> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
Another factor beyond individual suitability to remote work (which certainly varies person to person and even within a person’s lifetime due to lifestyle changes), is the work situation itself.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
Agreed, the loss of some opportunities for signal like is definitely one of the downsides.
One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
it says a large healthcare org but does not say if that's a care provider where on-site jobs will be completely different from remote-compatible ones, or an insurer where most jobs could be done mostly on a PC.
I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how much I enjoy work or how effective I am at my job. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.
Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.
Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.
I get this. What we are missing out on now is being able to read the room and environment PROPERLY. Hybrid jobs won't do this well. WFH won't, above a certain percentage of people working from home, in general, usually.
> here are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out
I'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
> lack of visual boundaries between work and home life,
This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
I have my desktop computer where I do my own stuff like games in the same desk where I put my work laptop, and yeah sometimes it feels like I'm never really done as the transition is just closing the laptop and switch the monitor input, one thing I like though is that we do mob programming so when it's over it's truly over as we share responsibility rather than me having to finish something on my own before a deadline.
But yeah I'm thinking of putting a second desk in another room for work, I don't want my own house to feel like an office.
I find that what I usually do it just leave the house for a bit too, eithe for a walk, to the gym, or to the grocery store. Having a some moments away from the "bad screen" before the "good screen" is wildly helpful for me.
>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
I've always thought that the same discipline needed to work remotely, is the same to start your own company. When you start a company, you have the same isolation, lack of coworkers for socialization, and no boundaries between work and home.
It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
The most undeniable examples were when we worked at a company that had offices, but allowed people to work remote at their discretion.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
Likewise online you run into claims that full remote or hybrid can't and doesn't work for anyone, and we all interpret observed dynamics at work to construct theories supportive of whichever configuration is our favorite (WFH/Hybrid/In Office) or as evidence the one we dislike is worse. In reality the situation is messy and complicated and heavily circumstantial, depending on team/company culture and dynamics and working styles.
For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.
Either at the company or at home (though I mean working at a coffee shop sometimes isn't so bad). Coworking spaces might help
with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.
I am curious, do believe that a company or an employee is responsible for paying for a ersatz "coworking space" (ersatz, in that the employer did not choose that as a place for their employees to work)?
I get that. I said as much. Though suggesting employers should have no say in where their employees work on generally work protected by intellectual property law is tricky. If they have an office, usually that is where they want you to work if the goal is an office setting. Some companies do not and rent out coworking space. Different.
By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
Could agree with this more. I've worked 100% remote for the last 6 years and had quite a few years of hybrid remote work before that.
Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
Exactly the same thing happens with in-office work. I've certainly had that experience! But it's hard to talk about because in-person work is the "default", and it feels like if you have problems with that it's a sign of problems with you.
(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.
Honestly the lack of empathy about this topic from top management is extremely disturbing.
Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
My "first-order costs only" spreadsheet put RTO at like twenty grand a year. I had no idea.
I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
> In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
this sounds like the WFH people might be treated the same way as the in-office people. as in you're retaining an in-office culture but people can choose to WFH. that is not the same thing as being a remote working company. the culture is completely different in an org that successfully does remote working.
as a functional example on the social side, people booking in time to just hang out and chat. even if it's work chat but just more relaxed chat. build in some social element beyond just treating it as cogs in a 9-5 machine. add an extra 30 minutes to a team update call to just have a chat with everyone -- including folks in the office.
edit -- to be clear, managers need to be doing that ^
I think I like where you're going with the "accommodated" or not framing. I feel that most companies' offices, especially tech companies, have lately just taken to straight-up not accommodating people. The company crams nothing but minimal, 4ft desks in, edge to edge, with zero partitions whatsoever (… let alone an actual wall to form … an … office …) but want to pretend as-if that's somehow accommodating. Add in crappy chairs, bad keyboards¹, 3 hour commutes, etc. and it's just so "wtf?" that, yeah, remote work — for what flaws it does have — ranks higher. I have a better equipment, a better desk, more space, more quiet / room to concentrate — I can build an office that exceeds what my employer will provide — and I can do so in spite of today's ludicriously priced real estate market where I haven't even really got the room to do so.
And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
100% agreed. i flamed out while remote working at $LAST_JOB. it was a combination of a changing cultural dynamic, changing expectations of my role (which i wasn't comfortable with) and a lack of necessary staffing.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
There is no mention of how many of the surveyed workers are even able to work remotely. A large healthcare organization is likely to employ many people who must be on-site in a hospital or clinic to even do their jobs, from doctors and nurses to orderlies, food service, and cleaning staff.
It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
I just flamed out exactly as you describe. It's my second time also. If anyone has any tips for some kind of counseling or coaching or anything else, would be much appreciated.
Get a few responsibilities in the outside world, or someone who'll make demands of you. Get a dog.
Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
It's worth being very honest with yourself about what you're feeling. If going into the office fills a void, you should realize that you are now handing a load bearing portion of your life and psyche to your employer. If you are laid off, you will be devastated. Doing the work to get your personal life to a place where you want to work from home because you enjoy your own company, friends, family, pets, environment... is very much well worth it in the long run.
Some struggle regardless of remote or onsite because office job culture has become fucking stupid FOMO fueled social animal farm, not a meaningful economic contributor in real terms.
That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
Loved remote working from 2019 to early 2026. No doubt it was the best type of job for my health as there was little stress and I was never lonely. I made sure I found new friends (like in 2024 I found a happy hour group via Bumble for Friends of 6 other dudes in which we gather every Tuesday. Also, one of them is my European travel buddy as his kid now lives in Europe) and strengthened other friendships.
I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career in healthcare soon. Definitely am missing remote work but i need to pay my bills. Further, IT especially web design and development is a dying field especially with the upcoming voice Internet paradigm shift I see and in which Open AI is working on now (wrote about such here https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
Too bad so many companies insist on top-down management practices that actively make this harder: planning and tracking work in individually owned tickets, individual stack-ranked performance evaluations, "productivity" metrics that don't account for collaboration or shared learning...
