To think that in years to come there will be studies into the social isolation caused by working from home?

[MySugarBabyLove]

I think that on many levels working from home is beneficial, so I’m not looking at slating the existence of WFH.

But I do believe that in years to come we will start to look at the social isolation that wfh has led to.

It’s already known that people who don’t work, be that because they’re home with the kids, or because they have disabilities are more socially isolated, purely because they just don’t get the same opportunities to speak to people as people do when they’re at work. In fact there have been many threads on here over the years from SAHMs who say they feel lonely and isolated, and the suggestion has been that they should go back to work.

Let’s face it, most of our interactions happen at work, and even if we don’t end up with lasting friendships, we do end up with regular opportunities to interact with people.

And now many people are working from home. And while there are many other benefits, the work/life balance, the ability to go to work without a commute, and be home at a decent hour etc, but I do think that the lack of interaction that WFH has led to should be acknowledged.

I work entirely from home. It works for me because I have a disability as well as another health condition, so while a commute would have been possible, not having to do so does benefit me.

And yet I feel more isolated now than before I started this job. Because although I work with people, a quick chat on teams isn’t a substitute for being able to have a laugh in the office, pass people going in and out, seeing someone at the coffee point.

My job started as WFH, I’ve been there since last July, and I have never and likely will never meet any of my colleagues in person.

And the longer I do it, the more I realise how different it is to when I used to work in an office.

I don’t miss the office politics, but I do think that WFH will possibly have a negative impact on people’s social abilities and their sense of belonging and isolation, and that this is something there will be studies on in the future.

In my experience the people who moan about new peoples lack of skills, grads or otherwise, are the same people who moaned about peoples lack of skills when they were all in an office anyway.

Almost certainly.

it doesn’t change the fact that there are many industries where training juniors is best achieved with a certain amount of time working alongside more experienced people - not just in teams meetings but physically in the same place. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but it does need to be some of the time, because important skills will not be passed on otherwise.

Yep. I honestly appreciate the practical benefits of wfh and I guess it suits some people but I would go absolutely mad if I wfh. I work with my best friends but even before, the interactions with people and the kids in my class were what made my day lots of times. I’m busy every weekend and multiple days in the week as well so it’s not like all my socialising comes from work but even with that, if I was home alone all day every day or just seeing my partner (if I had one), I think I’d go mental.

Totally agree. Actually an ironic twist is it’s actually older people who are more hardline about remaining wfh for longer/ full time. This is because they have larger, nicer homes, with home offices etc. I did some consulting with a law firm recently and they admitted they assumed it would be young workers who pushed back on returning to the office but actually it’s their 50+ demographic.
In a way it’s actually selfish to have squeezed everything you can put of a company and career and work mostly from home and not take part in investing back in the next generation.

The word 'actually' is taking some abuse there.

I completely agree that it depends, you can’t generalise across industries or roles

I find working from home as sociable as when I was working in the office, but my workplace actively encourage social chats and provide mechanisms for that. We have Teams sessions booked in where you can just turn up and chat to the CEO, only rule is that there be no work talk, coffee breaks scheduled where we're encouraged to stop working, have a break and join one of many Teams calls that are open to everyone and just chat, we share recipes companywide, globally across dozens of countries and timezones, photos of events/achievements, good news, bad news. There's somewhere to share it and someone to talk to.

How isolated people WFH feel is driven hugely by the company culture and how much effort they are willing to put in to maintaining the social aspects.

@NeverDropYourMooncup

In short, if there's a way for men to control women, they will find it, whether it's through 'dictating women's work schedule' outside the home or monitoring it inside the home.

That's 100% true and you're right that access to work can be a lifesaver for many women in controlling relationships for many reasons, this one included.

But that's a slightly different point.

In my industry there's an awful lot of bellyaching about people wfh basically because they feel our work ought to mirror the culture of the City (bankers etc) and because all the suits feel people should all be working in an office nine to five because that's how it's always been done.

In actual fact the reason, historically, why bankers, brokers and lawyers and all these types were able to work out of the office for 8-10 hours a day was that they invariably had women at home "facilitating" their careers.

When I started in my job I had to pay for wraparound childcare mainly just to be seen to have my bum on a seat in the City like the rest of them. They used to tell me it was essential to business. Now it's very plain to see that it's not essential: COVID drove a nail through that coffin once and for all. A lot of these types just dislike the idea that their time-honoured rituals and ways of doing things (all designed for men and their lives and ways of working) are being disrupted. For the vast majority of these careers there's no practical difference between being in an office working at a computer and being at home working on a computer. And in fact many of us are more productive at home.

But they bellyache on about "lack of mentoring" and the "skills deficit" etc because it irks them that their male way of working has been shown to be the load of bollocks it was. It's all completely irrational and more about losing their power and status than any practical objections to working from home.

