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 agree with your sentiment about working from home. I worked from home during Covid and absolutely hated it. Communication was mainly by email apart from the odd Teams meeting, and I felt incredibly cut off from colleagues. I guess it's great if you are pretty anti-social though, but I have great memories of work when I was younger and the social things we did together. I guess I was lucky though that I worked for a design company in London, so everyone was pretty cool and a bit quirky; we'd have music on in the office, and Friday nights we'd go out to a pub or club, there were office trips abroad, dinner parties, outings to the theatre, client parties etc. It was such a fun time, and I would never have swapped it for the convenience of not having to leave the house or being able to put a wash on in the middle of the day.

Of course you ignored the second part of my comment 😁

Anyway no, not almost everyone who works from home enjoys it. It’s just the norm now. I’d love mandatory days in office but that doesn’t exist, so I carry on at home. So many people I speak to say they would enjoy being in the office more but there’s no point when nobody else is there.

I’ve worked remotely for 4 years and love it. But I find it really important for my mental health to get out of the house before, during and after lunch. I have a dog who happily obliges many little walks!
I try to organise social teams calls too to bond with my colleagues, but truthfully those relationships will never be the same as the ones I had when I worked in office. That’s a sacrifice I’m happy with though because I also don’t have the many annoyances that I encountered while working in office!
Remote working can be amazing but it can be very tough when it feels isolating. I empathise!

It may not work for you but wfh would be my ideal job due to my chronic health issues and my happy introversion. Sadly I just can't find a working from home vacancy as it would need to be an entry level one, for various reasons and those kind of wfh jobs are as rare as rocking horse poop.

Horses for courses and all that. It may not have ended up to be the right thing for you but it is definitely someone else's idea of perfection.

Your question us too generalised. Of course it might not be sustainable for some. But works very well for others. If you feel its affecting your mental Health then make changes either in your current job, or moving on to another company with a better fit for what you want.

More arrogance and speaking for "most people".

And I indeed did see your pigeon-holed link. One that is irrelevant to the thread in fact.

People who want/choose to WFH can get their social interaction from friends and family. Work colleagues are not deemed friends by everybody. To some they are, to some they aren't.

It is quite simple, those who choose a job/stay in a job due to WFH do so because they want to.

What part of your brain struggles to comprehend that you and others like you do not have authority to "generalise" on what is and isn't beneficial for people's mental health?

A more accurate statement would be "In general, people's mental health thrive when freedom of choice is available".

I don’t feel like this as I’m a gigantic introvert with an autism diagnosis. I can go days without really speaking to anyone and I adore it. So peaceful and calm. Remote working works perfectly for me. But I can understand why people like you, who are more extroverted and sociable might struggle. That’s why working conditions and environments need to be flexible and person-centred. It doesn’t have to be a blanket either/or.

I loved WFH in my 20s. I lived in a house share and had a very active social life. I made my friends through parties, pubs, music and sports. My colleagues were much older with families and weren’t interested in those things.

Most people would kill for your job. Wish I didn’t have to speak to people at work. I mostly wfh but still have more teams calls than I would like. I definitely don’t feel the need to go to work for a social life!

I’ve worked from home and/or hybrid for nearly 9 years and I can’t see how it would become unsustainable. Unless my house fell down, but if it was a weekday and I was in the house when it fell down I suspect I’d be crushed and wouldn’t be particularly able to work on account being dead.

Farage propaganda.

I WFH 100% and I am very happy. It would be nice to meet my colleagues sometimes, but maybe like once in a month? Go for drinks or sth like that. My DH works similar and it's great. But we are nerds, I understand it doesn't work for everybody, you need to have a certain type of personality.

I work from home with 2 ‘in office’ meeting a month, and various site visits.

I love it, I have a home office in the garden, so my ‘work’ and home are separated (I appreciate not everyone can have this)

I speak to my team daily - I am not the most social of people anyway and can happily go weeks without contact with anyone apart from my husband and children.

On the days I do go to the office I find myself getting stressed as I never get any work done as people always want a chat…latest gossip and the coffee is crap.

But I’ve done my time in an office (years and years actually) and I am happy with my current set up.

I also like having my dogs around me 😂

It's been sustainable for me and my career for 18 years now.

I find the blanket talking points trotted out by anti-WFH people very strange: that it leads to isolation, that it's anti-social, that it's bad for young workers.

How much WFH is a positive or negative is obviously most dependent on your job, your industry and your personality. You simply can't make sweeping generalisations.

For me, I never relied on work for my social life and in fact tried to keep them as separate as possible. I'm friendly with colleagues but you can't ever be true friends with someone you also have to be professional with. WFH gave me more time and more energy for my real social life. So it wasn't anti-social for me.

Not talking to anyone in the working day? That was the dream. Don't know about you but I need to focus and concentrate to do my job - it's best done in solitude with no one chattering at me. I like talking to people but not when I'm trying to work!

Networking? You've been able to do that online for two decades. I connected with people in my industry online, I arranged coffee dates with them, I got my foot in the door and my career thrived. Not a single office was necessary. Additionally, I wasn't just able to network with people in my company or city but internationally - which opened a whole new career window for me.

