Does Remote Working Really Work For You? - The Gloss Magazine

Does Remote Working Really Work For You?

Pre-Covid-19, remote working was already on the rise, as many companies trialled or transitioned to blended office-based/WFH routines. Social distancing requirements means few offices have returned to full capacity, even though many lonely workers are keen to reconnect with colleagues. And it turns out, workers were already feeling lonely … at the office. Which begs a bigger question about the culture of the post-pandemic workplace, says NOREENA HERTZ …

The rise of remote working – by 2023 over 40 per cent of the workforce will be working remotely the majority of the time – risks making worker loneliness significantly worse. This is because most remote workers rely on email or other text-based communication tools as their primary way to interact.

While many remote workers cherish the autonomy and flexibility remote working provides, it can exacerbate feelings of isolation. Gossip, laughter, small talk and hugs were just some of the things people missed when forced out of the office during lockdown. Stanford professor Nicolas Bloom, one of the world’s leading researchers into home working, has found that “it’s very easy for remote workers to get depressed and uninspired at home”. In an experiment he ran, half of a Chinese company’s 16,000 employees were randomly assigned to work at home for nine months: at the end of that period half of them opted to return to the office, even though they had an average commute of 40 minutes each way. Working at home had left them missing the social interactions of the office so much that they were willing to sacrifice more than an hour of their own time every day to get it back.

What this suggests is that employers should resist the cost-cutting temptation to significantly ramp up remote working after the pandemic, while at the same time think carefully about how to mitigate its emotional downside for those who do find themselves working from home. Laszlo Bock, the former head of human resources at Google, has investigated the optimal amount of “work from home” time and found it to be one and a half days a week. With this combination, employees have both time to connect and build bonds with each other, and also time on their own to do deeper, undistracted work.

At work, as in our private lives, contact beats contactless and physical proximity is crucial for creating a sense and spirit of community.

Businesses’ ever greater emphasis on productivity and efficiency has conspired to make hanging out with a co-worker either during or after work less the norm than ever. The upshot is that many social practices that were commonplace a couple of decades ago – a mid-morning tea break with colleagues, after-work drinks at the pub or a workmate invited home for a meal – are becoming ever less typical. Nowhere is this more evident than the communal office lunch. Sarah, a producer at a major news corporation, told me in 2019 that despite having worked at her company for four years she had eaten lunch with colleagues only a handful of times. When she did, the rarity of the occasion made it feel like a group of strangers trying to find out about each other for the first time, rather than a community who actually spent dozens of hours a week in each other’s company.

Noreena Hertz photographed by Mark Nolte

In the US, 62 per cent of professionals say they eat “al desko”; less than half of them actually wanted to do so. Even in France, where a long lunch break with colleagues was for many years almost sacrosanct, market realities have begun to kick in. It makes sense that we are likely to feel lonelier at work if we eat alone, just as those living on their own are likely to feel most lonely when eating without company. We’re also less likely to feel connected to colleagues.

So as companies seek to rebuild a sense of community and help their staff to reconnect after months of forced distancing, reinstituting a formal lunchbreak – ideally at a set time – and encouraging workers to eat together, when guidelines allow, might form part of their strategy.

Creating opportunities for informal socialising while social distancing is still required is of course a real challenge. As workplaces move beyond the coronavirus, it’s imperative that they recognise how compelling the business case for doing so is. Not only because connected employees are more productive, more committed and less likely to leave, but also because in the battle for the best talent – which won’t disappear even as higher unemployment levels endure – a workplace with the reputation for feeling friendly will stand out. This is especially so for Generation K, the next generation of employees, who are the loneliest in society and also the group craving connection the most.

The workplace undoubtedly has a long history of feeling lonely for many. But what’s striking about its contemporary manifestation is the extent to which technological aspects of modern-day work, intended to make us more productive and efficient, are ultimately having the opposite effect because they make us feel less connected and more isolated. For it’s not just that workplace loneliness is bad for employees, it’s also bad for business, with loneliness, engagement and productivity clearly interlinked. People who don’t have a friend at work are seven times less likely to be engaged with their job intellectually and emotionally. Generally, lonely, disconnected workers take more sick days, are less motivated, make more mistakes and perform less effectively than those who are not. In part this is because, as one study found, “once loneliness is an established sentiment, you actually become less approachable. You don’t listen as well. You become more self-focused. All sorts of things happen that make you less of a desirable interaction partner to other people.”

Technological aspects of modern-day work, intended to make us more productive, are having the opposite effect.

When we’re lonely at work we are also more likely to switch or quit jobs. One study of 2,000 managers and employees in ten countries, found that 60 per cent of those surveyed said they would be more likely to stay with their company longer if they had workplace friends.

One of the reasons so many office workers feel alienated from each other is because they spend their days in large, open-plan layouts. This may seem counter-intuitive. When open-plan offices were first introduced in the 1960s they were heralded as a progressive, near-utopian design concept where people and ideas could more naturally mix and mingle. Yet, it turns out that the open-plan office – comprising half of offices in Europe and two-thirds of offices in the US – is especially alienating.

