The Connection Between Loneliness and Remote Work

A side project of mine the last 5 months has been researching remote work. This project began while I was still working at Eat Your Coffee when we decided to go remote as a company in August 2019. Before we did that, our entire team thought through the challenges of remote work and researched best practices. This opened my eyes to a massive shift underway in the workforce and gave me an itch to further investigate both the challenges faced by remote workers themselves and companies trying manage remote workers. 

My research, still in process, has involved conducting and analyzing surveys of 300+ remote workers (s/o to Lily Orlovsky for the data analysis help) and interviewing 40+ remote workers and HR staff at remote companies (s/o to everyone who volunteered for an interview). So I was like a little kid on Christmas when Ali Kothari forwarded me the 2020 State of Remote published jointly by Buffer and AngelList. 

It is an incredible report and I was relieved to see their findings matched much of what I found: namely remote workers loving schedule flexibility, the vast majority of remote workers working from their home, and mixed in-office / remote companies struggling the most with managing remote workers. But my research diverged from their report on one key point. 

In discussing the connection between loneliness and remote work, they concluded:

“It’s important to note that while loneliness is consistently selected as a top struggle for remote workers in these reports, we don’t think this implies that remote work causes loneliness… Remote workers feeling lonely is also an accurate reflection of a larger-scale societal struggle with loneliness.” 

The loneliness epidemic is indisputable and is a multi-variable problem that transcends the in-office / remote worker classification. But the fact that it afflicts both types of workers does not mean that increasing prevalence of remote work is blameless. Loneliness can be attributed to three types of isolation that come from remote work:

• Environment isolation: loneliness that comes from working in a frequently secluded environment and as many have reported to me "sometimes I don't get out of my house for days at a time."
• Social isolation: in a time where people’s professional lives increasingly contribute to their identity and traditional societal threads get pushed to the wayside, a remote work policy, if not implemented and managed correctly, can cripple a key avenue people have to finding social connection.
• Professional isolation: even if co-workers do not get to know each other outside of their work context, it is easier, all things equal, to develop professionals relationships and trust with your co-workers in-person than remote (i.e. "the watercooler talk" or dead time before meetings)

On the bright side, all three types of isolation can mitigated through tactics at both the individual and managerial level. But I will leave the discussion of addressing these three types of isolation for another time.

I am grateful to Buffer and AngelList for putting the time and resources towards creating such a valuable resource and continuing to move the discussion of remote work forward. 

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