I know, I know. Controversial. Click-baity, even. You’re ready to tell me I’m wrong and that I’m clinging onto a work culture of the past that we can never get back to. But hear me out. As an organizational coach, I work with many individuals, teams, and companies weekly across various industries, domains, and country borders. One thing has become clear through my work: You should reconsider working remotely.
I’ve written about this phenomenon before, but in this post, I’ll dig deeper into the statement from the employee’s point of view.
Short-term gains
There are many fantastic short-term gains for the individual working from home: later mornings, cheaper lunches, the possibility to catch up on housework, and the opportunity to live in cheaper rural areas and give your children shorter days at daycare.
These are real benefits and should not be acquitted. However, I want to explore the other side of the coin: what the individual has to pay for these benefits. The price is usually invisible and overshadowed by the immediate profits, but that price tends to grow and cause more pain over time.
You learn and, ultimately, earn less.
Firstly, studies show that the learning curves of those working remotely are stunted.
You can find everything on the internet these days! While the internet is full of answers, ideas, suggestions, and advice, and most of us know how to search for this information, we must first know what we are looking for.
At the office, we see others working and doing things differently. How they color-coordinate their incoming work, handle a difficult discussion with a client over the phone, or how they time their focus. It’s possible to see solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had!
Once we have identified a problem, perhaps we’d like someone to review a proposal; we can scan the office and see who could give us the needed input and be available without disturbing anyone. We may see someone with even more insights to provide us, but they hadn’t crossed our minds before we saw them.
At the office, we have people around us for help, and it is easier to have casual conversations and share ideas. We are more prone to accidentally stumble upon new and better ways our colleagues have solved matters. According to the Harvard study, this phenomenon of a stunted learning curve is true for everyone working remotely, but it hits young people and women the hardest.
Secondly, salary development is slower for those working remotely compared to the people at the office. This could be linked to stunted learning curves or other possible reasons. A machine rarely does salary negotiations, and we humans are filled with emotions and biases, paired with a difficult choice of whom the limited salary increase should be given to. Those we have social bonds with, we tend to trust more, and this level of trust may also ultimately influence decisions regarding, for example, career opportunities.
So what? The benefits of staying home may be so great that I am willing to learn and get paid less in exchange. Fair enough, but what if I told you that working from home will significantly impact your happiness? I chose a Norwegian happiness researcher, Ragnhild Bang Nes’s recent work regarding how the human brain best creates and maintains levels of serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins to be happy. When working extensively from home…
1. Your relationships worsen.
Human relationships are key to happiness. We are social animals. We need others to care about us and us for them. Humans thrive when we build and keep meaningful relationships. As we work for 8 hours every day, the people who have these social relationships at work tend to manage stress better, increase productivity, and call in sick less. It is not impossible to create meaningful relationships remotely, but it is much harder. Let’s explore why.
When people work extensively online, their social skills worsen, affecting their face-to-face relationships.
We can see the most horrific comments online where one can hide behind a monitor. This phenomenon can also be seen in workplace instant messaging services and other text-only means of communication. We can hardly say these nasty things to a person’s face but can cope with leaving these comments asynchronously for others to find. This type of communication rarely builds trust and understanding between different viewpoints or leads to better outcomes but increases the distance and frustration.
So, let’s move the counteractive online debates aside, assume we have pure intentions, and look at others through a principle of charity lens. Why is it still so hard to build these meaningful relationships remotely?
Our brain is wired to pick up on millions of social cues as we interact. This happens automatically. However, we can’t see demeanor clearly through the screen, so we are completely oblivious to the thousands of nano messages being sent our way. All the data we have to go on, even if our equipment is top-notch, is a lagging picture and audio through a machine of a person's shoulders and face. When we interact mainly in text and video, we misunderstand and often read each other incorrectly as the information isn’t available in a remote setting, which ultimately lowers trust.
This impacts the relationships at work directly. Being misunderstood is mentally draining. Misunderstanding others and having debates online makes us more anxious. We end our remote working days with more social debt and more fatigue, as studies show that online interactions do not increase wellbeing while face-to-face interactions do.