Mental health? The biggest factor in my mental health isn't being around other people, it's exercise. WFH gave me so many more hours and so much more flexibility to do it. I credit WFH entirely for getting in absolutely top-notch shape and maintaining that into my 40s.

If this doesn't work for you or your industry then fair enough. This pig-headed "it doesn't work for me so it can't work for anyone else" attitude is brain-dead though.

Years before the pandemic I worked with someone who worked remotely she had to get a flight and a train to be with the rest of the team she loved it and had a good relationship with other team members despite hardly seeing them. And all during my working life I have worked split site and still felt as though I knew the people on other sites.
Remote working isn't a new thing. For some reason it has become politicised for reasons since the pandemic

I think in office working is probably better for corporate cohesion and for general learning and development, getting to know the organisation’s business as a whole rather than just your team’s role.

I know what you mean, i've always had the option to WFH on the odd occasion e.g. the plumber was coming round but then we WFH throughout lockdown which was mentally draining. Since returning to the office we're all hybrid but the main difference is that we hotdesk rather than having our own desk. I don't have a local team and all my clients are remote so I can go in the office, don't know the person I'm sitting next to (there's also a real culture of people sitting with their headphones in all day so you don't even get to pass the time of day with them), and barely anyone talks to me all day. So I've started working from home more but that also feels isolating......I feel like I'm lonely at home and lonely in the office!

Same.

Thinking back to some of the parties where I met the people who've now been my closest friends for 20 years, I shudder to imagine colleagues being there too.

I got a job in the pandemic wfh with the rest of my team overseas

in time there were opportunities to meet other company employees and clients and we’d fly to have in person meetings with our team, it was great.

make time for online coffee meetings @HighlandsExpat if anyone works near you, arrange an in person meeting

life is what you make it, and if your life outside work is sociable etc, that’s healthy and better for you than 100% work centred social and zero social outside of work.

you have the opportunity to build the best of both worlds, do that, it’ll transform your life

If it works for both employer and employee it's sustainable.

I've just retired at 66 from working for an advice charity on various projects funded by third parties; think HMG, utility companies etc. All phone/webchat stuff sitting at PC with a headset.

Until Covid we were office based and I don't think anyone really thought about why that was needed. It was just a given.

Come lockdown we'd no choice but WFH. It worked just like being in the office. We had chat spaces and could speak to supervisors over the phone if we needed help.

Post covid we had a choice. I did about 50/50 but only one or two other people were in the office, always the same folks.

Latterly 100% remote. I'm in the S Midlands, employer near Brighton. They'd twigged that with no office they could recruit nationwide, vastly increasing their talent pool. They were looking for people with knowledge of the subject, welfare benefits but that would have been the same if we were in the office.

Laptop etc posted to me. Never met anyone else in the flesh but we had weekly video meetings and very much functioned as a team. New recruits trained on line.

I think the cohort who would be difficult to manage/integrate into WFH would be youngsters in their first job out of school. They were a nightmare in the office!!

It’s actually not that simple to just get a new job, sorry but that’s a very naive viewpoint. I have accepted that wfh will be my life for the next 30+ years, even though I really struggle with it (and actually don’t have a choice). I will keep my fingers crossed that one day I find somewhere with mandated office days.

Anyway to your main point, I do actually think it’s more than fair to say that in general people do need social interaction for their mental and physical health. The data is out there. Nobody is saying it has to come from work, although I do think for some people work was their main community and that’s all changed now. If you are part of other communities, that’s amazing. If you don’t think that applies to you that’s fine, it really doesn’t need to be this big a drama.

Hope you have a good rest of your day.

Well, surely it's the businesses and the workers who decide if it's unsustainable? Businesses won't keep it if it means they fail, workers won't do it if it doesn't suit them.

This!!!

If it doesn't suit you then fair enough. It's great that you have recognised that, now you do something about it. The onus is on you to change something that isn't working for you rather than taking the choice away from everyone else.

I don't know why it is hard for you to recognise that other people quite enjoy it. My dh wfh 2 days a week. It means no commute, he can do school pick ups and drop offs and feels he is more productive.

My sister wfh 5 days a week. She saves money not having a commute and buying lunches. Her job involves talking to people though so less isolation. My friend does the same job but she has to be physically present. She has a chronic health condition and the ability to work one or better yet 2 days from home would make the world of a difference to her. She is looking for a hybrid or remote role.

I cannot work remotely. I go into work so do have to commute but am self employed so choose to work closer to home and do the days I want. I don't begrudge others for choosing a work pattern that suits them.

Your social life shouldn't revolve around work. Eventually, we will accept the 4 day workweek and spend 32 hours a week actually working instead of 40 hours making small talk with our colleagues about our weekend plans and how Vera's diet is going without ever actually forming genuine connections, and another 10 hours commuting.

Everyone needs to find social activities with people they actually choose to spend time with and have things in common with, rather than relying on the people they happen to have been thrown into an office with.