10 ms·

Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees

• wilburx3 1mo ago
  Been working remote for over 15 years. It is the best.
  • Covzire 1mo ago
    About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.
    • lobofta 1mo ago
      Do you never get lonely? How do you deal with it?
      • bnchrch 1mo ago
        Not the OP but chiming in as someone who has worked remote almost exclusively since 2015. In my opinion that's the crux of this debate: social needs vs social remedies. If you have high social needs but don't have a strong personal social network, then an office is a great remedy. It solves the problem for you by default. Remote only seems to work for the inverse. Lower social needs, or a strong social network outside of work, or some mix of the two. I'm fairly extroverted (as far as engineers go) and I'm grateful to have a social network I've cultivated personally. So remote has fit well for me. I can get my work done to a high standard without the obligation, then turn around and spend purposeful time with friends and family. It's perfect for me, but not for everybody, and you can see that in the comments here. What remote really did was expose how many people were relying on office culture to meet their social needs. That's not a bad thing. It just surfaced something that went under-noticed for a long time.
• SirFatty 1mo ago
  Oh, I'm sure! And the highest concentration of weekday Costco shoppers.
  • bryanlarsen 1mo ago
    And also likely the highest concentration of workers working after 9PM or before 6AM.
    • bluedino 1mo ago
      The true workaholics are brining their laptops home to do this either way.
      • bryanlarsen 1mo ago
        The true workaholics are a small minority, though. Office workers who do this are part of the small minority. OTOH, it's a regular occurrence for those who work remote: not because they're workaholics, but because they're putting in their eight.
        • bluedino 1mo ago
          I'd argue that that's a minority as well.
    • SirFatty 1mo ago
      yeah, but not extra hours, just putting in the mandatory required. Friends, neighbors that work from home do the same. Heck, our AP clerk that works remote is processing transactions at 2a and is unreachable during normal business hours.
    • MaxHoppersGhost 1mo ago
      Those aren't the same workers though. There's a dichotomy of remote workers - some are screwing off during the day and some are working more hours than they should be since it can be hard to unplug from the desk (especially if it's a full remote cmpany with people across four plus timezones).
• cactacea 1mo ago
  No longer commuting from Shoreline to downtown Seattle and spending 2+ hours in a car each day certainly helped my sense of well-being.
  • DiggyJohnson 1mo ago
    Did you ever consider downsizing or renting to be closer to work? I can’t imagine choosing to commute that far every day.
    • fg137 1mo ago
      Most people don't "choose" to commute. They are forced to because of life constraints.
    • cactacea 1mo ago
      Of course? It wasn't really a choice, just making the best of bad and worse options.
    • itsboring 1mo ago
      By downsizing, you mean cramming my family into a crappy, small apartment in a terrible school district?
    • account42 1mo ago
      That just shifts the personal cost from commute time to reduced quality of life at home.
  • j_rosenberg 1mo ago
    Shoreline to downtown Seattle is not even close to 1 hour each way by car, maybe 35 mins, if you stretch it. That been said, I feel you, commuting sucks, consider living closer or finding a new gig.
    • ewb 1mo ago
      With the I-5 construction an hour is 100% believable. Just did a quick check and the Shoreline Costco to Pike Place at 9 on a Tuesday morning is 35m-65m according to Google Maps.
• webdood90 1mo ago
  > at a large healthcare organization Isn't there kind of an inherit bias here where on-site healthcare workers would have vastly different job requirements than remote workers?
  • francisofascii 1mo ago
    Also, isn't the healthcare industry thriving? Layoffs might be less of a worry.
• happytoexplain 1mo ago
  There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
  • e_i_pi_2 1mo ago
    I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours
    • frollogaston 1mo ago
      And possibly commute to an office their team isn't even at, because the point isn't colocation, it's to keep people working during work hours.
    • DiggyJohnson 1mo ago
      I’m always confused why the default commute time in these discussions is always 60 or 90 minutes one way. 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work. Does that make sense? Most American commute 10-30 minutes. That’s the middle of the bell curve.
      • bluefirebrand 1mo ago
        > 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work 60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute. When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
        • cosmic_cheese 1mo ago
• Aurornis 1mo ago
  …of a single company > Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization. I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine. It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected. It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
  • soupfordummies 1mo ago
    How do you know they're flaming out/struggling/etc because of remote work issues rather than other issues like company culture etc?