(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff, customers get unhappy and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. more profit usually doesn't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over their reports does.
Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
"office hours". a dedicated afternoon where anyone from the company could drop in to a running call and just ask me anything about engineering. bug reports; features; questions; feedback; anything.
building in an extra 30 minutes on team catchup calls just to hang out at the end. usually end up talking about some work stuff, but in a more relaxed/social way.
demo/learning sessions. how to use databricks, how to do X, how X works, this cool thing we built.
I mostly just focus on trying to find one or two people who like pairing and always suggest to do it with them. I always aim to be positive, anti judgemental, understanding, curious, etc. so theyll feel comfortable.
One of my coworkers in an old company set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
Being able to work remotely is like being sentenced to prison and then finding a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I always strive to do my best at work and make a good impression. But I have absolutely 0 interest in the product, the mission, the culture, the personal or collective aspirations of owners, shareholders, leaders or "leadership", or who they are as people. I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car, or using a public washroom, or eating in a cafeteria, or sitting uncomfortably at a desk all day, or listening to everyone's boring stories.
The best part though, is no team building nonsense, no company BBQs or pizza days, no casual Fridays, no boss dropping in for a one on one, no psychos trying to get the energy level up with a "LETS GOOOO TEAM!!"
Just doing a good job for good pay and being treated like an adult. I didn't know working could be like this when I was starting out.
WFH people want to do work, take meetings, and just overall get things done. Sure they also want to be at home so they can use a 15 min break between meetings to start laundry.
RTO people want to do work, take meetings, and overall get things done while there are others around them working. RTO people need other people around them constantly.
This is the conflict. WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
It's like being taken hostage with people who are pretending to like it. Meanwhile some of them have personal lives so bad or they're so afraid of being alone that they genuinely do like it.
me too, but its the vast minority of all companies i have been in the past 35 years. i don't want to sit in a room or even building with the rest of the drones of whom i have no clue what they are doing there expect burning money and wasting time of others.
but sure there are enough exceptions to turn up once in a blue moon to have drinks with the new peeps who seem nice on slack.
Do miserable people not deserve to make a living? Companies should be able to accommodate their disabilities by making sure they are not around others who may be affected by their presence.
I agree 100%, you get paid to do your job, anything above this is charity to the shareholders/executives/managers. I work as a contractor so get paid for days I work, I've watched permanent staff who were perfect corporate bots get the boot while I stayed as I focused on the work.
Everyone always seems to assume everyone else is a corporate bot and they are the only true mercenary just working for the money.
I’ve seen so many contractors who think they’re so smart for being contractors and not loyal to any kind of company… turns out they do the same shit an employee does just gets paid 5x less, and when they’re booted no one really gives gives a shit about them. Okay…
if i have to sit in an office to have job security (which is a big if as we see all the time) then i rather get thrown out. that never happened in the past almost 4 decades though: i leave because i get better offers. and never have been in an office, ever.
I've never been the first to be let go. It turns out if you do valuable work, people notice that and want to keep you around. On the other hand, when I had jobs based on a personal connection, it was almost the opposite. I was treated almost like an imposter. The conventional wisdom on this is just stupid. No one is going to keep you on just because you're a good buddy. Being useful always comes first.
people aren't rational actors. given your work passes a basic functional bar, if you are well liked, your work will be valued. if you are not liked, people will pick your work apart. these mechanisms feed back on one another but your narrative leads me to believe you /have/ forged meaningful relationships and are more well liked than you realize.
A theory I've proposed that I would love to get scientific evidence for... I would guess that WFH is effectively bimodal. WFH advocates would largely fall into a high performance bucket, and detractors either believe that average employees are low performers and need monitoring or are low performers. This is not social vs anti-social, its wanting to be productive with your time - whether thats the time you spend working, or with family etc.
- WFH for high performers: fewer distractions because you can control your environment, less time wasted on commute, less time on non-work communication, etc. More flexibility, better control of your time and space.
- WFH for poor performers: No oversight so you choose to work less. You control your environment so you can add distractions - Meetings, TV, social media chores, family, leaving to go do stuff.
- Office for high performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control - social conversations, meetings, etc... keeping you from doing work.
- Office for low performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control letting you avoid work without repercussion. Meetings, Social time with coworkers, etc
I would love any scientific evidence for or against this theory. If anyone has any studies or natural experiments I would love to know about them
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.
Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.
There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours
I’m always confused why the default commute time in these discussions is always 60 or 90 minutes one way. 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work. Does that make sense? Most American commute 10-30 minutes. That’s the middle of the bell curve.
We’re in a weird period where a lot of jobs went fully remote around COVID, many weren’t prepared for it, and now they’re doing the opposite over-reaction and forcing everyone back.
A lot of the people I know who went remote after COVID took remote jobs at new companies (remember “the great resignation”?) or moved to a new house because they thought they were done with commuting. Then their companies said they wanted everyone back.
> 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work
60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute.
When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
When I commuted semi-regularly into a downtown office, it was a good 90 minutes. Latterly, going into a newer company's customer briefing center was more like 2 hours each way. I had access to commuter rail which was more pleasant than driving so long as I didn't have an evening dinner/event. but it took about the same length of time.
One answer to the parent's question is that I owned/own a house which was a pretty manageable 25 minute suburban commute which I wasn't going to sell just because I got a new job. (Which didn't last that long anyway.)
Yes, I get the sense that this varies a lot depending on area and economic strata.
In the poor rural area my hometown is located, 1-3h+ commutes aren't unusual, partially out of necessity (there aren't enough jobs nearby to sustain the population).
I mean, in a lot of these cases people take those jobs because they're able to work remotely initially... and then get hit with an inflexible, top-down RTO mandate once they've settled into the role.
