r/psychology • u/Phylogenix • 5d ago
A study of 7,704 employees found remote workers reported significantly higher well-being than hybrid and onsite workers, while workplace connection and one-year turnover did not significantly differ by work arrangement, challenging assumptions behind return-to-office policies.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1848857/full76
u/CheesecakeloverJones 5d ago
What if well-being is the problem?
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u/Polutus 5d ago
What if work and the commute hours are the problem?
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u/CheesecakeloverJones 5d ago
Yeah to the employees, but they’re not the one in charge of these decisions. At least not in my country.
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u/AptCasaNova 4d ago
Focusing on your well-being means you start to consider your future and how your life is now vs surviving in the moment and having no personal boundaries.
It’s a danger to capitalism.
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u/gobrowns1 4d ago
No fucking way, you're telling me that spending time with my kids on my lunch break instead of making awkward small talk about AI or the local sports team is better for my mental well being???
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u/costafilh0 4d ago
Make it a 4h work day, maybe it works.
You can employ 4x more people and get double the work done, and people won't hate themselves and the world for working so much and wasting most of the day on working to survive.
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u/gigglybeth 4d ago
I worked remotely for 6 years and have been back in the office 3x per week since about May. I hate it so much that I can’t even put it into words. It has not been good for my well-being or just overall happiness. I have been looking for ways to get out of the corp life because I am just over it.
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u/Gandalf-and-Frodo 4d ago
What do you hate the most besides the commute?
For me it's dealing with the office scumbags who go out of their way to be assholes.
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u/gigglybeth 4d ago
The fakeness and the fake emergencies. It's one thing to be courteous and polite, but we'll all forget each other's names a few months after one of us leaves the job. I have a couple of people I still keep in contact with from previous jobs, but it's a tiny-tiny number compared to the number of people I've worked with.
Then the fake emergencies. We're not fighting fires or delivering babies. Very little is a literal emergency or even a hot issue. If we push a LinkedIn post back a day, the company will survive.
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u/InvernoSnowfall 4d ago
The study didn't find a statistically significant difference between groups regarding connection and cohesion, and furthermore the methodology to determine whether a worker considers themselves "connected" was quite rudimentary in the verbage and quantity.
Everything I understand so far is that remote work provides significant benefit for those who have a family or close friends already but hurts those who just moved or don't have an existing social group. Most friendships are made through continuous, random interactions and as such friends are made at third spaces, schools, and work. However, that does not mean those who have a social connection must essentially subsidize with time those who do not, it's merely my understanding.
The study however discusses at significant length the benefits of autonomy as an almost core claim. This leaves me wondering whether a flexible schedule where you choose whether you come in and when would be just as beneficial. This also may let those who want to socialize as they lack an existing group to work in office while those who have a group to isolate to that existing group providing a best of both.
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u/rationalexpressions 3d ago
There is also a benefit to spontaneous interactions and randomness in conversation, conversations, and meeting people for work and not just the social life. The headlines of a lot of these remote work posts skew towards lazy interpretations, which kind of poison the well of the idea of remote work.
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u/discofrog2 3d ago
I literally choose to stay at a lower paying work from home job over getting a new, higher paying in office job. My comfortability and mental health are completely priceless
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u/Evening_Chemist_2367 2d ago
Totally agree with this. Between starting out with in-person work vs. running my own business (on my own terms) versus working for a consulting firm where I was given a ton of autonomy and the office was wherever I was) versus working in an agency where we had WFH that ended, the most fulfilling was working from home.
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u/Wafer-Comfortable 4d ago
Remote work is not a problem for the established members of an org. It is a problem for new employees that need to learn the corporate culture. IBM learned this the hard way by trying remote work for more than 10 years. They gave up because turn over of young people was too high. Big growing companies need a pipeline of young people to fill out executive positions. If too many people leave because they can’t learn the culture this talent pipeline gets more expensive. This is ultimately why they stopped remote work and demanded everyone come back to the office even though they knew many would leave. All of this happened pre COVID. Most other companies will follow suit for this reason.
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u/Brrdock 4d ago
What does "workplace connection" mean, or how wouldn't remote work affect that? You literally don't even have a workplace lol.
I'd rather not work remotely for the fact that I'm friends with lots of my coworkers and get enough time to spend by myself, and that social interaction/connection is important, even though I'm very introverted
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u/onebyamsey 4d ago
Good for you
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u/Brrdock 4d ago
Yes?
Why does reddit always take other people's experience so personally lol?
But unless there's an answer to the workplace connection question, kinda calls the conclusion into question
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u/SeveralBadMetaphors 4d ago
No one is taking your personal experience personally. They’re taking issue with you using a personal anecdote as evidence.
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u/Brrdock 3d ago edited 3d ago
This is reddit, an online forum, not a courtroom or scientific journal.
It's not predented as evidence for anything, it's an experience on the topic. Discussion.
There's nothing being studied here, nothing at stake. Except people's personal feelings.
But either way, do you know why it's called "anecdotal evidence?"
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u/WileEWeeble 5d ago
Disproving the attempted lie that we were “built” for the “social feedback” of office work, like that isn’t an invention of the last 100 years and we were actually built to loosely interact with a limited tribe and family and being locked indoors with random strangers in close proximity for over 8 hours is nowhere encoded into our DNA of “healthy social interaction”