    • mercanlIl 1mo ago
      I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life. Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
      • toomuchtodo 1mo ago
        I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.
• softwaredoug 1mo ago
  This seems hard to prove a direct causal link. Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers. It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself. Where am I wrong?
  • pllbnk 1mo ago
    Many companies that are offering remote work knowingly provide lower salaries. And many people agree because added flexibility has a price too.
  • BeetleB 1mo ago
    This is a survey of 20,000 health care workers in one organization. I doubt that that many of them are senior.
  • ekjhgkejhgk 1mo ago
    Proving a causal link between being remote not having to commute is easy.
• ChrisArchitect 1mo ago
  Related: Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346149
• hamaluik 1mo ago
  Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day. It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
• ozgung 1mo ago
  >> "This suggests you let people work remotely if they want to work remotely," I can't believe people need studies to see that. All you need is some common sense.
  • Zolomon 1mo ago
    If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.
  • hightrix 1mo ago
    Unfortunately a lot of RTO advocates need to learn this.
• naniel 1mo ago
  been remote for quite a while. and i love it. but i've got some friends who absolutely hate it, and really struggled with remote working during covid. so. works for many people, but not for others
• scrapcode 1mo ago
  I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
  • TheCycoONE 1mo ago
    So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country. Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
    • scrapcode 1mo ago
      That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.
• ACV001 1mo ago
  yeah that's why the trend is now to call all back to the office so that you don't feel too well.
• jimt1234 1mo ago
  My F500 employer has on-site requirements. Colleagues and I sad-laugh because we all commute into the office, and spend most of the day on Zoom meetings with colleagues from other locations - you know, exactly the same thing we would do from home.
• josefritzishere 1mo ago
  The sample is not high quality, but the conclusion is pretty obvious. No thinking person can doubt that improving work/life balance, flexible hours, sleeping more, commuting less and comfy pants is going to lead to any other outcome.
  • pizzly 1mo ago
    Its not just sleeping more but having more people wake up in their optimal times. People's natural wake up times are in a distribution so when you remove the commute time you including more people in the optimum wake up times.
• dahdum 1mo ago
  Here is the actual study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1848857/full#sec6 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
  • softwaredoug 1mo ago
    Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.
  • 1970-01-01 1mo ago
    Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.
  • izacus 1mo ago
    They also completely fail to ask for the reasons of better well-being and then the article just starts guessing.
  • jasonfarnon 1mo ago
    Besides, the premise seems stupid to me. Employers don't like wfh because of perceived lower performance. 'For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.' this is just stupid PR, no different than netflix saying they're cutting down on shared accounts to give subscribers greater "personalization" and "covenience". employers care about employee health only in so far as it bears on performance. this stupid study is investigating the stupid pretext employers give for demanding rto.
    • pizzly 1mo ago
• philipallstar 1mo ago
  This is partly self-selecting, though. For example, it could really be saying that introverts - more likely to select remote work - are also more likely to be happy on their own. Extraverts are more likely to be happy around other people, but also more likely to be unhappy because of the behaviour of other people.
• margorczynski 1mo ago
  Just the amount of time and life you waste for commute can be staggering. And of course all the other overhead that comes with going to and back from the office.
• SamuelAdams 1mo ago
  Here is the full study. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1848857/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
• jambalaya8 1mo ago
  Clearly easier for you, me, or anyone else to delude ourselves into thinking our tech or jobs are harmless. God knows I prefer and feel happier at a WFH job, but how is this different or better for us than filter bubbles, aside from the obvious perks that are nice? How comfortable should work be?
• theappsecguy 1mo ago
  A big issue with non-remote is access to opportunities. A lot of organizations don't have offices everywhere, and I having to relocate every time there's a job change is absurd.
  • DiggyJohnson 1mo ago
    For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.
    • theappsecguy 1mo ago
      It may have been the normal before we had the technology to remove that need. Obviously it may be the normal for certain types of work still, but I don't see why it needs to be that way for office work. This ends up greatly affecting housing markets too and making life more expensive for everyone.