And money spent on a more expensive house closer to the office vs the same home in an affordable place. It's the main reason I can't go back to San Francisco, once you get used to a less than one million four bedroom house in a pleasant neighborhood you can't go back to living in a shoebox for twice the price, even if it's the most beautiful city in the world.
Yes, definitely. Time management is a lot easier when it's all on your own terms apart from the required meetings.
You get to skip the commute and reap the benefits all day long. Even your diet improves. You can cook fresh or have delivered whatever you want. Your hygiene improves since nothing is preventing you from taking another shower or committing to more involved skincare. You clean your home more often. You're more likely to exercise throughout the day for natural stress relief. If you have any minor medical issues that need upkeep, you're already in the privacy of your own home.
This is not just a list of annoyances or frivolous luxuries for highly sensitive people. These are the basic building blocks for a better quality of life. These used to be the forever-deferred items at the bottom of my todo list stressing me out. Now they are integrated with my life and effortless. I'm no longer trapped in a cube and put on display. I can live like a human being and do whatever whenever wherever I want. My life is no longer oriented around running errands or physical presence.
I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
I didn't have to do it every day and it wasn't for that long a period but I had sort of come to the conclusion that it wasn't sustainable, especially after the novelty of working in the city wore off. I live fairly far out but, even that aside, there's just a lot of traffic. Even coming in for something after work these days still takes me 90 minutes to get in and commuter rail is useless for an evening event.
Last sometimes commute (I traveled a lot) to a suburban office was much more manageable but the office shutdown at some point during COVID because of low use.
Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
>one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.
Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
Remote work is one of the things i would expect every country government to incentivise and promote.
Countryside, villages, islands would revive, less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs, more happy people and families, more opportunities globally, etc.
But no, some property owners in the centre are more important than this and we have to live in overcrowded cities. Kudos
I've been remote for ~6 years. I can't stand being in an office when I don't need to be there and looking busy. On top of that, commute savings are great. I work out of a coworking space a walking distance from where I live. I also had a child recently, and being able to pick him up easily after work is priceless. Forcing most tech talent to be in the same 2-3 cities is one of the worst things in recent history.
I've been working remotely for over 20 years. ProTip: working remote does not mean working from home. Surround yourself everyday with the people you want. Go to coworking spaces, coffee shops, parks. Find fellow remote workers and host coworking sessions and your places.
I like 1-2 days in-office if the team is actually local but the problem is that companies can't decide what they want (in-office vs cheaper LCOL labor) and it ends up being the worst of both worlds where you drive into the office just to sit alone in conference rooms on video calls with people in other offices.
If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.
For me personally, life has basically been divided into before and after. I used to spend an extra two hours every day just getting to and from work, taking public transport, which honestly wasn’t exactly inspiring. Now working from home is a real pleasure, and life has become so much more enjoyable.
I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company. After 3 years, or 5 years, you know how the company works, you know the culture, you have an internal network etc. I think at that point, depending on your role you're more equipped to effectively manage fully remote work. Fully remote is so helpful for families who have to navigate daycare drop-off/pick-up times that don't align with work + commute hours. Gaining the ability to work fully remote after X amount of years with a company could help retain mid-level seniority in that phase of life.
> I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company.
IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through.
Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
I went from being fully in-person at a design firm (IDEO), working every day in a project room full of brilliant designers, to fully remote at the same company post-COVID. The remote period was a nonstop marathon of Zoom meetings, and I eventually left.
With that said, I'm grateful to have made the transition to remote working, because I got to be there for my daughter's early years.
Now I still work remote, but on my own terms, as an independent consultant. The difference is night and day.
What I learned is that remote vs hybrid vs in-office doesn't matter nearly as much as feeling engaged and effective in your role. If you feel that, it doesn't matter where you are.
About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.
Those aren't the same workers though. There's a dichotomy of remote workers - some are screwing off during the day and some are working more hours than they should be since it can be hard to unplug from the desk (especially if it's a full remote cmpany with people across four plus timezones).
yeah, but not extra hours, just putting in the mandatory required. Friends, neighbors that work from home do the same. Heck, our AP clerk that works remote is processing transactions at 2a and is unreachable during normal business hours.
The true workaholics are a small minority, though. Office workers who do this are part of the small minority. OTOH, it's a regular occurrence for those who work remote: not because they're workaholics, but because they're putting in their eight.
Just the amount of time and life you waste for commute can be staggering. And of course all the other overhead that comes with going to and back from the office.
It depends on your personality: If you shine in meetings and love the hallway talk, you will suffer in remote work.
If you already juggle multiple dependencies in your life (small children and/or in school, elder care, other dependents and special situations, dual study), or simply have too many interests, hobbies and love to do more things outside your work, remote work just feels revolutionary, to the point you just resent going to the office.
I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?
I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.
Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.
Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
It's fascinating how well the system recovers. If it works, companies that do remote work will outperform those that don't. And the reverse. If many companies all opt-in to remote work and output declines inflation will correct that.
> For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.
Aww! All this while, I didn't know RTO came from a place of genuine worry and care about your workers. There I was thinking, that RTO was more about control and domination. Forgive me master, for I knew not.
I suspect the "more likely to leave their jobs" is the part the executives actually care about.
If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers.
And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.
This is partly self-selecting, though. For example, it could really be saying that introverts - more likely to select remote work - are also more likely to be happy on their own. Extraverts are more likely to be happy around other people, but also more likely to be unhappy because of the behaviour of other people.
I have a related question as someone who's been fully remote for about 12 years now, including all of my time in more senior/management roles: how does in person work even work for people who are in meetings all day every day?
My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?
Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.
There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.
Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha.
That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.
Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.
When I was at Google it wasn't uncommon for a particular conference room to be "assigned" to a director or VP. From what I remember their calendars were always crazy full, too.
After 6 years of full remote I am seriously considering how much of a pay cut I would accept to get work in person in an office and get to speak the local language daily.
A big issue with non-remote is access to opportunities. A lot of organizations don't have offices everywhere, and I having to relocate every time there's a job change is absurd.
