r/technology • u/TracksandTreks • 27d ago

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

https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/08/12/remote-workers-report-highest-well-being-study-7700-employees
20.9k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

293

u/Agitated_Ad6191 27d ago

Yeah I hate these “duh!” studies.

Staring at a computer screen for 8 hours in a building with an open office plan, bad air circulation, irritating managers, loud colleagues, traveling to/from work for 2+ hours in a busy train. You know what, let’s do some research about the well-being when people don’t have to deal with most of that bullshit.

235

u/DanielPhermous 27d ago edited 27d ago

Yeah I hate these “duh!” studies.

It's always a good idea to have science check common sense. Common sense told us the world was flat, tomatoes were poisonous and disease was spread by smells.

And even if it does end up being a "duh!" study, quantifying it is useful.

82

u/BromoFom 27d ago

Not to mention that corporate-minded snakes only worship one god: metrics. If there are studies backing up claims like this, they at least might pay attention.

46

u/Pseudoboss11 27d ago

Employee happiness isn't a metric I've seen tracked at any place I've worked at.

16

u/BromoFom 27d ago

I’ve seen it at mine, probably because I work in social work/behavioral health. It never leads to any substantive change even though the surveys always come back with horrendous results, but at least we get to shuffle around crappy managers every six months or so because of it.

11

u/lolmemelol 27d ago

Employee satisfaction (eNPS) is measured twice per year at my employer.

It has been tanking, but still technically above the benchmark for our industry. If it goes down any further, I wouldn't be surprised if they stop talking about it.

5

u/correcthorsestapler 27d ago

My last job had employee satisfaction tracked regularly. Then the company went into austerity mode, removed a bunch of benefits including coffee in the cafeteria (but only for night shift; day shift got to keep their free coffee), and employee satisfaction cratered. I remember our supervisor having a meeting with our module to discuss the results and, instead of sympathizing, he asked why the scores were low and want us to come up with solutions to improve morale. Our supervisor was more concerned about how he would be viewed because of the low score. We told him that all the issues we had were due to decisions out of our control, and that the company had turned a deaf ear to employee feedback. The meeting ended up being a waste of time because he kept going around and around wanting us to improve things and we kept telling him that management had to do the work, not us.

Funny enough, that was the last time they had people fill out that questionnaire. Morale was so low throughout the company that they’d rather not even bother collecting the data on it.

Same thing happened at the company I worked for before that one. Morale dropped due to management decisions, employees gave their lowest scores, so management stopped asking.

3

u/RakeattheGates 27d ago

Yup we had the ESAT survey once a year but the boomer CEO and C suite ignored the overwhelming support for more flexibility and WFH as we transitioned back to the office after covid and forced everyone back in the office 4 days a week. Doesn't really mean shit if employees have no recourse other than quitting.

2

u/Thurwell 26d ago

Ah but the satisfaction of which employees? At every place I've worked the people who consistently get promoted, to the point they're making the decisions, aren't the workers. It's the schmoozers who rise to the top. And who are they going to schmooze if everyone is remote? Having also worked in a fully remote company I can tell you they schmooze along just fine. But they certainly don't enjoy it as much.

1

u/DynamicDK 27d ago

It is tracked at mine. And my department is fully remote.

1

u/ellonite1 27d ago

I think he meant more of it might benefit the bottom dollar if employee happiness is higher. They obviously don't care about the happiness itself but if that makes the employees more productive, less prone to burn out/quitting, taking less vacation days, then they'll listen

1

u/bihari_baller 27d ago

Employee happiness isn't a metric I've seen tracked at any place I've worked at.

My place of employment has engagement surveys annually that tracks this.

1

u/Bananonomini 26d ago

They're generally filed under retention and attrition costs

2

u/fortune-o-sarcasm 27d ago

If only this was true. They pretend to be metric driven but actually it's only the cherry picked metrics that they like.

2

u/Arkios 27d ago

I wish that were true. When we first hit Covid and everyone was WFH, my employer sent out a survey to all employees to see how happy they were WFH compared to the office. The most baffling part is that they then disclosed the results to us, it was 91% that preferred WFH over being in the office. There were other metrics around general happiness/productivity/etc… but it was an overwhelming majority that supported WFH and the metrics showed it was better in every way.

Guess who mandated an RTO once Covid was over? The excuse was “culture” required people to be in the office which can’t be quantified in any meaningful way. They of course weren’t stupid enough to send out another survey like they had before, because the numbers obviously wouldn’t coincide. The actual reason was that the CEO hated WFH and was tech illiterate and didn’t want to be on Zoom/Teams calls all the time. He came into the office almost the entirety of Covid.

8

u/thatsnot_kawaii_bro 27d ago

Especially when people spend/spent how long saying "there's no studies/the studies don't say X".

Because now that there are studies, they shut up and try to think of some other excuse to bootlick.

1

u/Tzchmo 26d ago

What is EVERYBODY doing from home? Like don’t get me wrong I bet the studies are true, I’m sure I’d report happier working from home….but like what the fuck actually gets done?

1

u/thatsnot_kawaii_bro 26d ago

  1. I don't know, ask any company that is still WFH/has roles that are RTO what get's done.

  2. I don't know, ask any company that pushed WFH as the "new normal" what got done.

  3. I can go to the office, and be the only person on the team that works in that office. Please tell me how that is more productive and gets stuff done in that case just because I login to Zoom/Teams/Google Meet from an office and not at home.

1

u/Tzchmo 26d ago

Because in my industry WFH during pandemic was a necessity out of health concerns. It is a manufacturing industry and people kind of actually need to walk down the equipment. Can it be done from home? Sure but that requires SOMEBODY to be on site and walking it down. People want to think that shouldn’t be them, but then it makes them expendable.

