A sweeping new study examines what years of remote work may be doing to employees' well-being
Americans have spent years telling researchers they love working from home. A new study suggests home might not love them back.
The research, published in the journal Science in June, compared workers in remote-capable jobs to those that can't be done remotely, drawing on five national surveys spanning more than a decade. They found that workers in remotable jobs saw a 58% rise in hours spent alone during the workday and a 72% rise in the odds of going an entire day without human contact.
The finding surprised even the study's own authors, though maybe not in the way you'd expect.
"Our own experiences, sometimes living alone and working from home, primed us to think there could be negative mental health consequences for some segment of the population," said Emma Harrington, an economist at the University of Virginia and one of the study's authors.
What surprised her more was who failed to benefit. Remote work is often framed as a win for people with families, since it frees up time otherwise lost to commuting, but the data didn't bear that out.
"It was a little bit more surprising that for people with partners and children at home, we didn't see large positive impacts, despite anecdotal evidence that people really value remote work," Harrington said. The effects were more pronounced for people living alone, but no group saw a clear mental health upside from working remotely.
Why the small stuff matters so much
Harrington points to separate research to explain why a missed hallway chat or a coffee run isn't as trivial as it seems.
"There's some really interesting research in neuroscience showing that when people are sitting in the same room, they'll have mirroring in their body language," Harrington said. "What's more stunning is that the same kind of mirroring happens in people's brains, and that's associated with feelings of empathy and warmth toward other people. Those can be triggered by pretty small interactions."
Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and author of “Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How 'Small' Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life,” points to a deeper reason connection carries so much weight.
"Psychologists think there are evolutionary reasons for this," Sandstrom said. "When humans were living in small groups, if you weren't part of the group, you weren't going to survive. It's this fundamental human need, and all the research keeps coming back to the same finding: we cannot thrive unless we feel like we belong, that we matter."
That doesn't fully explain why remote workers aren't compensating elsewhere. The study found they're spending less time with friends after hours too, not more, something Harrington links to the loss of the office as a natural coordinating point for evening plans.
“Work in the office used to serve as this coordinating mechanism. Everyone was in a similar part of the city from nine to five-ish, and that made it relatively easier to coordinate some sort of activity in the evening," Harrington said.
Why video calls don't close the gap
Remote employees spend plenty of time on virtual calls, which raises an obvious question.
Why doesn't virtual contact fill the void?
Sandstrom pointed to research presented at a recent conference that distinguished between one-on-one video calls and group meetings, with the latter falling short in a specific way.
"You can't just have a chat with the person sitting next to you. You can't have those little, tiny, off-topic conversations," Sandstrom said of group video calls. "It's very much you're in the meeting, one person is talking at a time. It just doesn't feel the same."
She added that in a group call, the small, spontaneous moments that build connection in person don't have room to happen.
"You can't have those little moments where you talk about what you did on the weekend, because everybody's going to hear it, and people can't be responsive to you in the same way either," she said.
Still, Sandstrom sees some value in video.
"A Zoom call is definitely better than a phone call or a text, because you can get more of the context. You can see people's body language and facial expressions," she said.
What employers can actually do
Neither researcher endorses a blanket return to office mandate, echoing a tension HRD’s previous coverage on hybrid work versus fully remote policies has tracked for years.
"Having people come back to the office is only one possible response to these results," Harrington said.
Adding an office day or two may not help if colleagues still aren't there at the same time.
"Even when people go into the office, oftentimes their teammates are remote or in different offices, so they just end up Zooming with different scenery," she said.
Reorganizing teams to sit near the people they actually work with, she suggested, may be the more effective lever, a point that lines up with ongoing debate over how companies should structure their remote work policies.
Harrington also favors repeated, structured contact over one-off events, like a manager pairing two people up for regular check-ins.
"If those are explicit and repeated, that can form more lasting bonds because it's repeated," she said, pointing to research suggesting it takes roughly 160 hours to form a real friendship, a threshold the office used to make achievable by default.
Sandstrom pointed to smaller, more habitual options, like a recurring team coffee break, a "coffee roulette" that randomly pairs colleagues for a short chat, or paid volunteer hours.
"Repetition and having habits are really important, because you don't want people to have to decide every day whether they're going to do it," she said. "Making it part of the culture makes it easier for everybody, so not going becomes the exception rather than something you have to choose against every time."
The findings add fresh weight to a subject HR teams have grappled with since the shift toward remote and hybrid arrangements began. The U.S. Surgeon General has separately called loneliness and isolation a public health crisis, and this study gives that warning a workplace-specific data point.
Remote work isn't going away, and neither is the desire for it. The question employers face isn't whether to allow flexibility, but how to design what happens around it.
