Employees Often Prefer Working Remote But It Could Be Making Them More Lonely, New Study Finds

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Remote work frees employees from the commute and the crowded office, but it can also deepen isolation and worsen mental health, especially for those who live alone.

In a new study published in Science, economists analyzed five national surveys conducted from 2011 to 2024, excluding the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. They compared Americans in so-called "remotable" jobs that can be done from home, like software engineering, with those in nonremotable jobs, like medicine.1

The new study indicates that remote work could cause harms that extend beyond the workplace.2 The researchers suggest that hybrid work could mitigate some of these negative mental health effects.

The economists, Natalia Emanuel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Emma Harrington of the University of Virginia, and Amanda Pallais of Harvard University, found that workers in remotable jobs were more likely to spend the whole day alone and have days with no social contact.

The effects fell hardest on workers living alone: they were more likely to spend all day alone and less likely to socialize with friends after work than those who lived with family.

"When work became more isolated, people did not substantially compensate by socializing more outside of work hours," the researchers wrote. "Being at home may increase frictions to social contact outside of work hours."

Remotable workers also showed more signs of mental distress than nonremotable ones, reporting more sadness and depression, as well as an uptick in mental-health prescriptions.

While remote work may harm mental health, employees still prefer working from home. A Pew survey published last year found that nearly half (46%) of hybrid workers would be somewhat or very unlikely to stick with their current jobs if they couldn't work from home.3

"Our findings may seem puzzling in light of the fact that many workers prefer to work remotely," the researchers wrote in the study. "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."

Even though this study points to potential negative effects of remote work, other research has found that hybrid work arrangements—for example, working three days in the office and two at home—may reduce attrition while barely affecting performance.

In a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Emanuel and Harrington argued that employees can help themselves by building connections. For example, they can invite colleagues to lunch or organize happy hours. They suggested employers can help by rewarding connection-building in performance reviews and setting up mentorship pairings.

The fix, they argue, isn't simply a return to the office.

"The prepandemic norm of being in the office every hour of every workday often crowded out time with friends and family," Emanuel and Harrington wrote.4 "So, for many of us, the solution is not to rewind the clock to our 2019 ways. Instead, we can form strong bonds by being more intentional about how we work."