• sam1234apter 1mo ago
  would love to see productivity side of things
  • jjice 1mo ago
    I'm also curious. I work remote about 95% of the time and my time spent in the office is by far my least productive. Way more ad hoc chats and longer lunches (both work related and not). I do enjoy the social aspect a lot, but man I get so much less actual work done. On occasion though, those chats lead to a really great idea for the product, so there's also that.
• croemer 1mo ago
  Per HN Guideline "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.", this should be pointed at the original source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1848857/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... Also worth noting: Frontiers in Psychology is a low-impact journal.
• varispeed 1mo ago
  From what I saw most people who "like" going to office are those suffering from domestic violence, having young children and wanting "time off" from parenting and in case of managers, the feeling of power over other human beings is not the same over Teams. Then you have narcissists and peeps/pervs who enjoy being in the middle of "action" and finally people who don't have any friends who hope they find them at a workplace. If you feel the need to go to office, book appointment with a therapist. Maybe you have an unresolved issue.
  • tpmoney 1mo ago
    Couldn't one argue that if you think "most" of the people who say they like going to the office are lying, abuse victims, burned out parents, power tripping managers, narcissists, perverts and lonely losers, that it might be *you* that has an unresolved issue? Maybe people really do enjoy being in the office because they enjoy spending time with like minded people engaging in a common activity. If there really was no benefit to gathering in a common space in person with like minded people to engage in a shared activity, conventions wouldn't be nearly as big of a thing as they are, and they certainly wouldn't be big among famously introverted nerd and geek interests and hobbies. And yet when I talk about a "convention" I bet your mind goes first to a nerd event, something like comic-con or a star trek convention, or even CES.
• ardit33 1mo ago
  Of course. When I went remote, I could work from Miami during the winter, and escape the NYC cold months. Going for a swim to your buildings roof pool after done with the day, was the best feeling ever. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFZpJ9mWwAEfdhv?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFZpJ9mWwAEfdhv?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIjqR2aWMAErm9E?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIjqR2aWMAErm9E?format=jpg&name=... Of course I am going to score higher in the well being department. :)
• moezd 1mo ago
  It depends on your personality: If you shine in meetings and love the hallway talk, you will suffer in remote work. If you already juggle multiple dependencies in your life (small children and/or in school, elder care, other dependents and special situations, dual study), or simply have too many interests, hobbies and love to do more things outside your work, remote work just feels revolutionary, to the point you just resent going to the office.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• tschellenbach 1mo ago
  It's fascinating how well the system recovers. If it works, companies that do remote work will outperform those that don't. And the reverse. If many companies all opt-in to remote work and output declines inflation will correct that.
• dayvid 1mo ago
  I've been remote for ~6 years. I can't stand being in an office when I don't need to be there and looking busy. On top of that, commute savings are great. I work out of a coworking space a walking distance from where I live. I also had a child recently, and being able to pick him up easily after work is priceless. Forcing most tech talent to be in the same 2-3 cities is one of the worst things in recent history.
• GreenLightGo 1mo ago
  For me personally, life has basically been divided into before and after. I used to spend an extra two hours every day just getting to and from work, taking public transport, which honestly wasn’t exactly inspiring. Now working from home is a real pleasure, and life has become so much more enjoyable.
• atleastoptimal 1mo ago
  Good work environment >> Remote work >>>> bad work environment. However most companies who insist on full RTO are often the latter but claim they are the former.
• jknoepfler 1mo ago
  Workers without 5-10 hours of unpaid commute time in their week are happier. Gee whiz. That's time to run errands, learn a skill, exercise, sleep, read, do nothing... it's almost as though our time is valuable and we don't like wasting it.
  • Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
    Especially true if you aren't doing a job you enjoy. The downside of going remote is there can be a lot of project momentum lost in coordination issues. More chat based meetings, and less actual product out the door. =3 Ikigai: https://myzenpath.com/purpose-meaning/ikigai-reason-for-being/ https://myzenpath.com/purpose-meaning/ikigai-reason-for-bein...
• gr2m 1mo ago
  I've been working remotely for over 20 years. ProTip: working remote does not mean working from home. Surround yourself everyday with the people you want. Go to coworking spaces, coffee shops, parks. Find fellow remote workers and host coworking sessions and your places.
  • forinti 1mo ago
    There's a mall near my house that has a food hall that has become an informal co-working space. At one point, the coffee shop had a coffee day pass. Before my team got a back to office order we had weekly meetings there. Considering how malls are suffering I don't understand why they are not offering more options like this.
