Why do many workers still prefer to work remotely?
Employers calling on workers to come back to the office just got one recent publication support their agenda, as a recent study has linked remote work to increased feelings of isolation and mental distress.
The rise of remote work "explains about a third of the increase in isolation and mental distress between 2011–2019 and 2022–2024,” according to a study published in Science.org.
The research – by economists Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais – drew on five nationally representative surveys of American workers totalling 588,322 responses spanning 2011 to 2024, omitting the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.
Workers in jobs amenable to remote work logged roughly one additional hour alone per workday relative to on-site peers, and those living alone saw their likelihood of spending a whole day without any human contact rise by seven percentage points, an 83 per cent increase.
The story is the same in Canada. A previous Angus Reid survey found that 46% of Canadians working from home say social isolation is one of their biggest struggles, and an equal proportion cite the lack of division between work and personal life as a top concern.
Study design
To isolate the effect of working from home, the researchers compared workers in "remotable" jobs — roles such as software engineering and marketing that can be done remotely — against those in non-remotable jobs such as nursing and mechanical engineering, which require physical presence. They classified occupations using the Dingel-Neiman remotability index and applied a difference-in-differences approach.
The design tracks occupation-level shifts rather than individual choices. That distinction matters because the employees who opt into remote work may differ from those who do not, a long-standing problem in remote-work research that can confound results.
Overall, remote work quadrupled after COVID-19, rising from seven per cent of American workers in 2019 to 28 per cent in 2023. By 2024, workers in remotable jobs spent 31.1 per cent of workdays fully remote, against 8.9 per cent for those in non-remotable roles, a differential increase of 17.9 percentage points.
That shift translated into sharply more time alone. When people worked from home in 2022–2024, 84 per cent spent their entire workday alone, compared with 23.2 per cent of those who went on-site. Remotable workers also saw a relative rise in days with no human contact at all — what the authors describe as "no idle chitchat with a barista, no hello from a co-worker, no smile from a passerby at the grocery store."
The damage was concentrated among employees living alone, who experienced roughly 10 times the increase in spending all day alone as those living with family. For HR, that pinpoints solo-living remote staff as a specific group warranting targeted outreach rather than blanket engagement measures.
Mental-health signal
Mental distress rose in step. On the Kessler (K-6) psychological distress scale, remotable workers' scores climbed about 0.1 standard deviations relative to on-site peers, with the increase roughly twice as large for those living alone. The effect also appeared in behaviour: remotable workers became 4.6 percentage points more likely to see a mental-health professional and increased their use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety prescriptions.
The authors ruled out the explanation that remote workers were merely using flexibility to book appointments, finding no parallel rise in routine physical exams or in prescriptions such as statins. They also tested and rejected generative AI exposure and political shifts as alternative drivers.
The findings carry a warning for HR teams that read positive remote-work sentiment as reassurance, meaning satisfaction surveys may mask a deferred well-being problem that surfaces later in absenteeism, turnover and disability claims. The authors set out the stakes directly in their conclusion: "Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone.
“Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate. Understanding remote work's impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work and for firms and governments setting remote-work policies."
The authors also offer an explanation for why employees continue to favour an arrangement that the data suggests is harming them — a gap between immediate perks and slow-building costs that should shape how HR weighs employee preference against employee health:
"Our findings may seem puzzling in light of the fact that many workers prefer to work remotely. One possible explanation is that the benefits of remote work (e.g., skipping a daily commute) are immediate and salient, whereas the costs of remote work (e.g., frayed connections with co-workers) take time to materialize."
Poor mental health now represents one of the largest cost and productivity risks facing Canadian employers, according to a new report from CSA Group’s Public Policy Centre. The Economic Cost of Mental Health in Canada – authored by Olga Morawczynski, Kathleen Dobson and William Howatt – estimates that poor mental health costs the country $180 billion annually. Of that, employers absorb about $110 billion through disability claims, wage replacement, benefits, overtime, accommodations, turnover and compliance costs.
