Working from home is lonely

The argument

Working from home can be harmful to a persons' mental health. Staying home every day can be isolating and lonely, which makes it more difficult to find the motivation to work — and on this argument the two effects reinforce one another, since flagging motivation stretches the working day out and further reduces whatever contact it might otherwise have contained. When there is no physical place for an employee to commute to, people can feel disconnected from their coworkers and company. The commute and the building are what mark the boundary between work and the rest of life, and without them an employee has no daily reminder of belonging to an organisation at all. The isolation is often deliberate, which is part of the problem. Those who work remotely typically separate themselves from others to focus better on their job. But working independently creates a sense of loneliness that can affect work performance. There is no feedback or comparison to coworkers, so it creates constant worry that they are underperforming — a worry with no way of resolving itself, because the ordinary signals that would settle it, seeing how others are getting on and hearing informally how one's own work has landed, are exactly what remote work removes. Traditional offices are beneficial to a persons' mental health due to daily socialization, and that socialization is a by-product of simply being present rather than something anyone has to arrange. Companies can create a sensation of face-to-face communication for remote workers using video chats, but it cannot be compared to in-person conversations, since a scheduled call replaces incidental contact rather than reproducing it. The feeling of isolation and loneliness that people feel from working at home can negatively affect their mental health, motivation, and job performance.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Working from home does not have to be lonely or damaging to someone's mental health. Remote workers are able to do their job from any location, so they could go to a public place during work, such as a cafe or library. Video and phone calls are helpful in combating loneliness because of communication with other employees. People are able to socialize and communicate with others, even without a traditional office space.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise generalises from one arrangement to all of them. Remote work varies in whether it is full-time or hybrid, whether the household is empty during the day, and how much contact the role itself involves, and surveys through this period found a wide spread of reported wellbeing rather than a uniform decline. [Rejecting P2] Two claims are combined that do not belong together. The absence of a commute is not the absence of contact, and a lack of feedback is a management failure rather than a feature of the location: appraisals, one-to-ones and clear objectives are what supply it, and badly managed offices supply it no better. [Rejecting P3] The comparison is never actually run. Offices also produce interruption, commuting time, noise, and for some workers exclusion or harassment, none of which appear here — and the premise's own concession that video contact helps undercuts the claim that in-person socialising cannot be replaced. The conclusion is a general comparison, better or worse than office work, which would have to weigh autonomy, time recovered from commuting, and the substantial share of workers who report preferring it.