Here’s a puzzle: Working from home appears to make people feel more alone, but forcing them back to the office full-time won’t necessarily make them feel better, according to new research published in the Harvard Business Review.
Loneliness is a huge societal issue with often devastating health and cultural fallout, as the U.S. Surgeon General has warned — and in the workplace it can be particularly damaging.
Lonely workers are less productive, rack up higher health care costs, and are more likely to quit their jobs, says Constance Noonan Hadley, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, who co-authored the study.
Lonely workers want to feel closer or more connected to colleagues. The researchers defined work loneliness as “the distressful experience of having a higher desire for social connection than what is subjectively experienced while working.”
They surveyed 1,000 full-time office workers, aged 22-50, working in “knowledge” fields like finance, software engineering and consulting.
After taking an assessment (you can take it here), respondents were divided by levels of loneliness: high, medium, low. A smaller group was then asked more qualitative questions.
Surprisingly, the loneliest workers are getting a lot of face-to-face contact, but it doesn’t seem to help: 47% of the most lonely respondents said they conducted nearly half of their prior month’s work in person.
There was no difference in loneliness between those in-office full-time and those working a hybrid schedule. While fully remote workers, on average, were slightly more lonely — other factors were more impactful.
What matters the most, per their research, is the number of social opportunities workers have. The second most important factor is people’s level of extroversion (with introverts feeling more alone).
People of color were also more likely to feel lonely — that tracks with other research showing Black and Hispanic workers feel more isolated in the workplace.
25% of fully remote U.S. workers reported feeling lonely in a Gallup survey earlier this year. The number was 16% for folks who never worked from home.
The bottom line: It’s too simplistic to say that remote work is the cause of worker loneliness or that sending workers back to the office five days a week will fix the problem, says Hadley.
“We’re over-indexing on remote work as the blame,” she says.
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