Working From Home Is Not Working for Everyone

I have a staff of 10 (at times, many more) and have been struggling to figure out the best way to handle people working from home post-COVID. Because I run a research lab, my staff never worked regular 9-to-5 hours, and many worked remotely because our projects span continents. So, it should have been an easy transition for the team to work remotely, even those staff whose offices are located at the university in the city where we all live.

The transition, though, hasn’t been going well. Something is missing. Observing my team, I see very clever, creative people working in parallel. Where before the pandemic I remember plenty of spontaneously generated ideas for new projects, these days it feels like there is more task completion than inspired innovation. I certainly don’t mean that all my staff are like this, but as a researcher on the impact of social and physical ecologies on people’s mental health, I can’t help but wonder if the problem is the way I’ve organized our workspace rather than the people working with me. Is social isolation and furry cats walking across our shoulders while we’re talking to our supervisor distracting us from our careers? Work is getting done, but for some of the staff who I’ve had on my team over the past few years, there doesn’t appear to have been the same commitment to creating something more than what we do individually.

Scant Research on Working From Home Post-COVID

I thought the research could help me answer some practical questions, like how many days in the office should I ask my employees to come in? How can we best ensure that working at home remains productive? And how does one run a hybrid office and still create a sense of teamwork and innovation?

I was surprised to see how little literature there is post-COVID. Studies published in the last year, like a systematic review done by Charlotte Hall and her team at the UK Health Security Agency found inconclusive evidence for mental health and productivity outcomes. The best they could offer was to suggest that those who started working from home during the pandemic were at greater risk for poor mental health and poor productivity than those people who had already habituated to working from home before the pandemic. In other words, it seems that when one’s job was purpose-designed to be from home (about 5 percent of workers), the impact is benign. Force someone to work from home, and the adaptation brings with it multiple risks. This makes sense, as a job that is fully remote will be experienced by those choosing to do that work as quite different from employees who have had to adapt to a new, potentially more stressful, self-directed way of working.

There are other factors at play, too. In a study by Andrew Loignon and his team at Louisiana State University, the productivity of people working from home during the pandemic varied by the socioeconomic status of their home office. In other words, when one’s home office denoted a higher economic status, the more productive the employee was.

Intrinsic Motivation

So what does all of this tell us about the longer-term impact of working from home? That question remains largely unanswered. As someone, though, who studies resilience to stress, I worry that working from home only suits two kinds of workers: (1) people who are self-employed (though I work at a university, I am in many ways a self-employed professional whose motivation comes from internal goal setting rather than external performance expectations) and (2) people who enjoy their work and derive a sense of accomplishment through their employment, including a sense that their work says something about their identity and values. In both cases, intrinsic motivation seems to hold us accountable and makes us productive. I can practically sort my staff over the last five years into two groups: those who are intrinsically motivated and those who depend on extrinsic motivators. Both have shown very different results.

For those who need extrinsic motivation, I have seen people in many different work settings (my own and others) who languish in tasks for months that should have taken a few days, at most. They seem to constantly find excuses to explain their lack of productivity. In a unionized environment where even performance reviews cannot be used to let someone go, it can be darn near impossible to create an environment of accountability when an employee is working from home and is largely out of sight. There is a second motivator that worries me just as much for this group of individuals. They need the social interaction of the office but don’t know they do. They find working from home easy and convenient, but the resulting malaise is never connected to their lack of relationships, routines, and responsibilities that come when people work side by side. For some on my team (whose contracts have since ended), there were so few instances where they assumed the role as support to anyone else or even shared what they were doing without my prompting that they remained for all intents and purposes contract workers operating in siloes.

Not every workplace is like mine. I’ve noticed that in the tech sector, hybrid work is common, but it comes with far more expectations for performance, and computer time is often logged. I just can’t see myself doing this to my employees in an academic setting where personal autonomy would make such intrusions unlikely. Besides, it is unlikely to be sustainable. Most jobs need people to interact. Even Zoom recalled its employees to the office two days a week in August 2023.

In the end, I’ve asked my staff to produce a weekly report on their progress, goals, and timelines so I have a baseline to evaluate productivity. It helps, but it still doesn’t build community or speak to innovation. For that, I’ve required my staff to come to the office at least two days a week, with specific days preferred so that there will be a critical mass of people to spend time with. This is working, and one of my senior staff has taken advantage of the new routine to create a weekly get-together over lunch. Time will tell if this works, but I worry that across many industries people (young and old) are losing their attachment to their employment and the motivation to advance. Our pets are happier with us at home, but I’m not sure we are more fulfilled or even less stressed. If that was the case, then why is there still so much stress leave? Not so much in my working group but among the businesses that I consult with.

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If working from home is going to become the new normal, we would do well to develop a more refined science to explain who benefits, who loses, and how to optimize the experience so that work still gets done.