6 ms·

Working from home can bring big health benefits, study finds

65 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

Macha 3y ago
> “In the old days of office working, people realised that if you put everyone in the same room with no sound-proofing, it was all unpleasant and you didn’t have a very productive workforce,” he said. Did they? The trend I've seen my entire career has been finding new ways to pack more people into less space, damn the drawbacks. To the point that a common theme on here is lamenting the death of cubicles.
- shagie 3y ago
  They did and it's been known for a while. That wasn't lost on the productivity side of the equation. The other side is the cost side. The cost side often won out. Peopleware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project... was first published back in '87 and had a long list of references back then on previous studies.
  - LeafItAlone 3y ago
    > The cost side often won out. I was in two offices in the past decade where they renovated an office to make it more open. Other than burning down a budget in one case, the renovations had no purpose other than opening up the office. They didn’t even make room for more people
- mleo 3y ago
  There was no suggestion that anything was done about it. Had to consider the cost of space vs headcount growth vs loss of productivity. Anecdotally, I never had a problem with open office environments, but understand why they suck.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  Workers did. Management didn’t. Or maybe they did, because they kept their private offices.
- pjerem 3y ago
  > lamenting the death of cubicles. I’m too young to have worked in cublicles but man, each time I see pictures of them, I don’t get why they were so unpopular. I’ve never had so much room for my stuff and so much privacy during my career in open-spaces (except of course WFH). I’m amazed at how nobody understands that open-spaces are awful to do a job that requires focusing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I think the reaction is in comparison to having a private office. Though truth be told, everywhere I've worked with offices, the norm has always been open door policy unless you were on the phone or otherwise needed some privacy or maybe heads down time. It was never typical for people to go the day with their door shut and would have been remarked on.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      From 1997-2001 I worked in a glorious place where everyone had an office with a door and a window. Indeed, the doors were mostly open, but they opened onto corridors, meaning it was [by overwhelming] default quiet in the offices.
      - mvanbaak 3y ago
        I have the same experience. Where I worked the offices were 2-person offices, and this worked very good for mentor-student environment, or when 2 ppl had to crack a really tough nut. The doors were also mostly open, and the corridors were quiet and peaceful. If you wanted to chitchat etc you would walk to the social area with a coffee machine, the lunch setup etc. It was really nice, and if I ever have to go back to an office, this is how I would like it to be again. Otherwise I continue my working from home.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I worked for a very small company for almost 10 years. For about half that time I had a spacious office that overlooked a river. From a scenery perspective even better than my home office which is nicely appointed but doesn't have much of a view although it's in the country.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Things have gone through cycles. In the early 80s when I interviewed with Boeing everyone except managers were in big open rooms with desks. The company I ended up working for, everyone had offices. Then there was the high-wall cubicle phase. More recently things have gone through variants of open and semi-open plan.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  They know this quite well. What you are arguing about is if they care enough to do something about it. At some point our society-breaking universal presence of principal agent problems is going to break our society. It's absurd that it didn't already, and people have been observing that absurdity been absurd for some good 50 years at minimum. But assuming the problem doesn't exist this late on the game is hard-core cognitive dissonance.
- bb88 3y ago
  The nice thing about cubicles were their abilities to absorb sound. That made headphones optional. Conversations in the next cube could be had that kept the noise down to a minimum for the neighbors. But also, and you had a semi-permanent place to do work. So you could effectively show some personality on the walls, if you wanted. One person was learning Mandarin at the time and had a poster of common characters -- which was cool. I went to work for an open concept that exposed concrete for a couple of years. It was very anti worker. Conversations 2 rows over were heard clearly as it would reflect off the concrete. There was always a constant level of noise in the environment. Most people just brought in headphones when they wanted to buckle down and work.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
decafninja 3y ago
I lost 10lb in 2020 while WFH. Didn’t put any real effort. I just ate a lot more home cooked meals. Didn’t even exercise. Walked very little, drove everywhere. Then I went back full time to the office in late 2021 and gained all of it back. Only difference is I started eating office food again - office food that is specifically supposed to be “healthy”. I even walked and biked a lot more thanks to the commute.
- quest88 3y ago
  Calories are king, healthiness of food be damned. You're consuming too many calories is all.
  - decafninja 3y ago
    Yes. Just surprising how calorie dense the “healthy” office food is versus home food despite not seeming so. The home food was not made with any particular effort to be above and beyond healthy or low calorie either.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      It's impossible to consume a healthy amount of industrialized "office-safe" food and still get enough nutrition from it to go on with your day. That's as true for the "healthy" alternatives as it is from the proud to be junk ones.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  So why didn't you cook meals at home and bring them in? You can't blame weight gain on laziness.
  - decafninja 3y ago
    Because my commute is lengthy and grueling. Whatever time I had to cook for myself is consumed by the commute. My job pays me well enough to bite the bullet and endure the senseless commute. But not well enough to move closer to the office and trade my nice suburban apartment for a (older, rattier, with less amenities) shoebox half the size for more the cost.
corytheboyd 3y ago
Commuting to and from the office five days a week is a hell that I never want to go back to. WFH has transformed my life. Being more productive is a nice bonus, though it’s the personal life benefits I care most about. Work is already so dehumanizing, can we just have this one thing in our favor for once. Four day work week next would be lovely.
- truckerbill 3y ago
  Fight for it, don't ask!
  - corytheboyd 3y ago
