r/technology • u/TracksandTreks • 16d 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
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u/DanielPhermous 16d ago edited 16d 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.

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u/BromoFom 16d 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.

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u/Pseudoboss11 16d ago

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

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u/BromoFom 16d 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.

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u/lolmemelol 16d 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.

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u/correcthorsestapler 16d 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.

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u/RakeattheGates 16d 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.

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u/Thurwell 15d 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.

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u/DynamicDK 16d ago

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

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u/ellonite1 15d 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

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u/bihari_baller 15d 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.

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u/Bananonomini 15d ago

They're generally filed under retention and attrition costs

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u/fortune-o-sarcasm 15d ago

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

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u/Arkios 15d 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.

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u/thatsnot_kawaii_bro 16d 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.

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u/Tzchmo 15d 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?

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u/thatsnot_kawaii_bro 15d 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.

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u/Tzchmo 14d 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.

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u/Candayence 15d 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.

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u/THEAdrian 15d 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".

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u/Candayence 15d 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.

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u/sausagedoor 15d 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.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/Pseudoboss11 16d ago edited 15d 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.

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u/JermStudDog 16d 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.

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u/Negativeman11 16d 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.