  • informal007 1mo ago
    Interesting! Thanks for sharing
  • tpmoney 1mo ago
    I can see how this can help get you a change of pace, but as someone who learned during the pandemic they don't like remote working nearly as much as they thought they would, isn't doing this every day just commuting to a worse office with extra steps? I guess if your office is really awful or your commute is ridiculously long it might be better. But all the talk you see about why working at an office is so bad for people's productivity cite the noise, distractions, unrelated chatter etc. Co-working spaces filled with people who aren't even on your team, coffee shops filled with angry customers and stay at home parents toting their toddlers and parks full of barking dogs and biting insects seem like they would all be their own cacophony of distractions and noises to rival even some of the worst open office plans. Also at least around where I am, co-working spaces cost between $100-500 / month, and the coffee at the coffee shops while better than what is at the office is also $3-5 a cup. The parks are admittedly free, but the ergonomics of the tree trunk and root system leave a little to be desired. I'm sure it works for some people, but if I'm not spending my day working on my front porch in the sun with my dog, I think I'd rather be in the office instead of in the corner of a local coffee shop.
• sbrother 1mo ago
  I have a related question as someone who's been fully remote for about 12 years now, including all of my time in more senior/management roles: how does in person work even work for people who are in meetings all day every day? My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?
  • TSUTiger 1mo ago
    Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.
  • minraws 1mo ago
    You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha. That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.
  • bdbm 1mo ago
    Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.
  • justonceokay 1mo ago
    There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting. Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
  • QuercusMax 1mo ago
• mancerayder 1mo ago
  I'm four days a week in the office and almost all my meetings are on Zoom. It's noisy, lunch is rarely below 20 dollars (no, I don't have time nor will I cook a big pot of 4 meals Sunday night), the lights are too bright, the commute is crowded and causes anxiety, and my housing costs are very high so the commute is less than 45m. I hate RTO - and I'm in leadership. Anyone who's working from home and whining about it should be ashamed of the privilege. You're incredibly lucky. Now maybe not so much if you're underpaid.
  • tpmoney 1mo ago
    Not everyone works at Initech though. My office is quiet, filed with sound deadening cubical furniture (a conversation at normal speaking volumes 10 feet away is almost inaudible) and ample private meeting rooms. Lunch is rarely above $12 and is on par with or better than most of the quick serve restaurants in the area both in terms of price and quality of food. The lights are at a reasonable level and most of the lighting is natural sunlight coming in from the huge floor to ceiling windows. The commute is bearable depending on where you live and while the housing costs are definitely high closest to the office, you can still easily find large single family homes on good sized pieces of land well within budget and inside a 30 minute commute. I am indeed incredibly lucky that I work for a company that took employee comfort and experience seriously when they built this office. I wonder how much dislike around working in offices is less because working in an office is such a terrible experience vs working in a specific office for a company that doesn't care about their employee work environment is a terrible experience. I worked at a place for a brief window that made Initech look like a 5 star hotel, and if I had to work there every day, I might hate RTO too even though I found during the pandemic I didn't like WFH nearly as much as I thought I would. So maybe "Anyone who's in leadership and wanting their employees to RTO should be ashamed of the fact that anyone could produce a list of grievances that long about working in their office"
• robotburrito 1mo ago
  I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?
  • justonceokay 1mo ago
    Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours. Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
  • mystifyingpoi 1mo ago
    I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.
• bensyverson 1mo ago
  I went from being fully in-person at a design firm (IDEO), working every day in a project room full of brilliant designers, to fully remote at the same company post-COVID. The remote period was a nonstop marathon of Zoom meetings, and I eventually left. With that said, I'm grateful to have made the transition to remote working, because I got to be there for my daughter's early years. Now I still work remote, but on my own terms, as an independent consultant. The difference is night and day. What I learned is that remote vs hybrid vs in-office doesn't matter nearly as much as feeling engaged and effective in your role. If you feel that, it doesn't matter where you are.
• angmarsbane 1mo ago
  I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company. After 3 years, or 5 years, you know how the company works, you know the culture, you have an internal network etc. I think at that point, depending on your role you're more equipped to effectively manage fully remote work. Fully remote is so helpful for families who have to navigate daycare drop-off/pick-up times that don't align with work + commute hours. Gaining the ability to work fully remote after X amount of years with a company could help retain mid-level seniority in that phase of life.
