The Remote Work Loneliness Problem

Burnout and Loneliness are the evil sisters of working from home

More professionals are doing remote-work part time, working at home or doing the digital nomad / remote work thing full-time. For many of us this can augment some of the problems of loneliness with regards to spending more of our work-week isolated from face-to-face interactions.

As Alexander Besant mentions: Remote work’s benefits are pretty clear: freedom, comfort, and potentially more time with friends and family.

• Freedom
• Comfort
• More time with Family & Friends
• Better work-life balance

However, there are big downsides in being disconnected, including loneliness and isolation. These two issues have been linked to an increased likeliness to quit a job, says a report in Reuters.

• Feeling disconnected
• Increased isolation
• Greater vulnerability to loneliness

If you are making the change from a full-time job to being a freelancer, consultant or entrepreneurs, this can be a serious problem. Even co-working spaces are not necessarily that social. Picture a room with everyone on their laptop, not so different from your ordinary coffee shop, just really expensive!

Forget open-office spaces, noise problems, everyone has their headphones in anyways, perhaps technological automation will significantly increase how many of us will be working from home in the future. Tackling loneliness therefore is a significant barrier and future problem for workers and professionals. Not all of us have a family at home, as more people live alone than ever before in our smart cities.

The grind of being a freelancer doesn’t realistically always allow that much time for socializing with friends.

Yet, there are ways to combat that alienation both from the worker’s perspective and from that of management. I don’t pretend to know what those might be, however. Participating in digital communities could be a possible remedy, but isn’t that just replacing real human interaction with more fake online interaction? Do I really crave zoom video conferences or Facebook Groups with people like me?

The decline of face-to-face interactions even among young people who are feeling the pressure of economic and career uncertainty is demonstrative of how we’ve as a society put mobile smartphones ahead of real people. This problem is only increasing in an age where gaming and streaming is exploding in popularity.

Remote work makes us vulnerable in new ways, and perhaps it’s not as bad as the office politics of a startup or a big firm, but it’s definitely a high-risk position for any professional to be in. I’d argue working from home is a mental health risk, even for the most hardy introverts and balanced individuals.

Remote Work is Going Mainstream

A new study interviewed 18,000 employees across 96 international companies and found that 70% of employees are working remotely once a week and 53% are spending half the week away from the office.

Bottom line, remote work has its own kind of burnout. Knowing the signs, symptoms and solutions is extraordinarily important.

The Earth did not evolve human beings to be digital addicts or to spend this much time alone, cut-off from the real world.

How do you cope with feeling lonely while working remotely?

According to the State of Remote Work 2018 study, 21% of workers believe loneliness is the number one challenge with working remotely. Loneliness is at epidemic levels in America. A survey discovered Generation Z (adults ages 18–22) is the loneliest generation and claims to be in worse health than older generations. Generation Z is also the most likely group to take a chance on remote work.

Digital connection is not a recipe for solving the life-work balance loneliness issue of remote work or working from home.

Dan Schawbel, author of “Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation” had some points to share with Reuters that I found vaguely interesting on the topic:

• One-third of workers in the U.S. often work remotely.
• The number of remote workers is up 115 percent in the past decade.
• But just 5 percent of these workers see themselves staying at the same company for their entire career.
• Remote employees will work harder if they have a sense of connection.
• For managers, it is important to let a remote worker lead the meeting.
• Use video conferencing often for meetings — you get to see and hear someone, which is much better than an email.

Remote Workers Save Money and Time

One of the absolute best things about remote work is that put simply, you are saving time on meaningless activities. Namely the roughly 2 hours most people spend commuting a day.

Full-time remote employees in New York City save about 343 hours per year by not having to commute, and those working remotely 50% of the time get back 172 hours. It’s been found that remote employees have been using these extra hours to work longer hours.

A study that looked at data from job boards and the U.S. Bureau of Labor found that the average remote worker saved $444 on gas, and spent roughly 50% less on lunches.

It’s not so much the money, it’s the time here that means remote work is more time efficient. That means more time with your family or more time to work out or more time to take breaks when you need them, even if that means catching up with a project by doing over-time at other hours or on the weekend.

Loneliness isn’t just the Elephant in the Room Anymore

In the future of work loneliness isn’t the elephant in the room anymore, it’s the new norm.

Check out some of the comments on this LinkedIn post.

Many remote workers report never being lonely, however this may be for many other factors. For those of us not invulnerable to loneliness this can scale into becoming a very significant issue in our lives.

What can We Do about it?

• Schedule regular face-to-face time where you can actually TALK to a friend or family member every day (or at least a couple of times a week).
• Go out on a regular basis, work from a cafe, go to the gym or hit a co-working space. Just being around people can help to break up the routine.
• Schedule more meetings with your clients and or peers in what you do, even these weekly phone calls can be helpful to your mood and motivation.
• Take random breaks to do activities outdoors or have spontaneous social interactions. Spending more time in nature and connecting with friends can help when you feel loneliness creeping in.
• Rely less on social media and more on face-time to combat that sense of that something's missing.
• Reduce communications to a central place, e.g. more Slack vs. Email for example. This will help minimize information overload and digital comms burnout.
• Work outside the house, embrace being a "digital nomad"
• Find your own ways to deal with freelancer or remote work loneliness... (tell us what they are in the comments below).

This article was inspired by the LinkedIn Editor curated Remote Workers are Lonely news topic. This is part of a suggested stories initiative.