For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.
It may have been the normal before we had the technology to remove that need. Obviously it may be the normal for certain types of work still, but I don't see why it needs to be that way for office work. This ends up greatly affecting housing markets too and making life more expensive for everyone.
Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day.
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
This seems obvious and predictable. of course people with flexibility, comfort, privacy, and convenience are better off than people forced into a grueling commute, a sick office, an exposed cubicle and toxic office politics
Being forced to work in an office when you KNOW you can work remotely is the most soul crushing thing I have ever experienced. It feels a tiny little bit like a Serf not allowed to leave the land.
Workers without 5-10 hours of unpaid commute time in their week are happier. Gee whiz.
That's time to run errands, learn a skill, exercise, sleep, read, do nothing... it's almost as though our time is valuable and we don't like wasting it.
Especially true if you aren't doing a job you enjoy.
The downside of going remote is there can be a lot of project momentum lost in coordination issues. More chat based meetings, and less actual product out the door. =3
My F500 employer has on-site requirements. Colleagues and I sad-laugh because we all commute into the office, and spend most of the day on Zoom meetings with colleagues from other locations - you know, exactly the same thing we would do from home.
I'm four days a week in the office and almost all my meetings are on Zoom.
It's noisy, lunch is rarely below 20 dollars (no, I don't have time nor will I cook a big pot of 4 meals Sunday night), the lights are too bright, the commute is crowded and causes anxiety, and my housing costs are very high so the commute is less than 45m.
I hate RTO - and I'm in leadership. Anyone who's working from home and whining about it should be ashamed of the privilege. You're incredibly lucky.
Of course. When I went remote, I could work from Miami during the winter, and escape the NYC cold months. Going for a swim to your buildings roof pool after done with the day, was the best feeling ever.
From what I saw most people who "like" going to office are those suffering from domestic violence, having young children and wanting "time off" from parenting and in case of managers, the feeling of power over other human beings is not the same over Teams. Then you have narcissists and peeps/pervs who enjoy being in the middle of "action" and finally people who don't have any friends who hope they find them at a workplace. If you feel the need to go to office, book appointment with a therapist. Maybe you have an unresolved issue.
The sample is not high quality, but the conclusion is pretty obvious. No thinking person can doubt that improving work/life balance, flexible hours, sleeping more, commuting less and comfy pants is going to lead to any other outcome.
Clearly easier for you, me, or anyone else to delude ourselves into thinking our tech or jobs are harmless. God knows I prefer and feel happier at a WFH job, but how is this different or better for us than filter bubbles, aside from the obvious perks that are nice? How comfortable should work be?
I'm also curious. I work remote about 95% of the time and my time spent in the office is by far my least productive. Way more ad hoc chats and longer lunches (both work related and not). I do enjoy the social aspect a lot, but man I get so much less actual work done. On occasion though, those chats lead to a really great idea for the product, so there's also that.
Remote only if done right, otherwise nope. i have seen many “remote” but in reality they dictate other measures rendering it worse than in person, like 6hrs a day of xyz time zone to be present, others even want to have an open camera in these hours, others have other means of surveillance to track your location or time spent on the device. If the remote job isn’t asynchronous, minimal meetings, and only the outcome is required from you, it’s not remote and would rather go to the office so this scum employer pay hefty rent instead.
I have also noticed some are trying to portray remote as “woke”, I don’t even know the relationship between both
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
…of a single company
> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
Another factor beyond individual suitability to remote work (which certainly varies person to person and even within a person’s lifetime due to lifestyle changes), is the work situation itself.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
> amplified over Slack
Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
Agreed, the loss of some opportunities for signal like is definitely one of the downsides.
One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
Vent ahead:
I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
This is when you find a new WFH position. Imagine how bad it would be working in an office with sociopaths that want all of those things?
I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
it says a large healthcare org but does not say if that's a care provider where on-site jobs will be completely different from remote-compatible ones, or an insurer where most jobs could be done mostly on a PC.
I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how much I enjoy work or how effective I am at my job. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.
Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.
Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.
100% agree. I'm the exact opposite of the grandparent - I get much better work done on my wfh days because I'm not drained by the commute.
I get this. What we are missing out on now is being able to read the room and environment PROPERLY. Hybrid jobs won't do this well. WFH won't, above a certain percentage of people working from home, in general, usually.
> here are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out
I'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
> lack of visual boundaries between work and home life,
This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
I have my desktop computer where I do my own stuff like games in the same desk where I put my work laptop, and yeah sometimes it feels like I'm never really done as the transition is just closing the laptop and switch the monitor input, one thing I like though is that we do mob programming so when it's over it's truly over as we share responsibility rather than me having to finish something on my own before a deadline. But yeah I'm thinking of putting a second desk in another room for work, I don't want my own house to feel like an office.
I find that what I usually do it just leave the house for a bit too, eithe for a walk, to the gym, or to the grocery store. Having a some moments away from the "bad screen" before the "good screen" is wildly helpful for me.
>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
I've always thought that the same discipline needed to work remotely, is the same to start your own company. When you start a company, you have the same isolation, lack of coworkers for socialization, and no boundaries between work and home.
It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
It’s also circumstantial.
Working remote during COVID sucked and felt unmoored.
Once I had a robust IRL social life and could go see some live music again, it was great.
It also depends if you live in tiny apartment or if you have a house with a dedicated space.
The same person can take to it depending on the circumstances.
How do you know they're flaming out/struggling/etc because of remote work issues rather than other issues like company culture etc?
The most undeniable examples were when we worked at a company that had offices, but allowed people to work remote at their discretion.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
Likewise online you run into claims that full remote or hybrid can't and doesn't work for anyone, and we all interpret observed dynamics at work to construct theories supportive of whichever configuration is our favorite (WFH/Hybrid/In Office) or as evidence the one we dislike is worse. In reality the situation is messy and complicated and heavily circumstantial, depending on team/company culture and dynamics and working styles.
