How come the social animal likes working alone?

Humans are social animals. 

That is how we have survived and come to dominate this world. Through the millennia, belonging to a group means safety and prosperity.  Working from home, of course we miss the social arena of the office.   That was hardly a surprise for Professor Stefan Tengblad, Dr. Petri Kajonius, Sophie Hedestad of Netigate and me, as we surveyed 1500 Swedes, 506 of which had worked from home. The surprise was that two thirds liked it.

How can the most social animal on the planet enjoy working alone?

Now a measly 10-15 percent want to go back to full time in that very social arena, the office.

Almost as many see the office entirely as a thing of the past, but most of us want to spend between one and four days in the office.

One explanation why may the commute. Swedes spend an average of 32 minutes going to work. That ends up being five hours a week on the most happiness sucking activity known to mankind. Swedes are hardly unique here. Sitting on the Metro in Paris hardly feels like a party, nor does the Subway in New York. Sitting in a slow-moving car feels pretty much as bad in every city I have tried.  

I have traded that for being available when my son comes home from school. I make him a cup of cocoa and myself a coffee, and then we talk. The effect on my quality of life is huge.  An hour of relative misery is traded for quality time with the person that means most to me (sorry, dear wife!).

I also enjoy lunch every day with my wife. Ten years ago we both chose each other in a way we have not chosen any colleague. It is great having lunch together, but honestly…seven breakfasts, seven lunches and seven dinners together: it is becoming a bit much of a good thing. We both miss our professional lunches. A year into the pandemic, the lack of external stimuli is starting to feel like the walls are closing in on us.

I work from the living room and she works from our guest room. We fit the prescription of our study. Having a separate room to work from is key in working from home. Beyond that, we saw no trace of the socioeconomic patterns that tend to underly everything. In part or in whole, directly or indirectly; the rich always come out on top. Not here.

• Income did not matter.
• Apartment or house did not matter.
• House size did not matter.
• How many people live in your house/apartment did not matter.   
• Square meters per person did not matter.
• Big city, small city or countryside did not matter.
• Married/cohabiting or single did not matter.

In 30 years of behavioral research, I have rarely found a parameter to be so refreshingly free of class.

Even though the distance of your commute to work does not affect your enjoyment at home, it probably affects your willingness to start commuting there. Like me, you may have had time to get used to more quality time with the people you care most about.

Another hypothesis of why we like working from home is that it puts the boss farther away. A study by Office Management shows that managers do not feel the same way.  They have had to yield some of the control they had in the office. They can no longer see you work. In meetings, most of us click our cameras and microphones off when the meeting covers points we care less about. My colleagues and my manager can no longer see that I am listening to the meeting from the kitchen, while cooking up some tea. Next, I may be drinking that tea while reading the newspaper. Whenever control moves from my manager to me, in my book that is a good thing. It should be the same in the corporate book, when empowerment and motivation goes up. In the long term, that will benefit corporate stockholders. But one Swedish study shows that seven out of ten executives want their people back in the office.

It also seems self-contradictory that extroverts, the most social specimens of the most social animal, enjoy being alone. That is the aspect of our research that most papers write about. Extroverts have enjoyed homework more than more introverted people. Most people expected the opposite.  

We have a couple of hypotheses for this, that I look forward to telling you more about. But instead I will ask you to contribute to the Masters Thesis of Gabriel M Nilsson of Lund University who is investigating this apparent paradox further. Please give him one minute of your time by filling out this form https://forms.gle/9HGqXp1v6VAAzFZJ9