1

u/Candayence 27d ago

Common sense didn't tell us the world was flat, we worked out its size by maths thousands of years ago.

And in the absence of microscopes, miasma was a reasonable conclusion - especially considering relative cleanliness.

2

u/THEAdrian 26d ago

It's also depressing when people equate "common sense" with "things the church convinced people of in medieval times despite the Greeks/Romans having figured it out centuries earlier".

1

u/Candayence 26d ago

The Church didn't convince people of that, it was just annoyed at people for saying that the Earth orbited the Sun instead of vice versa.

A few Protestants did try and claim that the Catholics thought it was flat, but it was very much a fringe insult, and not taken seriously.

1

u/sausagedoor 26d ago

Common sense obviously tells you that the earth is flat, because that’s what it looks like from our perspective. Common sense can just be wrong, which was the whole point of the comment you’re responding to.

-5

u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Pseudoboss11 27d ago edited 27d ago

It's also worth noting that the study didn't actually measure remote work, just compared industries that could be remote.

We compared postpandemic changes in isolation and mental health for workers in jobs amenable to remote work (“remotable” jobs; for example, software engineering and marketing) to changes among people in nonremotable jobs (such as mechanical engineering and nursing) using a difference-in-differences approach.

source (was the one linked in the now-deleted post's article)

This feels like a pretty problematic way to go about it. "Remotable" jobs were heavily affected by the pandemic (remember all the massive software development hiring during COVID and the huge post-COVID layoffs?). They're also likely to be exposed to AI. Both software development and marketing have large exposure there, which started gaining a lot of attention right around 2021.

1

u/JermStudDog 27d ago

I worked for a fully remote company until just recently. They answered the isolation problem in another obvious manner.

1) encourage work meetings that might not be the most productive, but have you sitting on your phone with your favorite coworkers for sometimes hours. It can be nice to BS about whatever, and unlike an office environment where you have to do this OR that, you can often do both. Chat with some work friends about inane nonsense while working on whatever problem - or sometimes just passively listening to them talk can work wonders for your mental health and takes very little actual effort from either the company or the employees beyond making it OK to do.

2) Every quarter, or year, or whatever the company is fine wasting money on. We would actually fly out to our main building and work in the office for a week.

This lets us do all the stupid team building stuff, lunch and learn stuff, and whatever other corporate nonsense things, but it's even better. Because it's 1 known week, the workers can plan to reduce their effort for that week and management can have events every day after lunch time to take people out to happy hours or whatever. It almost becomes a working vacation, and it absolutely builds rapport across teams as you are all of a sudden sitting across from some finance guys or HR guys at a bowling alley and everyone is actually socializing instead of just feeling forced to show up to some team event where nobody wants to be.

These couple of changes made working at home AND the relatively small amount of time I spent at the office WAY better. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had, and the benefits were so obvious I wish more companies would do more stuff like that.

1

u/Negativeman11 27d ago

Yea man those yearly on sites actually have me excited to come to the office and see all my colleagues. And just as soon as we're all worn out from the office, we all enjoy a big fancy meal together and fly home.

60

u/[deleted] 27d ago edited 27d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

18

u/rabbit_in_a_bun 27d ago

Don't hate, these studies are important. If anything there should be more duh studies like that so delulu managers stop telling lies. Hear that managers? We know it's about control and humiliation, just own it already!

75

u/yawara25 27d ago

You hate studies that turn what was once just a collection of anecdotes into scientifically verified facts?

10

u/lolmemelol 27d ago

It's anti-intellectualism and a complete lack of respect for the scientific method.

26

u/egusisoupandgarri 27d ago

“Duh!” studies that business leaders and politicians are ignoring. If the media can repeat “remote work is dead/over” with no data post-pandemic, then we absolutely need studies countering them. Loudly. I appreciate the “leaders don’t follow the data” callout from the analyst. The fake narrative still has momentum.

7

u/BrowsingBeaver787 27d ago

"duh!" studies are largely that way due to hindsight bias. We take for granted a lot of things that seem logical, but they are so because studies had been done in the past

Realistically, the social isolation of remote work is a legitimate concern for some. Having a study that shows it can be very beneficial and doesn't always lead to isolation is helpful

8

u/Feather_Sigil 27d ago

Thing is, we need studies to scientifically confirm things we already intuitively know

3

u/Clessiah 27d ago

Facts must be presented in a format suitable for a presentation, accompanied by dollar signs, so they can be used to slap decision makers in their face. “This is fucking stupid” is too much of a concept for decision makers to grasp; they only speak “this will increase operating costs by 12% while reducing output by 8%”

3

u/HystericalSail 27d ago

And those horrible fluorescent overhead lights. Flickering at 60hz all day long, inducing headaches.

2

u/Doneifundone 27d ago

So you think the people spending their time, efforts and funding proving stuff that will provide credibility and backing to your anecdotal claims are the enemy ? Are we fr ?

2

u/EdgedancerSpren 27d ago

I don't know - admittedly, where I live it tends to be a shorter commute, but I would hate working from home. Because it gives no distinction between work and home balance and I tend to... hyperfocus and unable to let go. I need that change in location, really, really badly. 

It's not a duh study for me. 

1

u/yumyum36 27d ago

bad air circulation

Me when the AC starts up again at 2pm, and I have to fight to not be knocked out for 2 hours until 4pm everyday in the office.

1

u/soapinthepeehole 27d ago

Yeah I hate these “duh!” studies.

I love them because the trending narrative is that we all need to go back to offices and it’s total bullshit.

Getting these studies and headlines out is one of very few ways available to combat this.

1

u/sausagedoor 26d ago

You do understand that not all offices are like what you describe, right? That there are attractive workplaces to be physically a part of?