Lessons from the pandemic: the trouble with working from home

Researchers in Canada and France followed 700 office workers for six months in 2020 and 2021 to see how they were coping. Their findings reveal a less than favorable outlook on extensive remote work. Remember when COVID-19 hit, and suddenly everyone was working from home? Well, a team of researchers in Montreal and Paris decided to dig deeper into how this shift affected office workers during the pandemic. Led by Université de Montréal industrial-relations professor Marie-Colombe Afota , they followed 716 employees of a large global financial company in the U.S. and Europe over six months, from September 2020 to March 2021. Published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, the study surveyed people who worked at home at least three days a week and for whom such "high-intensity telecommuting" was something new. Afota and her colleagues were particularly interested in examining the impact of intensive remote work on workers' sense of belonging over time, as well as how fluctuations in feelings of connectedness with colleagues influenced workers' psychological well-being and their perception of the meaningfulness of their work. They found that, sure enough, as time went on, the office workers started feeling less connected to each other.