What happens when social creatures are deprived of social contact? For three years we have been conducting a very large experiment – of the sort, were it done to rhesus monkeys, that would get animal rights extremists in a lather. What if we took the main convener of community in the modern west, the workplace, and split up these communities, sequestering their members inside their homes?
At first the experiment was forced on us, but when the cage doors finally opened something strange happened: many of us simply chose to stay there. We refused to be released into the wild. In the year to December 2019, around 12% of working adults reported working from home at some point in the past seven days. Between January and February 2023 that figure was 40%. Some 16% of us, now, never go into the office. The experiment continues.
The results are trickling in. It turns out that depriving social creatures of social contact isn’t very good for them. Rates of depression and anxiety increase – as do feelings of stress and isolation. People feel less connected to colleagues. Without gossip, flirting, jokes, lunches and drinks, the day becomes a dull to-do list. And minus several layers of social context, messages get tricky to decipher – and the disconnection grows.
Remote workers are putting in longer hours but working less well (studies of individual companies put the productivity drop anywhere between 4% and 19%). A reported 80% of UK workers feel it harms their mental health. In sum: working from home is bad for us. But still we do it.
Some home workers, of course, are making rational decisions. There are people who genuinely thrive in this environment: parents with young children who can more easily fit in bedtimes and drop-offs, and those with punishing commutes or social anxiety, who get to avoid a joy-sapping ordeal. Remote working makes them happier. But the rest – probably the majority – seem to be making irrational decisions. These are the employees that Microsoft’s recent New Future Of Work report found to be “lonelier and more prone to feelings of guilt when calling in sick or taking breaks, leading to overcompensation”.
They suffer, but refuse to go into the office.
It’s not as if the craving for social contact has gone, just the habit that would most easily sate it. A strange counterpoint to remote working has been the boom in demand for co-working spaces. Since Covid restrictions were lifted, cafes and libraries have filled with freelancers who can’t bear to spend another day at their kitchen tables. We seek out substitutes for the workplace. But we don’t go in.
I wonder if a clue to all this can be found in the routines of a friend of mine, who when forced into the office for, say, an unavoidable in-person meeting always returns refreshed and perky, determined to do it more often. He resolves to commute in at least once a week – and then continues to work from home, getting out of bed just in time for his first Zoom.
I don’t think he’s alone. Could it be that the choice to work from home has allowed us to form self-sabotaging habits that we cannot break alone? Employees report that they value the “freedom and control” of remote working (even as depression levels soar) – but what use, really, is the freedom to spend eight hours battling your willpower in an isolated box?
“Shit. Five hours on Blitzkrieg. This wasn’t how it was meant to be! I was going to get to grips with The Roman Republic, get into the GI diet…” Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan, on a week’s holiday at home, might speak for the new era of remote working. “Am I enjoying this? Don’t know anymore. Doesn’t matter. Gotta finish the level. Then read those… do some sit-ups… learn the clarinet.”
Without an urgent motive to go to work – in the form of a boss waving a P45 – it might be that our behaviour has changed in ways that we ourselves do not like.
There is an analogy, here, I think, with the advent of dating apps. These, too, have changed social behaviour in a way that users themselves do not like. Apps such as Hinge and Tinder mean there is less incentive to chat people up in bars, for example, or make efforts to organise the sorts of fun social activities that might lead to meeting someone. The main driver behind all sorts of social behaviour – the possibility of sex – has gone. (Sports teams on tour used to be uncontrollable, one ex-manager tells me; now the boys stay in their rooms, on the apps.) Dating app users disapprove of this; most people would rather meet someone organically than online. We miss the social activities. We complain. But still we keep swiping.
Habits get locked in, and not just psychologically. The popularity of dating apps means there will be fewer people in bars looking for romance, even for those singles who decide to buck the trend. And those who now venture into offices in search of camaraderie may find themselves alone among blinking computers. Companies may downsize too. John Lewis is reportedly slashing the value of its London office space by half and HSBC announced last week that it’s moving out of its global headquarters in Canary Wharf to smaller offices in the City of London.
What is the solution, here, when it comes to working from home? Do we need bosses to take the lead and insist their employees come in for their own good? This is a hard thing to advocate: the principle that people know what is best for them, and should be allowed to do it, is a good one. But it conflicts with evidence that environment often conquers willpower.
We can get into unhealthy habits, and we can’t always break them by ourselves. Most of us would be better off in the office. We might need a prod to get there.