Lonely and stressed: How working from home is affecting Americans' mental health

Telework was already the fastest growing type of “commuting” before the arrival of COVID-19, and it became the only commuting method for nearly two-thirds of American workers at the height of stay-at-home orders.

As the pandemic has evolved, more workers are finding their homes have become permanent corporate real estate with many benefits for corporations and businesses that are discovering the value of a distributed working model.

But is what’s good for American businesses also good for Americans?

We published in November, “The Tradeoffs of Remote Work: Building a More Resilient Workplace for the Post-COVID-19 World,” a review of the existing literature on remote work in an attempt to better understand the tradeoffs employers and their employees must manage in a telework environment.

We found that almost all of the available studies focused on how remote work affected business, while few focused on workers, especially as it relates to the social and psychological impact of jobs that lose the immediacy of person-to-person contact.

We’ve heard a lot about how remote education affects anxiety and depression levels among kids, but when it comes to how working from home affects personal health and social stability among workers, we are practically flying blind.

Thankfully, some organizations took notice during the pandemic and sought answers from the workforce. Surveys of remote workers early in the pandemic show that the burnout started almost immediately after stay at home orders were issued.

To make matters worse, in the crush of economic and operational changes that have rained down over the past year, few employers have devoted much thought to questions of how to engage and support workforces that may be experiencing loneliness, burnout, fatigue and anxiety.

Workers say they lack support

Only half of respondents of one survey of workers with flexible work options felt they had the emotional support they needed to manage stress during work. Another survey by TELUS International conducted in October found that three quarters of workers have struggled with anxiety and stress at work during the pandemic, and 80% would consider leaving their current company for another that focuses more heavily on mental health support.

This data suggests workers have been, and are, under significant stress with unknown long-term, post-pandemic consequences.

Of course, we are all bound by the conditions we are currently operating in, and, in fairness, some of the stress employees report preceded the pandemic.

In fact, 60% of Americans reported feeling lonely, left out, poorly understood or lacking companionship before the pandemic hit, and this trend has been on the rise for the last several years.

As this sense of disconnection has increased, many employers have attempted to provide digital health and wellness services, which, by their nature, reinforces an already excessive dependence on technology and could be thought of as not much more than a bandage on a much larger health and wellness problem.

Companies need to rethink plans

Corporate plans to extend or make telework permanent indicate a need to rethink our long-term plans for supporting workers as a matter of urgency for strengthening and maintaining productivity and well-being.

We are all longing for the day we will be able to enjoy the face-to-face interactions we have forgone over the past year. In a society that already had a frayed social fabric, the isolation imposed by the pandemic is the last thing we needed, and continued social isolation via remote work risks making things worse.

Given the central role of work in not just our economic but social lives, we need to be deliberate about asking how we will repair the additional wear we’ve experienced during COVID-19 and prepare for a future when telework truly does become the “new normal.”

Brent Orrell is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Matthew Leger is a research analyst with AEI.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Working from home in pandemic has left Americans lonely and stressed