Remote Work Linked to Greater Loneliness and Mental Distress Among U.S. Employees, Study Finds

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated remote and hybrid work across the United States. Even after the acute phase, many firms kept these arrangements. A 2023 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics poll found one in five workers reported remote work, and about 80 % want at least one work-from-home day per week.

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Emma Harrington and colleagues examined five nationally representative surveys from 2011-2024, covering 588,322 U.S. adults. Respondents were classified as “remotable” (e.g., software engineering, law) or “nonremotable” (e.g., nursing). Analyses adjusted for age, parental status, education and other confounders.

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Controlling for covariates, remote-friendly workers who lived alone reported markedly more solitary time and higher mental-distress scores than nonremotable peers. Roughly 25 % of these respondents said they spent an entire day alone. The authors label these outcomes as net effects on well-being, noting remote work also offers benefits such as eliminating commutes.

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The authors advise firms to curb isolation by scheduling shared in-office days for hybrid staff and encouraging informal virtual interaction. Nicholas Bloom, an economist not involved in the study, stresses that employee choice of work setting is the most effective mental-health safeguard.

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Bloom warns the findings could be misused to push blanket office-return mandates, despite the study’s focus on net mental-health effects rather than productivity. The analysis omits measures of output, commute stress relief, and family time, limiting its scope on remote work’s overall impact.

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The authors acknowledge uncertainty whether occasional office attendance mitigates distress and note a possible lag between remote-work exposure and mental-health decline, making causal attribution difficult. Thus, definitive causality remains unproven.

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• “I struggled with having just whole days where I couldn’t be sure that I would see people, even in brief ways,” — Emma Harrington, Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

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• “That amount of isolation could have pretty detrimental mental health impacts,” — Emma Harrington

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• “People don’t want to be forced into the office five days a week but also don’t want to be forced to lock down WFH five days a week.” — Nicholas Bloom, Economics Professor, Stanford University

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• “Across a range of remote work arrangements, both individuals and organizations may want to prioritize making remote work less isolating by, for example, coordinating in-office days for hybrid workers or encouraging informal interaction, even online,” — Study authors

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