I don't deny that many women would find working outside the home a liberation. But that's no reason to pretend, as they often do, that wfh intrinsically damages the quality of work or the culture of a company.

Does anyone really think that talking to colleagues on a screen is the same as physically being in the same place? I don't join any of the "social" team meetings because after staring at a screen all day, any opportunity for a break is taken in the fresh air.

I solely WFH for 2 years across 2018 and 2019, that was entirely different to now, I was hugely isolated. Everyone else I worked with was in an office (long story short, my company basically moved stuff around and had no location for me) so it was really difficult. In comparison to now everyone (in my experience) works more flexibly at home and in the office. I go to the office 2 or 3 times a week and it’s not unusual for half of that to be on Teams calls, so really it often makes little difference.

@FatAgainItsLettuceTime we do on line socials too - they’re bloody awful and don’t replicate in any way the office chat in person.

Totally agree with @StormShadow

A lot of people only seem to think of their own job and their own circumstances.

I agree with much of this, but I reserve the right to know what works in my own specific line of work, and a certain amount of in person interaction is important for juniors learning to do what I do

Having a similar career path hardly means you're more likely to get on with someone!

I think it can be more likely than some of the other factors I mentioned (having a baby / location of your home). Having similar career paths means people have wanted to spend the majority of their time (in their working lives at least) focussing on the same areas and have actively chosen to invest a significant chunk of time & effort to get the qualifications and experience necessary to get to that point. That's a lot of shared interests. Of course, shared interests & experiences aren't any guarantee of getting on with someone but it can make it more likely.

I agree with the point about generalisations being unhelpful.

I have worked ft from home for the past year, I feel isolated and lonely.

I have a wide circle of friends who i see regularly but that 37.5hour stretch in the week is a long time to be in my own head! I'm being made redundant, I will never do ft wfh again.

Work colleague doesn't equal career path, so really that's another generalisation. Lots of people have jobs not careers, and people who do have careers might have all kinds of reasons they got into them. I agree there's no reason why eg living near someone must mean you're going to connect with them, but that's not a good barometer to start with.

But I don't think getting on famously with the majority of people through the day is a pre-requisit for staving off loneliness. I think familiarity, civility, a shared experience of a common environment and being embedded in common goal is a good social setting for many.

Obviously firm friendships are important to people but losing all of the hubbub of the above, the background noise of being situated in a physical group, is not replicable between a person and a screen and a quiet home study.

Absolutely. But worse for this generation that grows up where WFH is normal. I think they will greatly lack basic social skills let alone lonliness and all the other aspects. There is real value about working alongside people you wouldn't normally socialise with, possibly even more so people you would actively choose not to socialise with.

I hated teaching from home during the lockdowns. It was soul destroying. The kids didn't interact or do the work. Internet issues etc. was so glad to go back. I never want to do that again.

I hope you get a better job not wfh ft

I’d prefer there to be a place to work together at least some of the time

Indeed, and the environment!

I will say that I have generally found I had more in common with work colleagues than other mums on the school run. But that might be different now. I was an outlier (even though my son is only 20, so we are only talking 15 years) because I worked full-time.

But I have even more in common with people I do my hobbies with and have made friends through running who I would not have met or engaged with if I couldn't actually get to the sessions because I was on a train coming home from work. That said, one of my best friends is someone I met on the commute (though she doesn't live in the UK anymore).

WFH since 2009 and haven't been socially isolated.

Quite the opposite. The biggest positive difference WFH has made is to my energy levels - instead of a knackering commute and then having to be exhaustingly "on" for eight hours in an office, I have so much more energy on a day-to-day basis. At the end of the working day I don't want to crawl home and veg out, I'm up for socialising and going out. (And if I stay out a little too late, even on a school night, I don't have to have any face-to-face interaction the next day.)

This also means I've mostly socialised with friends, people I actually like, over the past 14 years, not colleagues. I don't have anything against being friendly with colleagues but the idea that work would be the main source of my social circle is too depressing for words. I liked to keep my social and professional lives separate.

When I worked in an office I went to plenty of work drinks and not one of those nights was memorably fun.

Losing the hubbub and background noise is EXACTLY why WFH improved my professional life, my mental health and my overall wellbeing.

I work in a remote team. We meet once a month. I find it fine, I've got to know people and yes it's a slower process than face to face but it has happened and I have a non work chat with at least one of my team daily. We have offices we can go into if we want as well. But I find I have more energy and so I socialise and get out the house more than I would outside work. For example i do the school run a couple of days a week which i wouldn't do if I was working (would be after school club). We are busy seeing people a lot of weekends where when we worked in offices a lot of weekends were taken up with housework and catching up on sleep