys spanning 2011 to 2024 — except the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 — and more than half a million workers in the United States. They find that employees working in jobs that can go remote experience, on average, greater social isolation and mental distress than employees in jobs that must be done in person. That distress is particularly high for workers living alone.

Some groups, such as working moms and people with disabilities, can benefit from remote work, research suggests. So it’s easy to assume their mental distress might go down when working at home. That’s not the case, says economist Natalia Emanuel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in New York City. “We actually see the entire distribution shifting to more distress.”

If remote work is harming mental health, or contributing to the loneliness epidemic, then action is urgently needed to protect workers. But that action should not take the form of getting everybody back to the office, experts caution. Commutes, for instance, also incur costs, says economist Cevat Giray Aksoy. Working from home saves people over an hour per day, across 27 countries analyzed, with people using that time for work and caregiving, Aksoy, of King’s College London, and colleagues reported in May 2023 in AEA Papers and Proceedings.

“The right lesson is not ‘everyone back to the office’ but ‘design work better,’” he says.

‘Remote work triggers distress’ is too simple a story

Population-wide social isolation, or time spent alone, and mental distress have increased since the pandemic. To see if remote work might be contributing to that rise, Emanuel and her colleagues merged five surveys taken by a representative sample of U.S. adults. They broke survey takers into two groups: those in occupations that could be done remotely, such as software engineers and clerical workers, and those in nonremote occupations, such as doctors and chefs. Roughly one-third of U.S. workers are in jobs that can be done remotely.

Much of the rise in distress across the population links with the possibility of remote work, the team found. Workers in jobs that could be done remotely were 4.6 percentage points more likely than workers in in-person jobs to see a mental health professional. On a standard distress scale, workers living alone went from experiencing distress “some of the time” on average to experiencing distress “most of the time.”

Not everyone is convinced by the findings. “To the extent there are mental health downsides from isolation at home, there are more than offsetting upsides in terms of less stress, time with family and quality of life,” says economist Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University. 

Nor does the methodology allow the researchers to differentiate between fully remote workers and hybrid workers, says Vacchiano, who wasn’t involved in the study. Depending on the evidence one looks at, a hybrid work arrangement is either the remote work sweet spot or a source of family conflict for workers craving predictable workweeks. With hybrid working arrangements now the dominant form of remote work, distinguishing outcomes between the groups is key, he says.  

Employers and researchers need to move beyond simplistic remote work is good or bad narratives, Vacchiano says. “This story [in the Science study] is simple. But the reality might not be that simple.”

Fostering flexibility and social connection makes for better workplaces

This study hasn’t resolved the conflicting signals emerging from research on remote work. But scientists are reaching some consensus on how to help workers. “Employers should treat social connection as part of the job design,” says Emma Zang, a family and health policy expert at Yale University who coauthored a perspective about the new study.

Often, hybrid employees find themselves working in empty offices speaking to geographically distant colleagues on virtual meeting platforms, a task readily accomplished at home, experts say. And it’s easy for coworkers to overlook fully remote employees even in hybrid settings.

The key is coordination and consideration of individual needs, Zang and others say. Work requires both deep focus time and informal interactions that can facilitate creativity and innovation. Solutions can include having hybrid employees come in on the same days or even the same times on a given day. Such flexibility can meet the needs of workers in various life stages, such as workers with caregiving responsibilities or new hires and early-career workers who benefit from more in-person time.

And special consideration should go to fully remote workers, Zang says. Employers should consider subsidizing membership to coworking spaces or placing remote workers on teams that meet occasionally in person.

As for myself, I began reporting this story nervous that the bottom line would be: Remote work harms mental health, so get back to the office. But now, I’m reminded of one my mentors. There are solvable problems and unsolvable ones, she liked to say. Focus on the former. In researching this story, it sounds like getting remote work right is one of those solvable problems — if employers take heed.

The global shift toward remote work is “one of the largest social experiments in modern history,” Zang and Yale sociologist Rourke O’Brien write in their perspective. All the more reason to get it right.