AIBU To Think Remote Work Isn't Sustainable?

[HighlandsExpat]

I work a very stable, secure 9-5 corporate job. I have been in this role for 1.5 years. I work in the office three days a week but my team is in another city so I don't see them in person.

I realized today I often go the entire workday without speaking! Which is probably good for my facial wrinkles but actually detrimental to my mental health. I am social outside of work and feel happy with my life and friends, but do feel like my job is incredibly lonely and isolating. Which is odd because I just got a promotion and am taking on lots of responsibilities, but hasn't translated into actually meeting new people or even having to speak more. I send a lot of emails and am chatting on MS Teams all day. I know we aren't pre-pandemic when it was five days a week and you would sort of naturally form relationships at work, but I cannot imagine being in this job in a few years.

AIBU to think this isn't sustainable? Do others feel this way sometimes? All of this is triggered because an old colleague emailed to wish me happy birthday and organized a virtual coffee chat. It made me a bit sad because I haven't had one of those (coffee with a colleague) since I left my old job.

I quote:

'I started work at 8am this morning having waved off the kids. I will now work until 4pm when they come home...'

Can you see why that's confusing?

I had a job working from home for over 20 years. I got to know my colleagues just as well as in previous jobs where I was in the office 12 hours a day 5 days a week, but worked much more efficiently because I had peace and quiet to comcentrate when I needed it and wasn't exhausted from commuting.

Sometimes when I'm working I hit a button to refresh data and my laptop can't do anything else for around 15 minutes. Or I'll send something off and I have ten minutes before a meeting and starting something isn't necessarily advised because I'll have to stop and then remember what happened for ten minutes.

So I scroll or post or unload the washing machine. In the office I'd go make a cuppa or chat to someone else (likely actually distracting them to be honest).

Although to be clear I'm off today.

I think that this on you, put calls into your colleagues calendars? Just a 15 minute catch up, suggest a lunch if you have local ish colleagues? You might be coming across as aloof as you don’t speak to people.

my colleague suggested a virtual exercise class on Zoom, that’s not for me but she got decent take up.

my sector has been remote/hybrid since 2002. It’s very sustainable, having just been out for the last four days I am delighted to be wfh for the next two weeks.

You aren't a remote worker, you work in the office 3 days a week. Just increase to 5! I work remotely 100% of the time, if I didn't like it I would change employers!

O I'm not slating wfh. Im just saying I need more social interaction than that.

Unfortunately I cant use a couple working space as the information i deal witb is confidential (think healthcare type stuff).

I also really think that hybrid working (and by this when i first started we did a meeting a month in the office, the rest from home) makes it hard to learn your role. I think when you work in health/ social care that's not good enough.

My team is incredibly divided- there are half of us that like being in the office and some who make it clear they hate it, then others who sit somewhere in the middle. I just know if my job was ft wfh I would not still be there because like poster I find sitting in my home all day isolating. People can say you can book catch ups in etc but there simply isn't time.

Ah, this is one of those kind of posts. ‘The majority disagree with me so you must all be missing my incredible deep nuance’

I worked at home because it suited my personal needs and the type of work I did

and I generally spoke to people most days on line or on phone - tech is amazing

if it doesn’t work for you - change things

don’t bring others with you who don’t need to go - don’t generalise your problems to the population

I know everyone who enjoys WFH says they are “more productive” etc, but that is not my experience. We trialed it for 6 months and productivity fell off a cliff. Wasn’t sustainable for us so we brought everyone back to the office. Problem solved.
That said, a lot of our client base still WFH and without being too outing, key markers of productivity and response times from clients are STILL about 40% less than they were before WFH started. That is just a fact. So I agree, it isn’t sustainable.

Have put YABU as it depends on the job.

I can see why it could impact mental health if not seeing or speaking to colleagues at all and if that’s the case in your role then would you consider finding a job that is more office based?

I work mostly from home but at least a day or sometimes two a week in the office but in my job I speak to people all through the day on teams and then have coffee on the office days or sometimes meet colleagues at a cafe if we’ve not got anything confidential going on that others could hear and we work together there for day a morning then work from home

We are very productive and actually rented out a chunk of our office space to other businesses so we couldn’t all fit in the building full time now if asked to. It saved lots of money for the business which has been used for other things.

I could see this working in the long term as we work hard and if anyone were to slack off at home it would be very quickly noticed!