For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
Thank you. This. The backstabbing and passive aggression are so much more trenchant.
I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.
Either at the company or at home (though I mean working at a coffee shop sometimes isn't so bad). Coworking spaces might help with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.
> Coworking spaces might help with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.
because, as someone else i replied to in the thread points out, miserable employees perform worse.
I am curious, do believe that a company or an employee is responsible for paying for a ersatz "coworking space" (ersatz, in that the employer did not choose that as a place for their employees to work)?
I get that. I said as much. Though suggesting employers should have no say in where their employees work on generally work protected by intellectual property law is tricky. If they have an office, usually that is where they want you to work if the goal is an office setting. Some companies do not and rent out coworking space. Different.
For me it's always been the opposite: Stuck with so many people around, always talking, always things going on and draining me. No way to focus.
Remote work was a godsend. I started working remote in 2015 and never looked back.
I'm right in the middle.
By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
Could agree with this more. I've worked 100% remote for the last 6 years and had quite a few years of hybrid remote work before that.
Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
Exactly the same thing happens with in-office work. I've certainly had that experience! But it's hard to talk about because in-person work is the "default", and it feels like if you have problems with that it's a sign of problems with you.
(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.
Yeah this is the primary disconnect because management is more extroverted and so they hated remote / don't see why some want it.
Honestly the lack of empathy about this topic from top management is extremely disturbing.
Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
My "first-order costs only" spreadsheet put RTO at like twenty grand a year. I had no idea.
I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
I absolutely detest this framing of remote vs onsite. What it really is is accommodated vs not-accommodated.
Accommodated employees perform better. Non-accommodated employees perform worse.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
> In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
this sounds like the WFH people might be treated the same way as the in-office people. as in you're retaining an in-office culture but people can choose to WFH. that is not the same thing as being a remote working company. the culture is completely different in an org that successfully does remote working.
as a functional example on the social side, people booking in time to just hang out and chat. even if it's work chat but just more relaxed chat. build in some social element beyond just treating it as cogs in a 9-5 machine. add an extra 30 minutes to a team update call to just have a chat with everyone -- including folks in the office.
edit -- to be clear, managers need to be doing that ^
I think I like where you're going with the "accommodated" or not framing. I feel that most companies' offices, especially tech companies, have lately just taken to straight-up not accommodating people. The company crams nothing but minimal, 4ft desks in, edge to edge, with zero partitions whatsoever (… let alone an actual wall to form … an … office …) but want to pretend as-if that's somehow accommodating. Add in crappy chairs, bad keyboards¹, 3 hour commutes, etc. and it's just so "wtf?" that, yeah, remote work — for what flaws it does have — ranks higher. I have a better equipment, a better desk, more space, more quiet / room to concentrate — I can build an office that exceeds what my employer will provide — and I can do so in spite of today's ludicriously priced real estate market where I haven't even really got the room to do so.
And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
100% agreed. i flamed out while remote working at $LAST_JOB. it was a combination of a changing cultural dynamic, changing expectations of my role (which i wasn't comfortable with) and a lack of necessary staffing.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
There is no mention of how many of the surveyed workers are even able to work remotely. A large healthcare organization is likely to employ many people who must be on-site in a hospital or clinic to even do their jobs, from doctors and nurses to orderlies, food service, and cleaning staff.
It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
I just flamed out exactly as you describe. It's my second time also. If anyone has any tips for some kind of counseling or coaching or anything else, would be much appreciated.
Get a few responsibilities in the outside world, or someone who'll make demands of you. Get a dog.
Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
It's worth being very honest with yourself about what you're feeling. If going into the office fills a void, you should realize that you are now handing a load bearing portion of your life and psyche to your employer. If you are laid off, you will be devastated. Doing the work to get your personal life to a place where you want to work from home because you enjoy your own company, friends, family, pets, environment... is very much well worth it in the long run.
Some struggle regardless of remote or onsite because office job culture has become fucking stupid FOMO fueled social animal farm, not a meaningful economic contributor in real terms.
That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
Are you saying me telling Claude to improve a process by 1% to increase shareholder value isn't meaningful and contributing to society? How dare you!
Loved remote working from 2019 to early 2026. No doubt it was the best type of job for my health as there was little stress and I was never lonely. I made sure I found new friends (like in 2024 I found a happy hour group via Bumble for Friends of 6 other dudes in which we gather every Tuesday. Also, one of them is my European travel buddy as his kid now lives in Europe) and strengthened other friendships.
I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career in healthcare soon. Definitely am missing remote work but i need to pay my bills. Further, IT especially web design and development is a dying field especially with the upcoming voice Internet paradigm shift I see and in which Open AI is working on now (wrote about such here https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
Too bad so many companies insist on top-down management practices that actively make this harder: planning and tracking work in individually owned tickets, individual stack-ranked performance evaluations, "productivity" metrics that don't account for collaboration or shared learning...
(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
oh for sure.
this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff, customers get unhappy and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. more profit usually doesn't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over their reports does.
Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
"office hours". a dedicated afternoon where anyone from the company could drop in to a running call and just ask me anything about engineering. bug reports; features; questions; feedback; anything.
building in an extra 30 minutes on team catchup calls just to hang out at the end. usually end up talking about some work stuff, but in a more relaxed/social way.
demo/learning sessions. how to use databricks, how to do X, how X works, this cool thing we built.
I mostly just focus on trying to find one or two people who like pairing and always suggest to do it with them. I always aim to be positive, anti judgemental, understanding, curious, etc. so theyll feel comfortable.
One of my coworkers in an old company set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
Being able to work remotely is like being sentenced to prison and then finding a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I always strive to do my best at work and make a good impression. But I have absolutely 0 interest in the product, the mission, the culture, the personal or collective aspirations of owners, shareholders, leaders or "leadership", or who they are as people. I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car, or using a public washroom, or eating in a cafeteria, or sitting uncomfortably at a desk all day, or listening to everyone's boring stories.
