The Impact of Remote Work on Employee Mental Health and Productivity

Remote work is sweet. If you haven't experienced it that means you are missing out. As a sales manager, it gives me freedom to explore. Keeping in touch with those that matter and being able to have time for myself and the people around me. The benefits are endless...

I said goodbye to onsite work, also known as office work, when office politics began to rise. Instead of showing empathy and spreading love, people in the workplace chose to hate their co-workers. The culture was polluted. Managers were not well-informed, and people were after positions. Everyone did things their own way. Even greetings became an issue. Senior managers felt intimidated by junior staff, and permanent staff disliked contract staff. There was a deviation in the company culture: no promotions, no transfers. Those who got promoted were those who knew how to play office politics very well. The Regional Service Manager, the Customer Relationship Officer, and the Quality Assurance Team ensured they frustrated the lives of good people in the workplace.

I have been working remotely for some years now, and the experience has been worthwhile. I have seen improvements in my well-being, mental health, and overall approach to life.

People working onsite are so passionate about office politics. I experienced hell working with them. I am a big survivor of office politics and know what I faced from the informal group in the telecommunications sector. I left my wasted years behind. I paused to consider: should I keep working, become a freelancer, or just hustle on the streets and forget about corporate life?

Now I find myself in the health sector. I thought I had escaped office politics, hatred, and jealousy from colleagues. However, the games played in the health sector were terribly intense. From the Human Resource Manager to the Hospital Manager and the Commercial Manager, it was too much for me to bear. They did not give me any breathing space in most of these companies. Their body language spoke volumes.

Now I’m considering going back to the office, and my heart is beating faster. The nightmare of the drama in office settings and the trauma it caused is disturbing me.

How do we explain the concept of work to business owners and managers in Nigerian companies? Why should you see your colleagues as rivals? Why do most line managers report their supervisees wrongly? What do we gain from office politics? Where does office politics take us? Where is your company ranked among global brands? Do we really have companies in Nigeria? Do most CEOs check what is going on in their organizations? Why the hatred? Why are we sabotaging our own efforts? What is the essence of having HR in our company when employees suffer emotional abuse from their managers?

Familiarity breeds contempt. Working with people in a physical workplace in a predominantly black environment often brings conflict and misunderstanding as people continue to interact. Such behaviors are less common in a remote work setting.

The study of organizational behavior has taken a new turn in the age of the internet. We need to educate people working not only in onsite settings but also in remote settings on the right behavior.

Dear team, greet your colleagues and be kind to them. You never know where you will meet again. Don’t be that kind of sales or operations manager in an educational consulting company who refuses to teach new hires how to do their job out of insecurity and low self-esteem. He or she gets intimidated by new hires' profiles or CVs. To get rid of new hires, the sales manager falsely reports them to the CEO. This is not the kind of behavior we need in the workplace.

Many young managers don’t want to employ people with better profiles or more experience than they have. Hence, they discard CVs or tell the business owner reasons not to hire experienced people just because they want to remain and dominate at work.

Work is meant to be an easy task, not a burden. Why are we making it look so complex?