In a recently published Harvard Business School study which tracked what happened to employees when they moved from cubicles to open-plan offices, researchers found that the open architecture seemed to “trigger a response to socially withdraw” from colleagues, as people opted for email and messaging instead of talking.

Why people pull back is in part down to the natural human response to the excess noise or unwelcome disruptions that are traditionally part and parcel of the open-plan office. It’s also an act of self-care. Studies have found that noise over 55 decibels – roughly the sound of a loud phone call – arouses our central nervous system and triggers a measurable increase in stress.

It’s not just the volume level that is problematic. Just as Amazon’s Alexa is always listening, waiting for a command to which to respond, our brains are constantly monitoring the noise around us, the typing of someone else’s keyboard, the conversation at the next desk, that ringing phone. As a result, not only is it more difficult to concentrate, but we have to work harder to complete tasks because we’re trying to simultaneously listen to and ignore all the ambient sound. As psychologist Nick Perham explains, “most people work best when it’s quiet, despite what they think”. Indeed studies have found that just one nearby conversation can reduce worker productivity by up to 66 per cent.

The barrage of sound is not the only thing that makes us want to withdraw; it’s also the lack of privacy. Researchers have written of “a feeling of insecurity” pervading open-plan offices because everyone can see and hear what you are doing. This resonates with my experience; it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation with a colleague – let alone make a call to your doctor’s office or check in with your partner – when you know you’re being overheard by anyone who happens to be around.

In the same way that teenagers’ conversations on social media tend towards being both performative and shallow because they are taking place within a public forum, so too does the behaviour of the open-plan office worker change when he or she knows that their behaviour is being watched. Cognitively and emotionally this is not only exhausting, it is also alienating: our avatar is now hard at work for us in the real world, too.

This sense of alienation is even worse if your office has bought into the idea of “hot-desking”. Employers have tried to sell this as the epitome of workplace freedom and choice – each day you get to decide where to sit. The reality, however, is that without a work space of your own and somewhere to stick a photo of your child or partner, never able to sit next to anyone for long enough to strike up a friendship and in a daily battle over which desk you’ll occupy, it can also be a pretty isolating existence. Hot-deskers are the workplace equivalent of the renters who’ve never met their neighbours. More vagrants than nomads, the hot-desker inevitably feels ever more expendable and disregarded, and ever less visible.

With the economic damage caused by Covid-19 and companies now under even greater pressure to reduce overheads – even though infection and open-plan are partners in crime, and even if open-plan offices are recognised as contributing to staff discontent – not only is there unlikely to be budget available for a fundamental office redesign in many organisations, but hot-desking may well re-emerge as a trend, despite its coronavirus-associated risk. Remember, after all, when it was that open-plan offices came back into fashion: just after the 2008 financial crisis. Although it isn’t inconceivable that in some companies a two-tier system will emerge, with management safely sequestered in offices and those lower down the organisation only provided with screens, if that.

At work as in our private lives, contact beats contactless and physical proximity is crucial for creating a sense and spirit of community.

It is not just our physical environment that has been eroding our relationships at work and making us feel lonely. Part of the reason many of us feel so detached from our colleagues today is because the quality of our communication with them is so much shallower than in the past. A 2018 global study found that employees typically spent nearly half their entire day sending emails and messages to one another, often to people within a radius of just a few desks. This also contributes to workplace loneliness. As many as 40 per cent of workers report that communicating with colleagues over email makes them “very often” or “always” lonely.

This is not surprising given the quality of exchanges in the typical work email: transactional rather than conversational, efficient rather than affable, sterile rather than warm. And the greater our workload, the less civil our emails.

But here’s the catch. While the majority of employees would rather work in a place where everyone’s kind and nice, in our neoliberal capitalist system kindness and niceness are traits that are significantly undervalued: jobs that actively solicit such qualities, such as teaching, nursing and social work, pay significantly below average. At the same time, women who are perceived as warm and friendly at work can find themselves “sidelined pretty easily, not be seen as power players or go-to people”, and “their skills can be overlooked”, according to Stanford senior research scholar Marianne Cooper who has studied this phenomenon extensively.

So if we want the workplace to feel less lonely, part of the challenge is explicitly valuing qualities such as kindness, cooperation and collaboration. And not just saying that one does, but actually finding ways to reward and incentivise such behaviour. One idea, recently adopted by Australian software company Atlassian, is to base employee evaluations not only on personal performance, but also on how collaborative they are, the extent to which they actively seek out opportunities to help others and how well they treat colleagues.

The global technology company Cisco takes this approach even further. They deploy two strategies, both to encourage collaboration and kindness and to actively reward these behaviours. The first is an initiative whereby any employee at any level in the company can nominate another employee for a cash bonus ranging from $100 to $10,000 as recognition for being particularly helpful, kind or collaborative. More recently, the company has also introduced employee-driven “tokens of appreciation” – a kind of virtual pat on the back. There’s no direct monetary reward, but each time a token is passed on a donation is made to charity.

A workplace in which people feel more appreciated for what they bring culturally, as well as how much they contribute to the bottom line, and one which actively encourages people to acknowledge and thank each other, is inevitably one in which employees feel much more connected to their employer and to each other.