    Like what, threaten my employer with an ultimatum? I’m not willing to do that, as the risk/reward balance is way off. I’d find another job if a six day work week is proposed, but not if a four day work week isn’t. I’d like to see it happen, and soon, so that I have it for most of the remainder of my working years. Back here in reality, I need (and like) this job, and there are much worse limbo states to be in than working for a respectful tech company, from home, hoping for the four day work week.
    - truckerbill 3y ago
      Yeah you just have to seek out better employers if you want it to happen, but I understand they work very hard to get people under the thumb :)
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  post-covid made me realise life could be so much better if the working people just had a bit more leverage. it was a fleeting glimpse at how quickly the norm can be broken and rebuilt as something better, if only temporarily in this case.
  - corytheboyd 3y ago
    Hoping it’s not completely temporary, and more of a significant fork in the road— there’s the path leading back to the office, but the path leading home has at least now been paved. I’m on paper a field worker now, so I don’t even have an office to return to. Company doesn’t seem to want to push for RTO, but I know these things change on a dime. Just like layoffs are NEVER EVER WE PROMISE happening, until, very suddenly, they are. Enjoying it while I have it, but if I lose it, that little WFH fork in the road is still there (I hope)
aiNohY6g 3y ago
Source article: https://academic.oup.com/joh/article/66/1/uiad013/7473692 https://academic.oup.com/joh/article/66/1/uiad013/7473692
swader999 3y ago
It's probably a little easier on the environment too.
- lkadjal 3y ago
  [dead]
nox101 3y ago
In 5-10 years I predict there while be tons of mental health articles about how WFH is killing us. Less social life. Less relationships. Less friends. I'd prefer my 8 hours at work to be fun. It's not when I'm at home alone. I get that some people hate their co-workers. I've been lucky I guess.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  It really depends. It sounds like in your case those things (friends, etc.) Are work focused. That's the case for many folks. In my case my friends are mostly not work focused. I have tons of friends I made at work, but work is not the primary way in which I engage with them. I guess what I'm trying to say is that my experience is exactly the opposite. When I work from home I see my friend who runs the local Cafe, I see my friend for lunch, I spend more quality time with my wife and family, and chosen friends. Work from home is not like Stephen King style, a lone warrior in a cabin in the middle of the woods. Some people get their community from work, some don't. That is not dependent on work from home or not, it's a conflating metric.
- Bayart 3y ago
  Much like iancmceachern, my experience is the opposite of yours. The office forces me into human interactions I wouldn't have chosen of my own free will, and WFH significantly increases the time I spend on relationships that matter, those I've chosen. A lot of it has to do with living in a dense urban area and cultivating a circle of friends that I can meet with little to no planning. I think it's got a lot to do with one's personality, priorities (whether to live in a dense area or not), interests (how big of a share work takes in the things you enjoy) and willingness to proactively cultivate human interactions. Like other things related to WFH, there doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all answer and I like it. Having more room to allow more varied types of individualities to co-exist freely is a good thing in my opinion.
  - nox101 3y ago
    We should apply the same logic to other things Kids should school from home. They don't get to choose who their classmates are so they're being forced to have human interactions who they haven't chosen of their own free will. Colleges should all be remote. Same reasons. I'm relatively confident that interacting with others is kind of the point of school and college and I'm just as confident that many (not all) of those same reasons apply to work. WFH ignores those reasons.
Linda231 3y ago
[dead]
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
if i could go to the office and leave as and when i wanted i would probably go more often. even just for an hour or two. but the issue is not having a choice. presenteeism is the greater evil.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
My health benefit is that I walk 3 miles in the morning and 3 miles in the evening. That is time I would commute. You cannot beat that. And since I keep no snacks at home I don't snack!
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  Some offices are too good at having great treats and snacks. Those are bad for the body.
knightoffaith 3y ago
>One of the studies reviewed found that 46.9% of employees working from home had gained weight, and another put the figure at 41%. Most of the papers reviewed showed that homeworkers were more sedentary. This is an important caveat. And the decrease in blood pressure is apparently just referring to blood pressure taken at a company office vs. blood pressure taken at home.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  What's the base rate for the comparable population? That sounds bad on a first read, but: If only 47% (or 41%) of surveyed gained weight, that's probably lower than the population-wide average. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9106499/#:~:text=Mean%20(%C2%B1SE)%2010%2D,more%20across%20the%2010%2Dyears https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9106499/#:~:tex.... (results from a 10-year study show a higher rate of weight gain)
doublerabbit 3y ago
Why should we be allowed to work from home yet those who work in retail, cafes et cetera don't get the same benefit? You can't argue our jobs are more important when theirs are just the same, if not more. As with out them you wouldn't have your conveniences, food.. We are a very entitled bunch.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  To be fair, you choose your career. Not only that, but each job comes with perks that may, or may not, appeal to you. For a kindergarten teacher, they get to spend the whole day with children. That's horrible for some people and beautiful for others. You get hugged a lot, if you need that in your life, it's unthinkable doing a different job. I can't get to do anything physical in the morning (walking kids to school is a lot of effort for me), but my brain goes full power in front of a pc in the morning, so it's great to have WFH privileges.
- OfficeChad 3y ago
  [dead]
- Volundr 3y ago
  > Why should we be allowed to work from home yet those who work in retail, cafes et cetera don't get the same benefit? Different jobs have different requirements. This is also why I don't have to wear a respirator to be fair to workers at a chemical plant or move around heavy boxes to be fair to warehouse workers. The fact that my job has different requirements doesn't make it "more important". Just a different job that needs different things.
OfficeChad 3y ago
[dead]
ojhughes 3y ago
Return to (hybrid) office working is in full swing in London now. The trains are packed again, long queues for lunch. Fully remote roles are becoming rare

