Working from home during the pandemic

19 rounds of a Dutch cohort questionnaire between March 2020 and January 2022 gave the public health researcher Esmee Bosma data on 41,147 workers, with social isolation measured on items from the UCLA loneliness scale. Home workers scored 56% higher on isolation than people working at a location, at an incidence rate ratio of 1.559 with a confidence interval of 1.529 to 1.590. Hybrid workers scored 17% higher. Age was tested as a moderator and did nothing at all: the interaction was 1.000.

The behavioural scientist Sonia Schifano tracked the same question across France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden over four waves between May and November 2020, measuring life satisfaction, sense of a worthwhile life, loneliness, depression and anxiety. Over 8,000 people took part in the first wave and the analysis runs on a little over 9,700 observations. Working from home went with lower wellbeing than working elsewhere, and not working at all was worse than either. Schifano is careful with the panel results, which are weaker than the cross-section and include a small drop in anxiety for people switching into home work. That gap could be adaptation, or it could be which kinds of people ended up at home.

Schifano reports where the penalty fell: on older workers, on better-educated workers, on parents of young children and on people whose housing was more crowded. That last group is the only place the dwelling enters this sheet.

The built environment researcher Iva Durakovic asked both sides of the same organisations. Across 1,579 responses from 911 workers and 668 managers in 12 Australian sectors, workers grew more confident over two rounds that they could work productively from home, reaching 80% agreement. Managers moved the other way, from 72% down to 55. On whether work quality matched office performance the gap was 76% of workers against 50% of managers. Technology was not the problem: 86% felt adequately supported by it. Connection, collaboration and the sense of belonging suffered, and those are what people named as the reason to come back.

The sport scientist Achraf Ammar surveyed 1,047 people across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas in April 2020, asking about life before and during confinement. Social activity through family fell 58%, through friends and neighbours 44.9% and through entertainment 46.7%, all at p below 0.001. Life satisfaction fell 30.5%. Contact through digital technology rose, with 24.8% more people connected that way, which is the substitution the other three studies keep finding insufficient.

Every study on this sheet was run during the pandemic, when working from home was compulsory rather than chosen. That is the largest limit here and it applies to all four.