Once we turn off the computer, we need healing face-to-face relationships more than our co-located colleagues do. Alright, so what’s the problem? There are two, the first one being worsened social skills: When we spend extensive time online with people instead of in person, we lose the skills to read subtle social cues. As we encounter fewer people daily, our brains are less receptive to these social cues; there is less material to learn from and eventually less fine-tuning of our own interactions.
The second issue remote work causes social interaction is an increased threshold for making face-to-face encounters happen.
As we have 8 hours less daily to practice our social skills, it requires more effort to interact with people. It is often easier to attempt getting one’s social fix by chatting to some family or friends on WhatsApp or scrolling social media – as it requires minimal effort from the tired online worker. However, this results in higher long-term thresholds, and we become increasingly less capable of maintaining vital face-to-face relationships. The National Library of Medicine also publishes studies that show social anxiety is on the rise globally as we live an increasingly significant portion of our lives online.
In some cases, especially young people replace their physical interactions with virtual ones as they feel more safe and comfortable… which renders them increasingly vulnerable to isolation and worsened social skills.
2. You lose opportunities for kindness.
Do you know the feeling when a stranger drops their shopping all over the floor? How good do you feel about yourself when you stop and help them? Ragnhild Bang Nes found that to be happy, we also need to feel like we are helping others.
When interacting with people at the office, these opportunities are organically at your feet; you see when someone needs help unloading the dishwasher, open a door for someone who has their hands full, or get to chat with someone who needs help in their project. Maybe even more significant is that we better understand who benefits from our work when co-located.
We can potentially see the customer service team who just got the important instructions for a new product, or we could exchange a grateful look with the other team who finally got the important missing piece to move their work along, or we can see the relieved looking new employee working away after we gave them a useful checklist to get the job done. It is, of course, possible to find some of these opportunities online, but they need to be searched for more extensively.
3. You lose physical activity.
People need movement to be happy. At the office, we move to different areas, chat with others in the coffee room, or walk outside to have lunch at a new restaurant with colleagues.
When working remotely, we are often at our desks. I have monitored my movement throughout the years, and when I go to the office, I get at least 8000 steps just from the commute and moving around at work vs. 2000 steps moving around my house during remote days.
Naturally, we may squeeze in physical activity in our remote days, but moving alone is not the same as moving socially: Going out for lunch with another human tickles so many trust-building particles, from walking together in the same direction to talking more relaxedly over lunch.
4. You learn less – and more seldom.
Our human brain tends to crave the feeling of progress. The learning curve is not usually a linear upward slope.
You know how kids get frustrated with a new hobby when the natural dip of the learning curve happens after the first few months or when you’ve studied a new language for some time and seem stuck?
That’s your brain demanding progress.
All humans love learning. This continuous improvement is part of what makes us feel good about ourselves and ultimately happy. At the office, we learn faster and more effectively as there are so many situations to learn from every day. When you work online, there tends to be only intentional get-togethers, and none of the “I saw Carla in the hallway, and guess what they are working on!?”.
It is not that these happiness-creating pieces are impossible to build into your days if you work online, but they tend to have to be intentionally built and maintained instead of happening organically, which requires a lot of effort. As online encounters impact our wellbeing less and require that aforementioned effort, the happiness-creating moments tend to be smaller in impact and fewer in numbers.
Remote work is work
Remote work isn’t easier or more convenient than in-person work. It’s harder. Where we can organically rely on ideas being discussed in the hallways at the office, we have to build a structure for the same result to happen in the online world. It requires much, much more effort and relentless discipline to make remote work work. Working from home occasionally does not stunt your salary development, weaken your social skills, or lessen your output.
The issues arise when we spend excessive time working remotely and there is little face-to-face time for the whole team. Occasional remote work is a slippery slope, so to keep it from causing trouble, the remote work should be strictly coordinated, and all designated co-located days should be respected. Without rules, the result quickly becomes little to no face-to-face time together for the entire team.
Conclusion? Don’t take this decision lightly.
When you wake up in the morning, the decision to stay home feels small. However, when those small decisions accumulate, like nanoplastics in the sea, you might have a bigger problem than you anticipated.