  • badlucklottery 1mo ago
    > I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company. IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through. Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
    • tpmoney 1mo ago
      > Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance. This is a bigger thing I think than most people realize. Before the pandemic I worked for a company that had a flexible policy of allowing people to work from home for the sake of work life balance (e.g. contractors, kid's recitals etc), but not an official "hybrid" policy for a fixed number of days remote. When the pandemic first hit, made it very clear when they sent everyone home that they wanted to get us back to the office as soon as it was safe to do so. When things started to open up again, they asked people to start voluntarily coming in to the office 2-3 days a week. And yet, the entire time they had that ask in place, every time I was in the office, I could probably have counted on one hand the number of people in the office on my floor and from everyone else I talked to who came in, it was the same every day. And I fully admit to being a part of that problem. But since people didn't do what was asked of them for a hybrid system, it seems obvious then that the company would insist then that everyone come back to the office full time. I really do believe that we would have ended with a hybrid system had people actually showed up on a fairly regular basis, but without people showing up, it became a negative feedback loop where people would show up less and less because every time they did, it was just remote work, but from the office. It also probably didn't help that we had so many people all over every social media network (including HN here) bragging about how much they were doing during their work hours that was anything other than the work they were being paid to do. If you start broadcasting to the world how you're only giving your employer 4 hours a day out of the 8 hours they're paying you for when you're working from home, it should be unsurprising that they decide they can't trust people to work from home and insist they come back to the office.
• UltraSane 1mo ago
  Being forced to work in an office when you KNOW you can work remotely is the most soul crushing thing I have ever experienced. It feels a tiny little bit like a Serf not allowed to leave the land.
• albatross79 1mo ago
  Being able to work remotely is like being sentenced to prison and then finding a get-out-of-jail-free card. I always strive to do my best at work and make a good impression. But I have absolutely 0 interest in the product, the mission, the culture, the personal or collective aspirations of owners, shareholders, leaders or "leadership", or who they are as people. I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car, or using a public washroom, or eating in a cafeteria, or sitting uncomfortably at a desk all day, or listening to everyone's boring stories. The best part though, is no team building nonsense, no company BBQs or pizza days, no casual Fridays, no boss dropping in for a one on one, no psychos trying to get the energy level up with a "LETS GOOOO TEAM!!" Just doing a good job for good pay and being treated like an adult. I didn't know working could be like this when I was starting out.
  • gnarbarian 1mo ago
    and this is exactly why you will be seen as disposable and the first to go when layoffs happen. personal relationships are very important, arguably more important that your raw performance.
    • sarchertech 1mo ago
      Unless you get caught up in a big layoff where the people you have relationships with have zero input.
      • randerson 1mo ago
        If you get laid off, it is your personal relationships that will help you land another good job while everyone else is fighting over the scraps that get posted online.
    • albatross79 1mo ago
      I've never been the first to be let go. It turns out if you do valuable work, people notice that and want to keep you around. On the other hand, when I had jobs based on a personal connection, it was almost the opposite. I was treated almost like an imposter. The conventional wisdom on this is just stupid. No one is going to keep you on just because you're a good buddy. Being useful always comes first.
• k__ 1mo ago
  I'm working remote since 2014. I built my whole life on that premise, traveling through the country on a weekly basis. I love the freedom.
  • luxpir 1mo ago
    Van life? Do often think about working out of our camper but it never really happens. Cheaper and warmer to sit in the home made office I put up in 2017... But I do envy a good van setup.
• penguin_booze 1mo ago
  > For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs. Aww! All this while, I didn't know RTO came from a place of genuine worry and care about your workers. There I was thinking, that RTO was more about control and domination. Forgive me master, for I knew not.
  • badlucklottery 1mo ago
    I suspect the "more likely to leave their jobs" is the part the executives actually care about. If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers. And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.
