Study Finds Hybrid Work Improves Mental Health Compared to Remote or In-Office
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
When I work from home I can log off and immediately go for a run in the sun, especially important as the winter approaches.
I have a gym I can access at work, but then I'd be on a treadmill staring out the window at a parking lot and the concrete ass of a big box store.
Guess which one I'm picking every time. Its crazy how fast that sun starts falling when you're stuck in traffic.
I don’t devote a single square foot of my home to my employer. When I’m home, it has nothing to do with work.
I would never allow my employer to colonize my home.
Because devoting a few gigs of my Home PC to work is easily worth avoiding 12 minutes per day on the train + however long it takes walking to the station and waiting for the train twice.
Really I used to live 1 subway stop from the office and WFH was still a significant time saver.
I also now require extra rooms for offices anytime i look at homes. The life balance is just so amazing for me i'm never giving it up, if i can. I feel respected in a way i never thought possible, before.
I worried about feeling isolated but found I didn't feel that way. And I think generally WFH has improved my ability to focus. My company is fully remote so there are not many in-person channels for information to flow.
Before the pandemic I would not have taken a remote job, I would have not been sure it would work out for me, but having done it for 3 years now, I'm real happy with it.
I do still like seeing people and will go out to work occasionally or cowork with friends. Traffic where I live is horrible though and avoiding a 30 minute dance with death twice a day is an amazing reduction in stress levels.
I guess it's going to work out that this is just one other thing to consider about a workplace and there's no one right answer where all businesses should do the same thing, people need the options.
Jokes on you, I don't care if my coworkers get hit by a bus either way! I cannot stand anyone I work with. Every meeting that should be 15 is now an hour minimum why? People want to chat and I sit there with my soul leaving my body totally unable to do anything but smile fake and try not to look like I'm dead.
I wasn't being melodramatic.
It is a me problem. Everyone else seems to love this random assortment of asinine "culture" and "team" concepts. I've worked at my share of places and it's always the same. "Standup is like 15 minutes." and it is. but then you have the 45 minutes leading up to it where they talk about what they did the night before or what their kids are doing or what life is like with their pet they've had for a decade. Everyone else seems to care and care deeply. I do not. At all. I just wastes my time.
Like cool, I can spend an hour getting an overpriced lunch with my coworkers and push the "going home" aspect back another hour.
I have several and I would never install work software or store work materials on it. The privacy and security risk alone is just not worth it — and I work for a company that respects privacy.
I would also never pay any money to maintain a computer to do work for a company.
I value my commute tremendously. It’s one of my favorite parts of the day.
> I would also never pay any money to maintain a computer to do work for a company.
Yet you’re seemingly happy to shell out your own time and money to pay for a train trip when it rains. I doubt your arguments here.
But you would maintain a car to [do] work for a company. I'm going to have to take my three hours a day that I have working remote, more if you include prep time to even leave the house, and spend that on bumper to bumper traffic baby!
My guess is that you either don’t live in the US or live in one of the small handful of cities that have decent public transportation.
Sitting in SoCal traffic for an hour both ways every day will certainly change your mind about commutes.
And framing it as 40 minutes saved is kind of missing part of the story, because it's every day. Forever! That in fact will amount to A LOT of time saved. Your employer would care about a 40 minute change in your hours one way or the other; why don't you?
Packed lunches or eating out. Shit coffee further tainted by the lingering smell of microwaved tuna. That feeling that you have to be seen looking busy even if you're not doing anything or just really need a break.
And there's Steve, who's always smacking on gum and humming while he works. You're awful, Steve.
Also, I think some WFH zealots on HN forget that other people may not have the mean, or the space, or the internet connection to have a nice office at home, and have pets or children that can be just as distracting as co-workers.
So whose preferences really matter here? Who holds the power in the equation? I'll give you a hint: it's not anyone who actually cares how productive work gets done.
It is absolutely a difficult problem for modern companies to deal with. Hybrid seems like the best/worst solution so that no one is happy and both parties compromise.
And even if you believe that’s a complete fiction, it’s a fiction which has sustained itself for decades and after a brief loss of belief during the pandemic appears to be on the rise again.
And even if you believe that’s complete fiction, it’s fiction that companies and management believed in enough to pay the same individual 2-3x the amount of salary after paying to relocate them to SF from Idaho.
Whether true or not, management and leadership has believed the benefits of employees being colocated physically for a long time and continue to believe that, and that’s what’s justified high tech salaries. Without that reality or fiction that they strongly believe in they have no reason to continue paying the high salaries you sre used to.
I work remote and travel around going wherever I want. The idea that my mental health and lifestyle can be “improved” by taking away my freedom and making me go into the office a number of days a week is preposterous.
I do meet up with my coworkers in person at a regular and infrequent cadence, and that’s always nice and pleasant. But that’s not what qualifies “hybrid” by any reasonable definition.
Those are my WFH terms. Companies can take those or provide me an office.