Making employees feel cared for and acknowledged is a strategy that goes a long way, and it doesn’t take much to achieve this. A publisher told me of a manager who stood out because he began each meeting acknowledging successes anyone in the team had had in the previous week and explicitly thanking them for this in the room. It was striking to me, and depressing, to see how out of the ordinary such behaviour has become in the workplace.

Many of us feel lonely at work because we’re lonely outside of it. After all, we don’t leave our feelings at home when we arrive at work. The trouble is that one of the reasons we’re so lonely is the long hours many of us now spend working. It’s a vicious cycle. In nearly every Western European country, “extreme working hours” (more than 50 hours per week) has significantly increased since 1990. In Japan, so many white-collar workers have worked themselves to death – literally – there’s even a name for it: karoshi. In China, starting work at 9am, leaving at 9pm and working six days a week is now so normal that there is a name for it too: “996”. The trouble with all these long hours, whether they are out of necessity or choice, is that they do more than exhaust us. They also make us lonely. In the US, almost 50 per cent of people describe being so exhausted by their work that they are unmotivated to socialise after hours. The losers in all of this are, of course our families, especially people’s relationships with their parents.

Even if we don’t physically stay at work this problem is likely to still hold true. For many of us, our jobs have become inescapable at weekends, evenings and even on holiday because of that repeat offender, the smartphone. For the self-employed worker whose earning power is increasingly precarious, there’s often no choice but to respond to emails, while in some companies the corporate culture is such that everyone’s expected to be “always on”. The upshot is that many of us find ourselves responding to bosses, clients and colleagues during family time, school plays and in bed late at night when in reality our reply could wait until we were back at work the following day. Relationships take time to nurture. Care can’t be delivered on the fly and we need to become more acutely aware of the high cost of our digital addictions. Some innovative companies, including Volkswagen and Daimler, instituted a policy whereby emails sent to employees on holiday would be automatically deleted. In 2018, supermarket chain Lidl banned work emails from 6pm until 7am and over the weekend in some of its markets in a bid to improve its employees’ work-life balance. In some countries the government has even weighed in. In France, for example, workers at companies with more than 50 employees have a “right to disconnect” that has been legally guaranteed since January 2017. Spain adopted similar legislation in 2018 and legislature in the Philippines, the Netherlands, India, Canada and New York City are considering various versions. Whilst advocates of such laws see them as a welcome and necessary step to help stymie employee burnout, they are undeniably a blunt response.

Recognising the interplay between loneliness at work and loneliness at home, employers could also do a much better job of acknowledging their employees as human beings with responsibilities outside of the workplace, whose mental and physical health is significantly affected by their ability to nurture and retain their external relationships and bonds. In the US, nearly a quarter of adults have been fired or threatened with the sack for taking time off to recover from illness or to care for a sick loved one. Employers have to rethink as a matter of urgent priority how it is that their all employees, not just of course those in the office, are enabled to deliver support, kindness and care. And the current economic climate cannot be used as a justification for retaining the status quo or even going backwards.

Again it doesn’t have to be this way, and there are some examples already of companies helping employees manage their dual roles as workers and family carers by offering more flexible working arrangements and increasing opportunities for part-time work. However, this may not always be the best solution. There is a significant body of research that shows that part-time workers are less likely to be promoted than their full-time colleagues. Given that women make up the majority of part-time workers, what seems on the surface like a positive move can therefore end up being another blow to gender equality.

Perhaps, instead of focusing on the provision of part-time employment as the way forward, companies could provide a number of paid “care” days for any employee to take, much as new mothers and fathers in many companies are given paid parental leave. These days could be used to care for a child or a friend, or a relative, or to do something to contribute to the local community.

In 2019, Microsoft ran an experiment in its Japan office in which it gave the entire 2,300-person workforce five Fridays off in a row, without decreasing pay. It also provided each employee with financial support of up to 100,000 yen (about €800) to spend on taking a family trip. The results were astounding. Not only were workers happier but meetings became more efficient, absenteeism fell by 25 per cent and productivity shot up a staggering 40 per cent. In addition, fewer workers in the office meant significant cost savings and environmental benefits: during the trial period, electricity use decreased by 23 per cent, and 59 per cent fewer pages of paper were printed.

Such examples give hope. They show that there are innovative and effective ways to tackle employee loneliness not only in the workplace, but also outside of it. And that the companies which employ these kinds of strategies can enjoy both a happier workforce and bottom-line benefits. While such policies might feel like luxuries your company cannot afford, we cannot allow the economic consequences of Covid-19 to further institutionalise selfishness in society. Care and capitalism need to be reconciled. Loneliness at work is not only about feeling disconnected from the people we work with, whether our colleagues or our boss, it’s also about feeling bereft of agency, feeling powerless.

Adapted from The Lonely Century, Coming Together in a World that’s Pulling Apart by Noreena Hertz, published by Sceptre, out now.

LOVETHEGLOSS.IE?

Sign up to our MAILING LIST now for a roundup of the latest fashion, beauty, interiors and entertaining news from THE GLOSS MAGAZINE’s daily dispatches.

Choose Your Categories

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This