65 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

> “In the old days of office working, people realised that if you put everyone in the same room with no sound-proofing, it was all unpleasant and you didn’t have a very productive workforce,” he said. Did they? The trend I've seen my entire career has been finding new ways to pack more people into less space, damn the drawbacks. To the point that a common theme on here is lamenting the death of cubicles.

shagie 3y ago
They did and it's been known for a while. That wasn't lost on the productivity side of the equation. The other side is the cost side. The cost side often won out. Peopleware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project... was first published back in '87 and had a long list of references back then on previous studies.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  > The cost side often won out. I was in two offices in the past decade where they renovated an office to make it more open. Other than burning down a budget in one case, the renovations had no purpose other than opening up the office. They didn’t even make room for more people
mleo 3y ago
There was no suggestion that anything was done about it. Had to consider the cost of space vs headcount growth vs loss of productivity. Anecdotally, I never had a problem with open office environments, but understand why they suck.
LeafItAlone 3y ago
Workers did. Management didn’t. Or maybe they did, because they kept their private offices.
pjerem 3y ago
> lamenting the death of cubicles. I’m too young to have worked in cublicles but man, each time I see pictures of them, I don’t get why they were so unpopular. I’ve never had so much room for my stuff and so much privacy during my career in open-spaces (except of course WFH). I’m amazed at how nobody understands that open-spaces are awful to do a job that requires focusing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 3y ago
  I think the reaction is in comparison to having a private office. Though truth be told, everywhere I've worked with offices, the norm has always been open door policy unless you were on the phone or otherwise needed some privacy or maybe heads down time. It was never typical for people to go the day with their door shut and would have been remarked on.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    From 1997-2001 I worked in a glorious place where everyone had an office with a door and a window. Indeed, the doors were mostly open, but they opened onto corridors, meaning it was [by overwhelming] default quiet in the offices.
    - mvanbaak 3y ago
      I have the same experience. Where I worked the offices were 2-person offices, and this worked very good for mentor-student environment, or when 2 ppl had to crack a really tough nut. The doors were also mostly open, and the corridors were quiet and peaceful. If you wanted to chitchat etc you would walk to the social area with a coffee machine, the lunch setup etc. It was really nice, and if I ever have to go back to an office, this is how I would like it to be again. Otherwise I continue my working from home.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I worked for a very small company for almost 10 years. For about half that time I had a spacious office that overlooked a river. From a scenery perspective even better than my home office which is nicely appointed but doesn't have much of a view although it's in the country.
ghaff 3y ago
Things have gone through cycles. In the early 80s when I interviewed with Boeing everyone except managers were in big open rooms with desks. The company I ended up working for, everyone had offices. Then there was the high-wall cubicle phase. More recently things have gone through variants of open and semi-open plan.
marcosdumay 3y ago
They know this quite well. What you are arguing about is if they care enough to do something about it. At some point our society-breaking universal presence of principal agent problems is going to break our society. It's absurd that it didn't already, and people have been observing that absurdity been absurd for some good 50 years at minimum. But assuming the problem doesn't exist this late on the game is hard-core cognitive dissonance.
bb88 3y ago
The nice thing about cubicles were their abilities to absorb sound. That made headphones optional. Conversations in the next cube could be had that kept the noise down to a minimum for the neighbors. But also, and you had a semi-permanent place to do work. So you could effectively show some personality on the walls, if you wanted. One person was learning Mandarin at the time and had a poster of common characters -- which was cool. I went to work for an open concept that exposed concrete for a couple of years. It was very anti worker. Conversations 2 rows over were heard clearly as it would reflect off the concrete. There was always a constant level of noise in the environment. Most people just brought in headphones when they wanted to buckle down and work.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