The best part though, is no team building nonsense, no company BBQs or pizza days, no casual Fridays, no boss dropping in for a one on one, no psychos trying to get the energy level up with a "LETS GOOOO TEAM!!"
Just doing a good job for good pay and being treated like an adult. I didn't know working could be like this when I was starting out.
I'm glad you work remote because to be candid you sound like a miserable person to be stuck in an office with.
This right here is the crux of the argument.
WFH people want to do work, take meetings, and just overall get things done. Sure they also want to be at home so they can use a 15 min break between meetings to start laundry.
RTO people want to do work, take meetings, and overall get things done while there are others around them working. RTO people need other people around them constantly.
This is the conflict. WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
I like both. What do we do now?
You do what you want without forcing others to do what you want.
It’s pretty simple, in my opinion.
It's like being taken hostage with people who are pretending to like it. Meanwhile some of them have personal lives so bad or they're so afraid of being alone that they genuinely do like it.
Why so cynical? Some of my best friends and favorite people are people who I initially met as random coworkers.
I'm sure there are great friendships among slaves and prisoners too, that doesn't mean you should be thankful to be one.
me too, but its the vast minority of all companies i have been in the past 35 years. i don't want to sit in a room or even building with the rest of the drones of whom i have no clue what they are doing there expect burning money and wasting time of others.
but sure there are enough exceptions to turn up once in a blue moon to have drinks with the new peeps who seem nice on slack.
I think your comment is an example of why lots of people prefer to work remotely: the 'enforced fun' of it all.
Why is it a problem for you that they don't enjoy eating in canteens? Why does working with you mean signing up to be your best friend?
Do miserable people not deserve to make a living? Companies should be able to accommodate their disabilities by making sure they are not around others who may be affected by their presence.
I agree 100%, you get paid to do your job, anything above this is charity to the shareholders/executives/managers. I work as a contractor so get paid for days I work, I've watched permanent staff who were perfect corporate bots get the boot while I stayed as I focused on the work.
Everyone always seems to assume everyone else is a corporate bot and they are the only true mercenary just working for the money.
I’ve seen so many contractors who think they’re so smart for being contractors and not loyal to any kind of company… turns out they do the same shit an employee does just gets paid 5x less, and when they’re booted no one really gives gives a shit about them. Okay…
and this is exactly why you will be seen as disposable and the first to go when layoffs happen.
personal relationships are very important, arguably more important that your raw performance.
Unless you get caught up in a big layoff where the people you have relationships with have zero input.
if i have to sit in an office to have job security (which is a big if as we see all the time) then i rather get thrown out. that never happened in the past almost 4 decades though: i leave because i get better offers. and never have been in an office, ever.
I've never been the first to be let go. It turns out if you do valuable work, people notice that and want to keep you around. On the other hand, when I had jobs based on a personal connection, it was almost the opposite. I was treated almost like an imposter. The conventional wisdom on this is just stupid. No one is going to keep you on just because you're a good buddy. Being useful always comes first.
people aren't rational actors. given your work passes a basic functional bar, if you are well liked, your work will be valued. if you are not liked, people will pick your work apart. these mechanisms feed back on one another but your narrative leads me to believe you /have/ forged meaningful relationships and are more well liked than you realize.
A theory I've proposed that I would love to get scientific evidence for... I would guess that WFH is effectively bimodal. WFH advocates would largely fall into a high performance bucket, and detractors either believe that average employees are low performers and need monitoring or are low performers. This is not social vs anti-social, its wanting to be productive with your time - whether thats the time you spend working, or with family etc.
I would love any scientific evidence for or against this theory. If anyone has any studies or natural experiments I would love to know about themHere is the actual study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.
Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.
They also completely fail to ask for the reasons of better well-being and then the article just starts guessing.
There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours
I’m always confused why the default commute time in these discussions is always 60 or 90 minutes one way. 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work. Does that make sense? Most American commute 10-30 minutes. That’s the middle of the bell curve.
We’re in a weird period where a lot of jobs went fully remote around COVID, many weren’t prepared for it, and now they’re doing the opposite over-reaction and forcing everyone back.
A lot of the people I know who went remote after COVID took remote jobs at new companies (remember “the great resignation”?) or moved to a new house because they thought they were done with commuting. Then their companies said they wanted everyone back.
Do you have a citation for that?
> 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work
60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute.
When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
When I commuted semi-regularly into a downtown office, it was a good 90 minutes. Latterly, going into a newer company's customer briefing center was more like 2 hours each way. I had access to commuter rail which was more pleasant than driving so long as I didn't have an evening dinner/event. but it took about the same length of time.
One answer to the parent's question is that I owned/own a house which was a pretty manageable 25 minute suburban commute which I wasn't going to sell just because I got a new job. (Which didn't last that long anyway.)
Yes, I get the sense that this varies a lot depending on area and economic strata.
In the poor rural area my hometown is located, 1-3h+ commutes aren't unusual, partially out of necessity (there aren't enough jobs nearby to sustain the population).
I mean, in a lot of these cases people take those jobs because they're able to work remotely initially... and then get hit with an inflexible, top-down RTO mandate once they've settled into the role.
Its not just the time, its the energy expended.
And money spent on a more expensive house closer to the office vs the same home in an affordable place. It's the main reason I can't go back to San Francisco, once you get used to a less than one million four bedroom house in a pleasant neighborhood you can't go back to living in a shoebox for twice the price, even if it's the most beautiful city in the world.
Yes, definitely. Time management is a lot easier when it's all on your own terms apart from the required meetings.
You get to skip the commute and reap the benefits all day long. Even your diet improves. You can cook fresh or have delivered whatever you want. Your hygiene improves since nothing is preventing you from taking another shower or committing to more involved skincare. You clean your home more often. You're more likely to exercise throughout the day for natural stress relief. If you have any minor medical issues that need upkeep, you're already in the privacy of your own home.