Your employer, to the extent they want to agree to this, is renting space from you and you're citing and setting the price to buy it forever as justification. That undermines. Just name your price and see if they take it or counter.
Uh.. where might these unicorn jobs exist? All I've seen is salaries go down about $40k for like to like positions from my last senior role. They've all dropped out of the six figure park.
My team members do not care about being on video in calls, so this works really well for me.
I click shutdown, click the button on my KVM, and I'm done.
But I'm glad you have something that works for you.
- But once or twice every month, I forget to bring something I need to the office (phone, earphone, water bottle, keys...etc) and that makes that day suck.
- Sometimes it rains and I get wet.
- Sometimes I eat something bad and have diarrhea and need to use the dirty public toilet.
- If my wife messages me saying she's sick, I need to sit in traffic for an hour before I can see her.
- Yesterday I got up 30 minutes late than usual and had to drive during rush hours, that's one more hour of my life.
- If I don't go to office, I only drive for up to an hour on weekend for fun. But now I spend 10x time in the car on weekdays and that's 10x more chance to have an accident.
None of these happens everyday, but when they do, they are just extra headache to deal with only because I need to go to office. If a few sqft in my home is all it takes to completely eliminate all of them, I would take that any day.
Probably many companies hate WFH because of this: when people will realize the value of freedom at their home, their work can be seen as mere economical contract without tie, so people will be more precarious but so will be companies and that means we surpass the need of unionization by a kind of new market equilibrium.
For context, I have an amazingly comfortable at-home set up that is often better than the office. I also worked from home for the last few years very successfully. And I have to commute an hour each way. I have been less stressed working from a chaotic office than a quiet home.
My point here is: for some people WFH is the way, for others it is not. Having flexibility to stay home on a day and take my daughter to the doctor is amazing. Having to stay home every day is painful to me.
If my management team has faith in me to get the job done, provides me with clear goals I can provably meet with metrics and trusts me to manage my time wisely, my mental health is going to be great, whether I'm in the office or not.
Asking which is better, WFH, hybrid or in office, seems to me too simplistic. A lot of depends on which type of work a person is doing and what type of management style they work under.
There should be plenty of notice given and they should be on a repeatable cadence once or twice a year.
But i'm glad if some people enjoy this stuff. I just don't want to force remote people in office, or force office people to be remote.
Part of what i value so much about WFH (going on 10 years now) is the work life balance. I love hearing peoples children in the background, or people stepping out to run an errand or deal with life. I love that we can value and respect the individuals life for them to be able to do these things. Yea, we have "work to do", but work should be there to live life, not the other way around. Feels like we've clawed a bit of that back with more WFH recognition.
Yet despite being purely WFH, i still respect that others desire going in, or hybrid, or etc. I just hope we can all learn to work with people, however they best live their life.
Oh, so you're a devil-may-care litterbug? Tell me more.
But only for humor or conversational interest. Rigidly rejecting folk colloquialisms is kind of annoying.
I wonder if there could be any possible confounding factors in this study?
I have made it a habit of disregarding any sociology or psychology studies done during the COVID pandemic as there were massive confounding factors across all of society for many people, and in my mind leads to it being anything but representative for many people. Science is about finding truth, we need to make sure we are putting sand in the corridor if we really want to have valid information.[1]
It's certainly harder to have those conversations and to accommodate variation, but the result for employees and employers would be better with a little investment of time (and sometimes money) here.
I have the flexibility to work wherever I want, no questions asked, no one keeping track. All asked, is that I get shit done and show up to our very infrequent in-person meetings.
Although I am quite introvert, I work in the office because I enjoy and need the social interaction.
Ultimately, what matters to me is not whether fully remote, hybrid or in-office is optimal. What matters is the freedom to choose what fits best with my personal life.
I find in person to be draining, so the opposite of you.
I guess this is the core of the difficulty. Not everyone feels the same but very often we’re forced into someone else's ideal.
I agree with your main point - hybrid isn’t great when it is too prescriptive. Works well enough if each team is given the flexibility and latitude to decide what works best.
I'd say don't open one unless you want to work hard to save pennies over dollars.
> We conclude that hybrid work arrangements were associated with positive self-rated mental health
For example, one explanation for the lower self rated mental health of fully remote workers could be because they already have poorer mental health and stay out of the office because that would be even worse.
The HN title should be reverted to the originally published title.
And even if hybrid is “better”, this study can only say that it’s better on average. Since no individual human is average, it will always be worse for some subset of the population. The whole problem is that CEOs are trying to cram every human into the same Procrustean box.
1. You still have to live within a commutable distance of your office, which, if you have to pay rent, is expensive.
2. You still have to arrange for someone to accomplish the chores you're able to do at home when you WFH - like cooking, dropping and picking up your kids, etc.
Imagine you had a 5 increment rating system that was 1–5 stars. Then, to interpret the data, someone decided that 2-,3-, and 4-star ratings were all equivalent.