• tamimio 1mo ago
  Remote only if done right, otherwise nope. i have seen many “remote” but in reality they dictate other measures rendering it worse than in person, like 6hrs a day of xyz time zone to be present, others even want to have an open camera in these hours, others have other means of surveillance to track your location or time spent on the device. If the remote job isn’t asynchronous, minimal meetings, and only the outcome is required from you, it’s not remote and would rather go to the office so this scum employer pay hefty rent instead. I have also noticed some are trying to portray remote as “woke”, I don’t even know the relationship between both
• higeorge13 1mo ago
  Remote work is one of the things i would expect every country government to incentivise and promote. Countryside, villages, islands would revive, less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs, more happy people and families, more opportunities globally, etc. But no, some property owners in the centre are more important than this and we have to live in overcrowded cities. Kudos
  • tpmoney 1mo ago
    From a nation standpoint, doesn't "incentivizing and promoting" remote work also incentivize off-shoring jobs out of your economy? If your nation's companies perfect remote work, why would they higher your highly paid citizens living in (relatively) high cost of living areas when they could hire massive remote teams in lower cost of living countries to do the same job for less? I'm a big fan of flexibility, and certainly think companies should do their best to treat their employees as adults and let them do what works best for them and their teams. But it is really weird to me to watch an industry that has spent years trying to convince companies that hiring off-shore remote workers had all sorts of negative externalities on team cohesion and the development process suddenly fall head over heals in love with the idea of all companies going all in on "off-shore remote workers".
• zeafoamrun 1mo ago
  After 6 years of full remote I am seriously considering how much of a pay cut I would accept to get work in person in an office and get to speak the local language daily.
• bickfordb 1mo ago
  Seems like a good case for unions if workers prefer remote, but can't get it through typical one on one negotiation.
• mikelgan 1mo ago
  This seems obvious and predictable. of course people with flexibility, comfort, privacy, and convenience are better off than people forced into a grueling commute, a sick office, an exposed cubicle and toxic office politics
• siliconc0w 1mo ago
  I like 1-2 days in-office if the team is actually local but the problem is that companies can't decide what they want (in-office vs cheaper LCOL labor) and it ends up being the worst of both worlds where you drive into the office just to sit alone in conference rooms on video calls with people in other offices.
  • ghaff 1mo ago
    It's not just LCOL options. For even modestly large companies, there are probably teams scattered around the world and you're having teleconferences at many hours of the day and night.
• nphardon 1mo ago
  loving my hybrid life; 2 days a week in office, working outdoors, 3 days at home.
• jppope 1mo ago
  A theory I've proposed that I would love to get scientific evidence for... I would guess that WFH is effectively bimodal. WFH advocates would largely fall into a high performance bucket, and detractors either believe that average employees are low performers and need monitoring or are low performers. This is not social vs anti-social, its wanting to be productive with your time - whether thats the time you spend working, or with family etc. - WFH for high performers: fewer distractions because you can control your environment, less time wasted on commute, less time on non-work communication, etc. More flexibility, better control of your time and space. - WFH for poor performers: No oversight so you choose to work less. You control your environment so you can add distractions - Meetings, TV, social media chores, family, leaving to go do stuff. - Office for high performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control - social conversations, meetings, etc... keeping you from doing work. - Office for low performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control letting you avoid work without repercussion. Meetings, Social time with coworkers, etc I would love any scientific evidence for or against this theory. If anyone has any studies or natural experiments I would love to know about them
  • tyre 1mo ago
    There are 100% people who are the reverse. It sounds like you're optimizing for heads-down IC time, which I agree is more productive at home. But for team building—which, in very early stage companies is huge—and quick identification and resolution, in-person can be much better, in my experience. (Not always! Person, team, role, etc. dependent.) There's a HUGE difference between in-person meetings and over Zoom. Teams in person—again, my experience—can move much faster because you can process social cues, body language, attention right there. There's zero latency. This isn't to discount the distractions you're talking about, or the trade-offs of commute and cost-of-living to be near an office, etc. Very real. But saying that high performers are better WFH and potatos are better in-office is not a universal truth.
    • gunsle 1mo ago
      Team building is management speak and completely unnecessary. Teams will naturally form bonds as they complete work together. Any worker with a life has zero desire to go drink a couple bad drinks and do an escape room with coworkers they barely like to appease a manager that thinks this is going to somehow increase productivity.