decafninja 3y ago

I lost 10lb in 2020 while WFH. Didn’t put any real effort. I just ate a lot more home cooked meals. Didn’t even exercise. Walked very little, drove everywhere. Then I went back full time to the office in late 2021 and gained all of it back. Only difference is I started eating office food again - office food that is specifically supposed to be “healthy”. I even walked and biked a lot more thanks to the commute.

quest88 3y ago
Calories are king, healthiness of food be damned. You're consuming too many calories is all.
- decafninja 3y ago
  Yes. Just surprising how calorie dense the “healthy” office food is versus home food despite not seeming so. The home food was not made with any particular effort to be above and beyond healthy or low calorie either.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    It's impossible to consume a healthy amount of industrialized "office-safe" food and still get enough nutrition from it to go on with your day. That's as true for the "healthy" alternatives as it is from the proud to be junk ones.
doublerabbit 3y ago
So why didn't you cook meals at home and bring them in? You can't blame weight gain on laziness.
- decafninja 3y ago
  Because my commute is lengthy and grueling. Whatever time I had to cook for myself is consumed by the commute. My job pays me well enough to bite the bullet and endure the senseless commute. But not well enough to move closer to the office and trade my nice suburban apartment for a (older, rattier, with less amenities) shoebox half the size for more the cost.

corytheboyd 3y ago

Commuting to and from the office five days a week is a hell that I never want to go back to. WFH has transformed my life. Being more productive is a nice bonus, though it’s the personal life benefits I care most about. Work is already so dehumanizing, can we just have this one thing in our favor for once. Four day work week next would be lovely.

truckerbill 3y ago
Fight for it, don't ask!
- corytheboyd 3y ago
  Like what, threaten my employer with an ultimatum? I’m not willing to do that, as the risk/reward balance is way off. I’d find another job if a six day work week is proposed, but not if a four day work week isn’t. I’d like to see it happen, and soon, so that I have it for most of the remainder of my working years. Back here in reality, I need (and like) this job, and there are much worse limbo states to be in than working for a respectful tech company, from home, hoping for the four day work week.
  - truckerbill 3y ago
    Yeah you just have to seek out better employers if you want it to happen, but I understand they work very hard to get people under the thumb :)
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
post-covid made me realise life could be so much better if the working people just had a bit more leverage. it was a fleeting glimpse at how quickly the norm can be broken and rebuilt as something better, if only temporarily in this case.
- corytheboyd 3y ago
  Hoping it’s not completely temporary, and more of a significant fork in the road— there’s the path leading back to the office, but the path leading home has at least now been paved. I’m on paper a field worker now, so I don’t even have an office to return to. Company doesn’t seem to want to push for RTO, but I know these things change on a dime. Just like layoffs are NEVER EVER WE PROMISE happening, until, very suddenly, they are. Enjoying it while I have it, but if I lose it, that little WFH fork in the road is still there (I hope)

aiNohY6g 3y ago

Source article: https://academic.oup.com/joh/article/66/1/uiad013/7473692 https://academic.oup.com/joh/article/66/1/uiad013/7473692

swader999 3y ago

It's probably a little easier on the environment too.

