We are fortunate to be living in a time when the global community is stronger than it has ever been. There are currently 5 billion people on the planet who can connect to the internet. Facebook and other new ways of communicating are free to use.
These miracles should satisfy our old need to be with other people, right?
Not quite.
In a strange way, more people are feeling alone. There are a lot of things going on, but the fact that we spend more and more time online has a lot to do with it. Many of the tools that make it possible for people to talk to each other anywhere and at any time also make them feel more alone and isolated.
People worry that the recent rise in remote work made possible by technology will only make things worse. After two years of lockdowns and staying away from people, it’s easy to think of remote work as a lonely, limited way to work from home. If it’s true that the loneliness epidemic is going to get worse, it would be hard to say how bad this would be.
Loneliness can be fatal.
According to the website for the Campaign to End Loneliness, being lonely makes you more likely to get coronary heart disease, a stroke, or high blood pressure. It even makes people more likely to lose their minds or get dementia.
So, should we stop the revolution toward working from home?
Do we all have to get back to work as soon as possible?
It’s time to stop arguing and start making things better.
We didn’t believe it.
After being involved in the remote work movement for years—one building the world’s largest hospitality platform for digital nomads and the other running a global workers’ rights campaign—we wondered if consciously designed remote work could be a solution.
To find out what was going on, we asked top experts from Boston University to survey more than 1,000 remote workers from 55 different countries. This is how “Social Connection in Remote Work” (SCRW) came to be. It’s the first study of its kind to look at loneliness in remote work settings.
We hope that the results will help the “remote vs. in-office” debate move forward. The world will never be the way it used to be. So, we’re putting our efforts into making flexible working a good thing for everyone.
Here’s a brief summary of what we found:
1. The pandemic has given the working world its biggest shock since World War II. This chart shows the biggest change in how people live that our culture has seen in a long time. Any problem of this size will pose serious risks and problems, which is why we need to know how it is affecting our social and mental health.
2. More than half of the people who answered our survey are often alone. 15% of the people in our sample were in the “at risk” group. In addition to the problems listed above, loneliness has also been linked to broken relationships, depression, drug use, lack of activity, and a long list of other health risks.
3. People want to connect with other people while they are at work. Psychologists say that loneliness is the difference between how much social contact a person wants and how much social contact they actually have. It’s a feeling that depends on the person and how they see the quality of their personal relationships. If most people didn’t care about their social connections at work, how and where they work wouldn’t have anything to do with loneliness. But that isn’t true.
4. Being lonely could be costing companies billions of dollars. Besides the health risks, loneliness has another major effect: it makes it harder to keep employees at work. Large U.S. businesses are thought to lose at least $1 trillion each year because employees leave on their own. Many employees say their managers or organisations could have stopped this.
5. There are real risks to working from home. This doesn’t mean that homework is always a bad thing. Even so, most of the “least lonely” people still work there. But our data does show that working from home alone can make you feel lonely. In our study, people who mostly work from home said that home was their most socially fulfilling place to work a lot less than people who mostly work from offices or third spaces.
6. Third spaces are better for meeting people than offices. A “third space” is a place where people can work outside of their home or office, like a cafe, a public library, or a coworking space. This finding is surprising because more than 30% of the people in our sample group have never worked from a third space in an average month. If all of our respondents had tried third spaces, the 42 percent number would probably be even higher.
7. Coworking can solve the problem of loneliness at work. Coworking spaces are much better places to meet people than other third spaces. This suggests that coworking spaces, which are the most socially fulfilling third spaces, could be a way for people who work from home to avoid feeling lonely.
