alt Hacker NewsRemote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees
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I wonder if anyone has done the work to adjust for 'net salary per hour working or commuting' for WFH vs. in office work in a high cost of living area;
This can easily translate to a 50-80% higher salary after housing costs, which for sure would translate into better wellbeing for most people anyway. For some EU companies, this can mean not even having to live in the same country, so wildly different cost of living.
Just having to live somewhere you can reasonably commute to an office, even just 2 days a week, is massively limiting in terms of where and how you can afford to live on any salary. For a daily in office work it's even worse.
Then the commute costs; easily 5-10k GBP per year for 'commutable to London' towns in the countryside.
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.
Here 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.
> remote roles tend to be concentrated in administrative or analytic work, whereas onsite roles may involve clinical or operational responsibilities ... may contribute to differences in well-being or turnover beyond location of work alone
So this is comparing jobs that can be remote (IT/clerical etc) with those that can't (janitors, medical staff, night security).
There are probably more differences in well-being between those roles than if they are remote or not.
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.
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 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.
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
No longer commuting from Shoreline to downtown Seattle and spending 2+ hours in a car each day certainly helped my sense of well-being.
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'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.
>> "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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I'm sure! And the highest concentration of weekday Costco shoppers.
The nature of employment has changed and there is no going back.
"These findings challenge assumptions that remote work undermines connection and retention. Instead, they suggest that remote work can support well-being and that well-being, not proximity, is a key factor in employee retention."
What is interesting to me here is the conflict between well-being and corporate interests. It is high time that well-being is being mentioned and considered as the definitive measure of employee retention.
I've worked at a multi-national bank with HQ in London, Operational HQ in Singapore, Shared Services in Malaysia, India and China, Data centres in Hong Kong, Dubai and back in England. Every day was basically remote working with teams across the globe. No video; email, IP phones and audio-only meetings on MS Office Communicator. When the bank downsized office space so that 1/3 of shared services had to work from home, wasn't an issue at all because we were so used to working remotely.
This biggest issue is that new and middle managers are only trained to manage, not to lead. They feel that they must be able to reach out and touch someone to manage, hence RTO.
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.
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.
Whether your company is WFH or RTO is a decision, but please dont try to do a hybrid -- where some employees on the same team are remote while others are in office. You end up with team members going to the office, and just staying on a zoom the entire day without actual interaction. Worst of all worlds.
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.
Study certainly is biased since primary data comes from single unnamed organisation - likely MD Anderson. With 3 out of 4 authors of the paper from same institute makes more objective title "An employer's internal Leadership Institute analyzes its own employee-engagement and HR data and concludes that its remote employees have better well-being."
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.
> 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'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.
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.
For a programmer remote work is the best, solitude, calmness, isolation, zero interruptions, flow, flexible hours, less soul sucking meetings, etc
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 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?
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.
Stop coming to my desk when I am working. The context switching of having 1 visitor an hour can wreck my productivity. I wish I could quantify this in USD$ and then track over the course of a year how much certain individuals are misappropriating company resources for their own pleasure. This should be a fireable offense. Lets turn on these wifi body tracking tools and start measuring metrics and KPIs for these intermittent "desk fault interruptions"! I demand satisfaction and dashboards with leader rankings.
yeah that's why the trend is now to call all back to the office so that you don't feel too well.
This is the kind of study that knows its audience - employees who want to keep remote working. The headline is self congratulatory.
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?
Here is the full study.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
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.
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.
Let me just summarize what the LLMs comment on this thread:
- home office is bad and this link only has one sample so its automatically invalid and does not take any type of combination and occupation under the sun into account
- home office is a prison because you dont talk to people
and now the humans:
- saving commute time is good (less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs)
- having more time for children
- remote work != home office, you can work anywhere btw
- don't have to pretend to look busy
You know these were just the first 10 comments I read, you make up your mind now
Biggest problem in working at home: neighbors giant barking rodent!
Seems like a good case for unions if workers prefer remote, but can't get it through typical one on one negotiation.
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.
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.
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.
Related:
Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck
…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.