• mawadev 1mo ago
  Let me just summarize what the LLMs comment on this thread: - home office is bad and this link only has one sample so its automatically invalid and does not take any type of combination and occupation under the sun into account - home office is a prison because you dont talk to people and now the humans: - saving commute time is good (less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs) - having more time for children - remote work != home office, you can work anywhere btw - don't have to pretend to look busy You know these were just the first 10 comments I read, you make up your mind now
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• networkOne 1mo ago
  The nature of employment has changed and there is no going back. "These findings challenge assumptions that remote work undermines connection and retention. Instead, they suggest that remote work can support well-being and that well-being, not proximity, is a key factor in employee retention." What is interesting to me here is the conflict between well-being and corporate interests. It is high time that well-being is being mentioned and considered as the definitive measure of employee retention.
• TuringNYC 1mo ago
  Whether your company is WFH or RTO is a decision, but please dont try to do a hybrid -- where some employees on the same team are remote while others are in office. You end up with team members going to the office, and just staying on a zoom the entire day without actual interaction. Worst of all worlds.
• Kuyawa 1mo ago
  For a programmer remote work is the best, solitude, calmness, isolation, zero interruptions, flow, flexible hours, less soul sucking meetings, etc
  • tpmoney 1mo ago
    For a programmer, remote work is the worst. Constant endless notifications from emails, slack messages and calendars. Excessive amounts of meetings to replace what used to be 5 minute chats at someone's desk. Expectations of instantaneous and always on availability since everyone works different hours now and since you're remote and have a VPN they know you can get online. Intrusion into your private space with forced cameras, microphones and mandatory spyware that's now running on a machine on your personal network. Wasted minutes in every meeting dealing with microphone failures or latency induced "I was- oh- sorry- no you go first". All that to say, like everything in life, remote work is a trade off.
    • NichoPaolucci 1mo ago
      If I need heads down time during WFH, I literally turn on do not disturb mode and flip my teams to "busy". As in the office, I would put headphones on and find a quiet corner. Meetings depend on the company, my team gets a lot of information transferred quickly whether it's on a call, in person, or async over teams messages. Spyware - definitely sucks, I luckily have a pretty lax IT group (I'm part of them) but we're not super concerned unless something is malicious. I think to some, remote work is a trade off. To others, remote work is a gigantic benefit. I would take remote work over a 25% raise, for example. Others might not. To each their own, but for me - not putting miles on my. vehicles, getting 2+ hours of the day back, and being able to hit laundry / other chores over lunch is amazing for my work/life balance.
• Uptrenda 1mo ago
  HNs just like: now that I have the most highly sort after perk that almost no other job has I feel lonely :( wahhhh, wahhhh. Declares "remote work isn't what it's cracked up to be" while they sit on their golden thrones. Poor HNers.
• SA9G 1mo ago
  Biggest problem in working at home: neighbors giant barking rodent!
• kittikitti 1mo ago
  I go to work to attend video calls in office and remain quiet and working under supervision the rest of the time. I don't see the people I work with in real life. Unfortunately, as an extrovert, this is still preferable to working from home. I'm not white so I'm not really allowed to exist in public so the benefits of remote work doesn't apply to me. In the same vein, the office is now high-pressure because of economic anxiety. It's one thing to hear about someone getting fired who was only ever a head on a screen versus someone getting fired that you knew in person. The current US administration has been hostile to the background of many of my respected colleagues and this creates fear in the office. It also creates anti-competitive incentives. Additionally, The University of Colorado Boulder profits from online degrees and this link was more a marketing tactic than an academic piece. I think fully remote work works for some, and not for others. Even still, an online program may be the best way to find out.
• hey_im_workin_h 1mo ago
  Stop coming to my desk when I am working. The context switching of having 1 visitor an hour can wreck my productivity. I wish I could quantify this in USD$ and then track over the course of a year how much certain individuals are misappropriating company resources for their own pleasure. This should be a fireable offense. Lets turn on these wifi body tracking tools and start measuring metrics and KPIs for these intermittent "desk fault interruptions"! I demand satisfaction and dashboards with leader rankings.
  • tpmoney 1mo ago
    On the other hand, I usually find people are generally observant of your desk space, especially if you look really busy with something. But remotely, you're constantly interrupted by incessant notifications from the slack channels you're in, from people directly messaging you to see if you're available for something and from an increase in 30 minute meetings to replace what should have been a 5 minute chat at someone's desk. And that's not counting having to actually stop what you're doing and literally switch tasks and screens to go read through all the slack messages and emails you've missed. And that doesn't account for the extra time you have to spend going and correcting a conversation that went off the rails that you could have helped solve faster if only you'd known it was happening, but since it happened in another window while you were heads down, and not at the desk 5 feet away where you could hear it, you missed everything before the folks in question went way down a rabbit hole.
