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By Stephen Beech
Working from home has had a negative impact on employees' mental health by making them feel more isolated, new research reveals.
The rise in remote working triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has substantially increased time spent alone and worsened workers’ mental well-being, according to the study.
The findings, published in the journal Science and based on survey data from more than 500,000 Americans, found the negative effects of working from home were particularly common among people living on their own.
The research team said that, by evaluating remote employees’ mental health, the analysis moves beyond the main consequence of remote working usually evaluated in studies to date: worker productivity.
To understand remote work’s effect on human well-being better, Natalia Emanuel, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and her colleagues analyzed data from five nationally representative U.S.-based surveys that together spanned more than a decade and included 568,000 respondents.
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They compared workers’ experiences before the pandemic, 2011 to 2019, with experiences from the post-peak period, 2022 to 2024, excluding the acute pandemic years of 2020 to 2021.
The research team found that workers in jobs amenable to remote work experienced "substantially larger" post-pandemic increases in time spent alone, worsened mental well-being across multiple measures, and increases in the use of mental health services and prescriptions.
Emanuel said: "These effects were particularly pronounced among individuals living alone."
She explained that if workers made changes — such as cultivating social networks outside of work — they may not yet have reaped the full benefits by the time of the study.
Emanuel added: “Across a range of remote work arrangements, both individuals and organizations may want to prioritize making remote work less isolating by, for example, coordinating in-office days for hybrid workers or encouraging informal interaction, even online."
Professor Rourke O'Brien, of Yale University, said of the findings: "The shift in work location to the home carries measurable costs at the population level."