lkadjal 3y ago
[dead]

nox101 3y ago

In 5-10 years I predict there while be tons of mental health articles about how WFH is killing us. Less social life. Less relationships. Less friends. I'd prefer my 8 hours at work to be fun. It's not when I'm at home alone. I get that some people hate their co-workers. I've been lucky I guess.

iancmceachern 3y ago
It really depends. It sounds like in your case those things (friends, etc.) Are work focused. That's the case for many folks. In my case my friends are mostly not work focused. I have tons of friends I made at work, but work is not the primary way in which I engage with them. I guess what I'm trying to say is that my experience is exactly the opposite. When I work from home I see my friend who runs the local Cafe, I see my friend for lunch, I spend more quality time with my wife and family, and chosen friends. Work from home is not like Stephen King style, a lone warrior in a cabin in the middle of the woods. Some people get their community from work, some don't. That is not dependent on work from home or not, it's a conflating metric.
Bayart 3y ago
Much like iancmceachern, my experience is the opposite of yours. The office forces me into human interactions I wouldn't have chosen of my own free will, and WFH significantly increases the time I spend on relationships that matter, those I've chosen. A lot of it has to do with living in a dense urban area and cultivating a circle of friends that I can meet with little to no planning. I think it's got a lot to do with one's personality, priorities (whether to live in a dense area or not), interests (how big of a share work takes in the things you enjoy) and willingness to proactively cultivate human interactions. Like other things related to WFH, there doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all answer and I like it. Having more room to allow more varied types of individualities to co-exist freely is a good thing in my opinion.
- nox101 3y ago
  We should apply the same logic to other things Kids should school from home. They don't get to choose who their classmates are so they're being forced to have human interactions who they haven't chosen of their own free will. Colleges should all be remote. Same reasons. I'm relatively confident that interacting with others is kind of the point of school and college and I'm just as confident that many (not all) of those same reasons apply to work. WFH ignores those reasons.

Linda231 3y ago

[dead]

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

if i could go to the office and leave as and when i wanted i would probably go more often. even just for an hour or two. but the issue is not having a choice. presenteeism is the greater evil.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

My health benefit is that I walk 3 miles in the morning and 3 miles in the evening. That is time I would commute. You cannot beat that. And since I keep no snacks at home I don't snack!

xhkkffbf 3y ago
Some offices are too good at having great treats and snacks. Those are bad for the body.

knightoffaith 3y ago

>One of the studies reviewed found that 46.9% of employees working from home had gained weight, and another put the figure at 41%. Most of the papers reviewed showed that homeworkers were more sedentary. This is an important caveat. And the decrease in blood pressure is apparently just referring to blood pressure taken at a company office vs. blood pressure taken at home.

sokoloff 3y ago
What's the base rate for the comparable population? That sounds bad on a first read, but: If only 47% (or 41%) of surveyed gained weight, that's probably lower than the population-wide average. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9106499/#:~:text=Mean%20(%C2%B1SE)%2010%2D,more%20across%20the%2010%2Dyears https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9106499/#:~:tex.... (results from a 10-year study show a higher rate of weight gain)

doublerabbit 3y ago

Why should we be allowed to work from home yet those who work in retail, cafes et cetera don't get the same benefit? You can't argue our jobs are more important when theirs are just the same, if not more. As with out them you wouldn't have your conveniences, food.. We are a very entitled bunch.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
To be fair, you choose your career. Not only that, but each job comes with perks that may, or may not, appeal to you. For a kindergarten teacher, they get to spend the whole day with children. That's horrible for some people and beautiful for others. You get hugged a lot, if you need that in your life, it's unthinkable doing a different job. I can't get to do anything physical in the morning (walking kids to school is a lot of effort for me), but my brain goes full power in front of a pc in the morning, so it's great to have WFH privileges.
OfficeChad 3y ago
[dead]
Volundr 3y ago
> Why should we be allowed to work from home yet those who work in retail, cafes et cetera don't get the same benefit? Different jobs have different requirements. This is also why I don't have to wear a respirator to be fair to workers at a chemical plant or move around heavy boxes to be fair to warehouse workers. The fact that my job has different requirements doesn't make it "more important". Just a different job that needs different things.

OfficeChad 3y ago

[dead]

ojhughes 3y ago

Return to (hybrid) office working is in full swing in London now. The trains are packed again, long queues for lunch. Fully remote roles are becoming rare