Indeed. It is also an extremely arrogant post by the OP i.e. "WFH doesn't work for me so therefore it isn't sustainable".

Don't you just love those who speak for other people?

@Betterbeanon78 I said being isolated isn't generally good for people's mental health. I'm not claiming any higher authority on the subject, but I think social isolation is usually not considered ideal. Read my whole post, I've talked about the positives of working from home as well as the potential negatives; there is nothing authoritarian about my post just a balanced opinion. You, of course, can counter that with your own one.

Personally I am so much better off socially and emotionally without the enormous drain and pressures involved in office drama and politics. I'm quite a people-orientated person and it's only now (a few years on) that I can see how much of my 20s and 30s were diverted from their 'proper course' because I allowed my choices to be influenced so much by the people around me.
Because I worked full time, 'the people around me' meant 'colleagues' (i.e. people who you spend very intense times with, but who ultimately have no long term investment in each other). Now working part time and remotely, the people I spend the most time with are family and friends, which is so much better for me and I've been able to pursue the things that have always mattered to me instead of them being a tiny part of the week.

I absolutely agree it’s not sustainable. I really worry for young people, as so much of how you learn is observing others.
I also wouldn’t want to go back to where we were when my kids were in nursery and I wasn’t allowed to work from home at all. I think we need a better balance.

But without realising it, you are still being arrogant.

Isolation is a thing some people want, rightly or wrongly.

You are essentially saying everybody is a social being.

Introverts draw their energy from their own company for example. Are you suggesting your blanket statement applies to them also?

Working from home does not = isolation. Maybe for people who live alone and don't have any friends, but I would say it is a minority of people who rely solely on work for their relationships and they could seek out non-work from home roles if that is what they needed.

I am in the office 100% of the time (unless logging in outside working hours), some people do hybrid and some are also in 100%, one is fully remote and some are not far off A few years down the line from covid I can see that for some people it is healthier to be in the office all or most of the time and some people are more productive in the office and some wfh.

However, I know my strongest relationships now are with those who are in the office. It is about a shared experience. The only ones with mental health issues are the ones who are reluctant to be in the office whether that is cause or symptom, I can't be sure. It is also about learning from one another and there are more missed opportunities for that now.

I completely agree with this.

There is merit in some facetime in work and I would not want to work in a wholly remote environment.

But there’s something very ugly about the way certain groups of men are weaponising remote work to basically reinstate family unfriendly work practices.

Thousands of women have been empowered to work in a way that suits their family life and have thus been allowed to remain in their jobs. Why would you want to take this away just for the theatre of making people go into an office?

There’s a clear business case for remote work improving productivity in many industries.

The only plausible reason for wanting to remove this is because certain sorts of men don’t want women to have the flexibility to compete with them in work. I’m looking at Farage and his henchmen. He worked in the City at a time when sexual discrimination was rife and normal and obviously he wants to turn back the clock. Don’t fall for it.

it’s very frustrating doing a piece of work needing someone’s input to find them not at their desk and no idea when they will be .

And thats just as likely if not more likely to happen if people are in the office?!?

At least with Teams or Zoom you can pop a message in, or an alert for status change and you'll know when they are around

Speaking for myself hybrid is perfect. We have one day a week where the whole team are in so we can have a proper in person catch up and tbh that’s the day we get the least done because we’re all nattering

Then we totally the other days so there’s always a couple of people on the office and the rest at home. Our contracts are 50% in office 50% at home so it’s 3/2 with alternate weeks being 3 in office then the other weeks 2 - it’s worked perfectly for 5 years and no plans to change.

Of course nuance goes over the head of most!

What do you mean by this?

Thank you Dr Freud.

Could you provide your link to your research study that demonstrates that a reluctance to be in the office is due to having mental health issues?

No. I'm not. I wfh and personally have no problem not having much contact with colleagues or other people. As I said, I have made it clear that I am talking generally about isolation and with no authority on the subject. I can see that for some people it is a much preferable situation. There is no arrogance involved or intended in my answer. I am giving my opinion on a site for opinions and chat.

Work from home is amazing for my autistic sister. Its allowed her to flourish in her career, where working from the office would destroy her. The lighting, the noise, the people. Its too much alongside her workload.

Plenty of disabled people find working from home life changing. I think a future where what works best for the individual employee makes sense.

Which is fine. You are allowed speak for your experience of WFH and what works for you. You have no authority to speak on others' experience and what does or doesn't work for them.