“The mall is Amazon. Theater is Netflix. The desktop is Zoom. There is a future where you never leave your home and after COVID is over the most dangerous thing will be loneliness,” said Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (@bchesky) at a Lesbians Who Tech conference, according to a Tweeter from communications specialist Brooke Hammerling.
Chesky may be right.
According to the American Psychological Association, isolation and loneliness were already serious public health problems before the pandemic. There is evidence to suggest that, as with many other diseases, concern has only grown over the past two years.
“The pandemic appears to have increased loneliness,” writes Mareike Ernst, Ph.D., of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, co-author of an APA study on pandemic loneliness. “Because loneliness poses a risk to premature mortality and to mental and physical health, it should be closely monitored. Loneliness should be a priority in large-scale research projects aimed at studying the health outcomes of the pandemic.
As attention shifts to the workplace, greater loneliness can have a significant impact on employee satisfaction and well-being.
Before the pandemic, Organizational psychologist Lynn Holdsworth studied remote journalists and found that compared to working in an office, loneliness increased by 67 percentage points when working full-time remotely.
The 2003 report highlighted all the benefits we see in practice today, including better work-life balance, flexibility, shorter commute times, higher productivity, a wider range of skills wide for business etc.
But the adverse effects are also well known. Some examples include blurring of boundaries, a lack of support, and obviously social isolation.
According to a blog post by real estate company JLL, loneliness has consistently emerged as one of the top challenges remote workers face and interferes with their ability to perform their jobs.
“The intersection between loneliness and burnout has a negative impact on worker productivity. Lone workers are twice as likely to miss a day of work due to illness and five times as likely to be absent from work due to stress, while 12% of lone workers say they think their work is of lower quality than it should be, according to Cigna research,” reads JLL’s post. “Lone workers also say they think about quitting their job more than twice as often as non-lone workers.”
According to Flore Pradère, director of research at JLL on the global dynamics of work, working from home for long periods made people feel isolated and had a negative impact on their social wellbeing.
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