This is not just a list of annoyances or frivolous luxuries for highly sensitive people. These are the basic building blocks for a better quality of life. These used to be the forever-deferred items at the bottom of my todo list stressing me out. Now they are integrated with my life and effortless. I'm no longer trapped in a cube and put on display. I can live like a human being and do whatever whenever wherever I want. My life is no longer oriented around running errands or physical presence.
The biggest for me is diet by far, I cook every meal. If I have a stretch of going into the office, I end up eating slop, which kills my energy levels
I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
I didn't have to do it every day and it wasn't for that long a period but I had sort of come to the conclusion that it wasn't sustainable, especially after the novelty of working in the city wore off. I live fairly far out but, even that aside, there's just a lot of traffic. Even coming in for something after work these days still takes me 90 minutes to get in and commuter rail is useless for an evening event.
Last sometimes commute (I traveled a lot) to a suburban office was much more manageable but the office shutdown at some point during COVID because of low use.
Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
Wait, are you saying that human contact has no bearing on one's psychological well-being? Or are you saying that I'm being deliberately obtuse?
>one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
Commuting to work for people who don't absolutely need to commute to work may be the biggest cargo cult of them all.
I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.
Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
Remote work is one of the things i would expect every country government to incentivise and promote.
Countryside, villages, islands would revive, less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs, more happy people and families, more opportunities globally, etc.
But no, some property owners in the centre are more important than this and we have to live in overcrowded cities. Kudos
I've been remote for ~6 years. I can't stand being in an office when I don't need to be there and looking busy. On top of that, commute savings are great. I work out of a coworking space a walking distance from where I live. I also had a child recently, and being able to pick him up easily after work is priceless. Forcing most tech talent to be in the same 2-3 cities is one of the worst things in recent history.
I've been working remotely for over 20 years. ProTip: working remote does not mean working from home. Surround yourself everyday with the people you want. Go to coworking spaces, coffee shops, parks. Find fellow remote workers and host coworking sessions and your places.
There's a mall near my house that has a food hall that has become an informal co-working space. At one point, the coffee shop had a coffee day pass.
Before my team got a back to office order we had weekly meetings there.
Considering how malls are suffering I don't understand why they are not offering more options like this.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing
No longer commuting from Shoreline to downtown Seattle and spending 2+ hours in a car each day certainly helped my sense of well-being.
Did you ever consider downsizing or renting to be closer to work? I can’t imagine choosing to commute that far every day.
By downsizing, you mean cramming my family into a crappy, small apartment in a terrible school district?
Most people don't "choose" to commute. They are forced to because of life constraints.
Of course? It wasn't really a choice, just making the best of bad and worse options.
I like 1-2 days in-office if the team is actually local but the problem is that companies can't decide what they want (in-office vs cheaper LCOL labor) and it ends up being the worst of both worlds where you drive into the office just to sit alone in conference rooms on video calls with people in other offices.
>> "This suggests you let people work remotely if they want to work remotely,"
I can't believe people need studies to see that. All you need is some common sense.
Unfortunately a lot of RTO advocates need to learn this.
If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.
For me personally, life has basically been divided into before and after. I used to spend an extra two hours every day just getting to and from work, taking public transport, which honestly wasn’t exactly inspiring. Now working from home is a real pleasure, and life has become so much more enjoyable.
I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company. After 3 years, or 5 years, you know how the company works, you know the culture, you have an internal network etc. I think at that point, depending on your role you're more equipped to effectively manage fully remote work. Fully remote is so helpful for families who have to navigate daycare drop-off/pick-up times that don't align with work + commute hours. Gaining the ability to work fully remote after X amount of years with a company could help retain mid-level seniority in that phase of life.
> I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company.
IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through.
Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
I went from being fully in-person at a design firm (IDEO), working every day in a project room full of brilliant designers, to fully remote at the same company post-COVID. The remote period was a nonstop marathon of Zoom meetings, and I eventually left.
With that said, I'm grateful to have made the transition to remote working, because I got to be there for my daughter's early years.
Now I still work remote, but on my own terms, as an independent consultant. The difference is night and day.
What I learned is that remote vs hybrid vs in-office doesn't matter nearly as much as feeling engaged and effective in your role. If you feel that, it doesn't matter where you are.
Been working remote for over 15 years. It is the best.
About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.
Oh, I'm sure! And the highest concentration of weekday Costco shoppers.
And also likely the highest concentration of workers working after 9PM or before 6AM.
Those aren't the same workers though. There's a dichotomy of remote workers - some are screwing off during the day and some are working more hours than they should be since it can be hard to unplug from the desk (especially if it's a full remote cmpany with people across four plus timezones).
yeah, but not extra hours, just putting in the mandatory required. Friends, neighbors that work from home do the same. Heck, our AP clerk that works remote is processing transactions at 2a and is unreachable during normal business hours.
The true workaholics are brining their laptops home to do this either way.
The true workaholics are a small minority, though. Office workers who do this are part of the small minority. OTOH, it's a regular occurrence for those who work remote: not because they're workaholics, but because they're putting in their eight.
I'd argue that that's a minority as well.
I'm working remote since 2014. I built my whole life on that premise, traveling through the country on a weekly basis.
I love the freedom.
Van life?
Do often think about working out of our camper but it never really happens. Cheaper and warmer to sit in the home made office I put up in 2017...
But I do envy a good van setup.
Just the amount of time and life you waste for commute can be staggering. And of course all the other overhead that comes with going to and back from the office.
Per HN Guideline "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.", this should be pointed at the original source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Also worth noting: Frontiers in Psychology is a low-impact journal.
It depends on your personality: If you shine in meetings and love the hallway talk, you will suffer in remote work.
If you already juggle multiple dependencies in your life (small children and/or in school, elder care, other dependents and special situations, dual study), or simply have too many interests, hobbies and love to do more things outside your work, remote work just feels revolutionary, to the point you just resent going to the office.
I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?
I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.
Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.
Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
It's fascinating how well the system recovers. If it works, companies that do remote work will outperform those that don't. And the reverse. If many companies all opt-in to remote work and output declines inflation will correct that.
> For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.
Aww! All this while, I didn't know RTO came from a place of genuine worry and care about your workers. There I was thinking, that RTO was more about control and domination. Forgive me master, for I knew not.
I suspect the "more likely to leave their jobs" is the part the executives actually care about.
If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers.
And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.
This is partly self-selecting, though. For example, it could really be saying that introverts - more likely to select remote work - are also more likely to be happy on their own. Extraverts are more likely to be happy around other people, but also more likely to be unhappy because of the behaviour of other people.
I have a related question as someone who's been fully remote for about 12 years now, including all of my time in more senior/management roles: how does in person work even work for people who are in meetings all day every day?
My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?
Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.
There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.
Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha.
That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.
Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.
When I was at Google it wasn't uncommon for a particular conference room to be "assigned" to a director or VP. From what I remember their calendars were always crazy full, too.
loving my hybrid life; 2 days a week in office, working outdoors, 3 days at home.
Seems like a good case for unions if workers prefer remote, but can't get it through typical one on one negotiation.
After 6 years of full remote I am seriously considering how much of a pay cut I would accept to get work in person in an office and get to speak the local language daily.
A big issue with non-remote is access to opportunities. A lot of organizations don't have offices everywhere, and I having to relocate every time there's a job change is absurd.
For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.
It may have been the normal before we had the technology to remove that need. Obviously it may be the normal for certain types of work still, but I don't see why it needs to be that way for office work. This ends up greatly affecting housing markets too and making life more expensive for everyone.
Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day.
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
yeah that's why the trend is now to call all back to the office so that you don't feel too well.
Here is the full study.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
This seems obvious and predictable. of course people with flexibility, comfort, privacy, and convenience are better off than people forced into a grueling commute, a sick office, an exposed cubicle and toxic office politics
Being forced to work in an office when you KNOW you can work remotely is the most soul crushing thing I have ever experienced. It feels a tiny little bit like a Serf not allowed to leave the land.
Good work environment >> Remote work >>>> bad work environment.
However most companies who insist on full RTO are often the latter but claim they are the former.
Workers without 5-10 hours of unpaid commute time in their week are happier. Gee whiz.
That's time to run errands, learn a skill, exercise, sleep, read, do nothing... it's almost as though our time is valuable and we don't like wasting it.
Especially true if you aren't doing a job you enjoy.
The downside of going remote is there can be a lot of project momentum lost in coordination issues. More chat based meetings, and less actual product out the door. =3
Ikigai:
https://myzenpath.com/purpose-meaning/ikigai-reason-for-bein...
My F500 employer has on-site requirements. Colleagues and I sad-laugh because we all commute into the office, and spend most of the day on Zoom meetings with colleagues from other locations - you know, exactly the same thing we would do from home.
I'm four days a week in the office and almost all my meetings are on Zoom.
It's noisy, lunch is rarely below 20 dollars (no, I don't have time nor will I cook a big pot of 4 meals Sunday night), the lights are too bright, the commute is crowded and causes anxiety, and my housing costs are very high so the commute is less than 45m.
I hate RTO - and I'm in leadership. Anyone who's working from home and whining about it should be ashamed of the privilege. You're incredibly lucky.
Now maybe not so much if you're underpaid.
Of course. When I went remote, I could work from Miami during the winter, and escape the NYC cold months. Going for a swim to your buildings roof pool after done with the day, was the best feeling ever.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFZpJ9mWwAEfdhv?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIjqR2aWMAErm9E?format=jpg&name=...
Of course I am going to score higher in the well being department. :)
Related:
Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346149
> at a large healthcare organization
Isn't there kind of an inherit bias here where on-site healthcare workers would have vastly different job requirements than remote workers?
Also, isn't the healthcare industry thriving? Layoffs might be less of a worry.
From what I saw most people who "like" going to office are those suffering from domestic violence, having young children and wanting "time off" from parenting and in case of managers, the feeling of power over other human beings is not the same over Teams. Then you have narcissists and peeps/pervs who enjoy being in the middle of "action" and finally people who don't have any friends who hope they find them at a workplace. If you feel the need to go to office, book appointment with a therapist. Maybe you have an unresolved issue.
The sample is not high quality, but the conclusion is pretty obvious. No thinking person can doubt that improving work/life balance, flexible hours, sleeping more, commuting less and comfy pants is going to lead to any other outcome.
Clearly easier for you, me, or anyone else to delude ourselves into thinking our tech or jobs are harmless. God knows I prefer and feel happier at a WFH job, but how is this different or better for us than filter bubbles, aside from the obvious perks that are nice? How comfortable should work be?
would love to see productivity side of things
I'm also curious. I work remote about 95% of the time and my time spent in the office is by far my least productive. Way more ad hoc chats and longer lunches (both work related and not). I do enjoy the social aspect a lot, but man I get so much less actual work done. On occasion though, those chats lead to a really great idea for the product, so there's also that.
Remote only if done right, otherwise nope. i have seen many “remote” but in reality they dictate other measures rendering it worse than in person, like 6hrs a day of xyz time zone to be present, others even want to have an open camera in these hours, others have other means of surveillance to track your location or time spent on the device. If the remote job isn’t asynchronous, minimal meetings, and only the outcome is required from you, it’s not remote and would rather go to the office so this scum employer pay hefty rent instead.
I have also noticed some are trying to portray remote as “woke”, I don’t even know the relationship between both
been remote for quite a while. and i love it. but i've got some friends who absolutely hate it, and really struggled with remote working during covid.
so. works for many people, but not for others
This seems hard to prove a direct causal link.
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
Where am I wrong?
Many companies that are offering remote work knowingly provide lower salaries. And many people agree because added flexibility has a price too.
This is a survey of 20,000 health care workers in one organization. I doubt that that many of them are senior.
Proving a causal link between being remote not having to commute is easy.