• thewileyone 1mo ago
  I've worked at a multi-national bank with HQ in London, Operational HQ in Singapore, Shared Services in Malaysia, India and China, Data centres in Hong Kong, Dubai and back in England. Every day was basically remote working with teams across the globe. No video; email, IP phones and audio-only meetings on MS Office Communicator. When the bank downsized office space so that 1/3 of shared services had to work from home, wasn't an issue at all because we were so used to working remotely. This biggest issue is that new and middle managers are only trained to manage, not to lead. They feel that they must be able to reach out and touch someone to manage, hence RTO.
• djinn 1mo ago
  Study certainly is biased since primary data comes from single unnamed organisation - likely MD Anderson. With 3 out of 4 authors of the paper from same institute makes more objective title "An employer's internal Leadership Institute analyzes its own employee-engagement and HR data and concludes that its remote employees have better well-being."
• bentt 1mo ago
  This is the kind of study that knows its audience - employees who want to keep remote working. The headline is self congratulatory.
• zuzululu 1mo ago
  i remote work for 3e different companies that dont know im working 3 employers i feel an immense sense of security
• helsinkiandrew 1mo ago
  > remote roles tend to be concentrated in administrative or analytic work, whereas onsite roles may involve clinical or operational responsibilities ... may contribute to differences in well-being or turnover beyond location of work alone So this is comparing jobs that can be remote (IT/clerical etc) with those that can't (janitors, medical staff, night security). There are probably more differences in well-being between those roles than if they are remote or not.
• wooger 1mo ago
  I wonder if anyone has done the work to adjust for 'net salary per hour working or commuting' for WFH vs. in office work in a high cost of living area; This can easily translate to a 50-80% higher salary after housing costs, which for sure would translate into better wellbeing for most people anyway. For some EU companies, this can mean not even having to live in the same country, so wildly different cost of living. Just having to live somewhere you can reasonably commute to an office, even just 2 days a week, is massively limiting in terms of where and how you can afford to live on any salary. For a daily in office work it's even worse. Then the commute costs; easily 5-10k GBP per year for 'commutable to London' towns in the countryside.
• jeffaf 1mo ago
  Here for comments from remote workers defending our way of life and comments from office workers attacking it(because they are jealous)
• snowloops 1mo ago
  Done both. The only circumstance where an office is actually fun is when a company is small (pre-HR), there are nerf guns, beer and a vibe of "we are fucking doing this!" Once all that stops and things get sterile it is annoying. Open offices, less privacy in the bathroom, constant distractions and smells so some buffoon in leadership can feel lordly while watching the peasants work.
• Magicrafter13 1mo ago
  I mean yes, if I can work in my sweatpants (or no pants), not have to pack myself a lunch, and more easily goof off when I feel it is acceptable to do so, I too would report a higher 'well-being'. You wouldn't have to ask me twice to work remote again - unfortunately I work in manufacturing which can't really be done from one's home, usually. This is a funny thing to study though, I'm really curious what they hope to gain from this 'knowledge'.
• yannick1976 1mo ago
  There might be biases I’m not sure the study accounts for: 1. People who work remotely are more likely to have asked for it, and people who are in a situation that asked for are more likely to be happy about it. 2. People working remotely tend to fight for it, which makes them less likely to say bad things about it (such as, that they’re not happy with their work) 3. As another comment mentioned it, there might be a bias due to the fact that some jobs can’t be done remotely (e.g. housekeepers)
• yubrshen 1mo ago
  It depends. For someone who’s not disciplined, WFH may not be as productive. I have been using an app to track how focused I have been. I find that when I work at home, my focused score is usually lower. Here’s the app: micro-time.com
• mstaoru 1mo ago
  We have a 4-home-1-office policy ("office day" on Tuesdays), I think it captures the best of both worlds for software teams. I go to office to "work" as well but it's different work: building relationships, having conversations, mingling, meeting others. I cannot imagine getting any coding work done in the office.