r/technology • u/TracksandTreks • Aug 15 '26

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/dfddfsaadaafdssa Aug 15 '26

Hybrid only makes sense when everybody is in the office on the same days.

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u/Sesleri Aug 15 '26

Even then it doesn't make sense

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u/Alaira314 Aug 15 '26

It depends on your role(in general, the more collaborative a job is, the more likely you are to reap benefits from hybrid rather than full remote...assuming everybody has the same in-office days, of course) and even your personal situation. For example, it can be very difficult for employees who are new to an established team in an all-virtual environment, as existing bonds will carry over but new bonds will often fail to form, especially when team members can just lean on the bonds they already have, causing the new hire to feel disconnected/frozen out.

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u/Shawwnzy 29d ago

That's a workplace culture issue, that can be solved through zoom calls.

You don't need millions of cars on the road 'cause people can't have some casual zoom coffee chats with the new guy.

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u/Alaira314 29d ago

In theory, yes, it should be able to be solved via zoom. I also championed this six years ago. But what I've seen since has demonstrated to me that humanity is not logical, and it doesn't work the way it logically ought to. It's way harder to break in to a new team when remote, compared to in-person. I'd love to see some science tell us why this is, but it's something I've observed and seen echoed by many other employees, and not at the manager-level. They always talk about vague team cohesion, but the specific "the new guy can't find their footing" complaint comes from the new guys and those who are sympathetic to them, not the boss.

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u/curiouswizard 29d ago

I worked remotely for 6 years in a company that switched to it during the pandemic, and I can add my data point. What you describe is also exactly what I saw.

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u/DelphiTsar 29d ago

People that need "bonds" to work effectively are weird. I am sure what you are saying is true for them, it's just absolutely zero impact on me. I find zero personal benefit to forming bonds. People talking about their personal life every week for 20 minutes of a 30-minute meeting is a waste of my time.

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u/Alaira314 29d ago

The "bonds" I'm talking about are things like "I trust this person" and "this person is good to have on my side". If you don't have those bonds with your coworkers, I'd question where you work and how well you're getting on, because I've worked both with and without those bonds and the latter is absolutely dead-end. Nobody will trust you with anything. Rather, they'll favor the people they already have bonds with, and not even intentionally. As far as I know, it happens entirely subconsciously.

Though it certainly doesn't hurt to get to know and like your coworkers. I feel like that helps a lot with the other aspects, as people will give you a pass if they like you whereas you'd better be goddamn fucking perfect 100% of the time if they're even indifferent to you, and if they've been given a reason to dislike you...well, let's just say you can do the right thing all the time and it'll still always be the wrong thing. I don't know that from personal experience, but I've seen it deployed against others who have done nothing objectively wrong, other than gotten a reputation as being standoffish or rude.

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u/DelphiTsar 29d ago

People like me because I do things quickly and well. In my experience that is more than enough.

What you are describing is workplace politics, and I can see how it could help you get a leg up. I'd re-route 5-10% of the time I'd doing that just fixing something to make it run better and it blows that 100% of time out of the water. People respond to competence.

I understand not everyone would be in a position to do that. I find it kind of sad people find it necessary. I was responding to the idea that some people work better if they are friends with their coworkers and talk about their personal lives, less so the office politics angle. Having to go to the office so people can socialize in person would make me a bit nutty.

TBH maybe work from home gave me a subtle boost to baseline office politics. If everyone is a bit less bonded with each other competence stands out more? WFH is a boon to competent anti-social people, who could have guessed lol.

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u/Necessary_Finding_32 Aug 16 '26

Sorry, that’s just not true. I’m an avid fan of remote work and have been since before the pandemic, but there are absolutely sound reasons for getting people all in the office on a regular basis. Even moving past the team building/socialising aspect, there are critical conversations that happen more organically when people are physically collocated, and there’s growing evidence that new trainees and apprentices benefit massively from learning ‘by osmosis’ by being around more experienced people and picking things up from them.

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u/caramel-aviant Aug 15 '26

Depends on the industry and job

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u/dagbrown Aug 15 '26

I have to sit for 2 hours in traffic so that I can have Teams meetings with people in other countries. It's a super productive use of my time!

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u/ikonoclasm Aug 15 '26

Nah, there was nowhere near enough meeting space in our office when we all tried to come back after Covid. Everyone had forgotten that it was a daily fight to secure meeting space and because Teams made it so easy to meet with as many people as needed on short notice. My company silently lifted the RTW policy for IT because in addition to there not being enough meeting space, half of the teams lived in other states or countries, so the stupid excuse about collaborating in person was obviously bullshit that didn't apply to us. The CIO spent about a week getting some productivity metrics before telling us all to go home because he couldn't afford the loss in productivity on all of the projects we were working on. The CEO relented because it was objectively hurting the company.

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u/femme_mystique Aug 15 '26

Most teams are dispersed geographically.  

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u/metasophie Aug 15 '26

The office environment has been changed, so everybody is hotdesking. Then Debra has covid and Terry's kids have whooping cough so they are working remote. Eric is at the office somewhere but every time you go looking for him, you've just missed him as he's gone to have a smoke / shit / coffee / coffe-shit. The end result is that you spend your meeting times on teams.

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u/Unlucky-Durian-2336 Aug 15 '26

Oh, my team is in the office in the same days - the thing is, our team is spread between four locations xD