Is Working from Home Bad for Your Health?

I’ve got a job working from home, 100% of the time. I am a fully disconnected, remote worker. I "work from home". For 20 years, I toiled away in glass towers and pre-fabricated 70’s offices, commuting in and out of London like a rat in a maze, addicted to the cocaine-laced water my scientist overlords were feeding me, returning daily for my corporate fix in work attire and brushed hair.

And now I am free. Or am I?

There is a dark side to remote working and distinct disadvantages to working from home that are insidious but potent. This dark side no one talks about, a dark side I believe is infecting the souls of thousands, maybe millions of workers around the globe as we huddle over our laptops and jabber into our headsets.

It’s time to speak the truth. It’s time someone was honest about working from home and why it is toxic. And I’m the one to say it. Ready? Please join my Teams call, mute your audio, keep your camera on (I need to see you're apying attention), and we shall begin.

Morning Routines

The morning routine is important. Win the morning, win the day. When I worked in a physical office, I was up early, out the door, and waiting for a train at 7:30am on a windswept platform as the sun was struggling to rise above grey, British clouds.

Now I get up later, don’t have to catch any trains and there isn’t a windy platform in sight.

This is toxic. How’s such luxury going to make me tougher? How am I going to win the day and turn into a hard-nosed businessman if I have a pleasurable morning and get more sleep?

Worse, I no longer cram myself onto trains and tubes, standing for an hour pushed up against seven other people. I loved that endurance test, the sweat running down my back, cold and flu germs in my mouth and nose from coughing commuters, people shouting “Can you move down the carriage please?” at every stop, as if it was our fault the trains were drastically over-populated and all that was needed was a shuffle to the left and a magic amount of room was going to appear.

When I arrived at the office after those commutes, I felt like I’d been through something, a personal trauma, a Tough Mudder, an Iron Man. Now, I just sit at my desk relaxed and sweat-free like some sort of pussy.

I’ve tried to replicate the commute by putting on a suit and standing in the airing cupboard with the warm towels for 45 minutes, but it’s just not the same. I also tried burning £1,200 cash a month in the garden to replicate the money I spent on train fares, but without a union rep complaining they don’t get paid enough and striking every other week, it felt meaningless.

My morning routine is ruined.

The Loss of Corporate Culture

It’s well known that working from home means there is no more corporate culture to speak of. This shift to home working has been akin to the burning down of The Great Library of Alexandria in terms of cultural loss.

Pre-pandemic, we were living through a golden age of corporate culture; the sugary snacks in the kitchen, the printed-out notes reading “Please do not use milk for cereal, it is only for teas and coffees” stuck on a cupboard, and the valuable and enriching team activities such as ordering pizza or attending quarterly departmental reviews.

Now, all this is gone, only to be replaced with foods of my choice in my kitchen, lunches where I can tetherlessly do what I like, and departmental reviews online, instead of sitting in a room together. It is not the same.

I ask you this: Would one visit the Mona Lisa over Zoom? Exactly.

I have installed a suspended ceiling throughout my house and carpet tiles in all the rooms, but it does not come close to reproducing the beauty and culture of a real office environment. Sad.

Slacking Off

The professional-managerial class has long been ringing the bell for productivity and quite rightly claims there is a distinct lack of it when working from home.

Office work allowed employees to sit next to their managers in open-plan rooms where everyone could be observed and monitored fairly.

Today, remote working has ushered in a ludicrous era of employees being judged by their output, not by their ability to sit quietly, look at their screens for 8 hours, and take suitably short toilet breaks. How can a worker achieve their best results when they are not wearing the correct attire, they are talking to colleagues about non-work topics, or they are coming back from lunch 2 or even 3 minutes late?

I am burned out trying to monitor myself at home. If I succumb to temptation and look at my phone, I make a note of it on a spreadsheet and submit the evidence to my manager for suitable reprimanding in our 1–2–1 sessions. So far, he has ignored these emails, which only serves to prove the point that slacking off has become endemic within the workplace.

The Death of Collaboration

Even the most die-work working-from-home convert will agree that nothing replaces face-to-face interaction. When teams work together, they can share ideas and enjoy the benefits of a corporate Brain Trust.

When I worked in a physical office, ideas were shared daily, whiteboards were full of inspiration, employees were engaged and my magnanimous leaders were in constant face-to-face consultation as we held hands and sang folk songs every lunch break, hugging, crying, and healing together.

Since the working-from-home revolution, there has been a significant top-down mentality of rule. Senior managers meet together without employees’ knowledge, strategic decisions are made without consulting the workers who know best about processes that are being changed, and no one has a say on how the company is run. All accountability and transparency have been replaced.

Come to think of it, this might have been exactly what it was like before remote working, and there has never been a spirit of collaboration, but some CEOs say otherwise, and they must be correct. CEOs don’t lie. Ever.

Mental Health Decline

Absolutely undoubtedly workers’ mental health suffers when working from home. There is no need to quote statistics, provide evidence or cite sources when making this claim, it is patently clear this is a fact.

Let’s look at some of the main ailments of home working:

Burnout — Workers no longer commute, get up as early, spend money on suits, pencil skirts, and work shoes, no longer buy expensive salads at lunch and more expensive train tickets, they're no longer monitored and judged for every micro-activity under glaring strip-lights and they no longer spend as much time away from family. Of course, all this causes burnout. Probably. I think there was an article in Forbes about it.

Posture — When I worked in an office, I sat in an ergonomically designed chair and my workstation was at the perfect height, under perfect lighting. Now I crouch upside down, hanging from the roof of the garden shed like a bat, with a laptop strapped to my chest and I am at risk of developing several blood-pooling conditions all because I did not have a health and safety assessment of my home workstation. We are all set to become monstrous sub-humans. As a Daily Mail headline recently noted, “Swollen eyes, a hunchback, and claw-like hands: Grotesque model reveals what remote-workers will look like in 70 years”. Case closed.

Isolation — Humans are social creatures. The office perfectly recreated our evolutionary bonding that occurred on the grassy savannahs of 10,000 BC. Now I work from home, I only get to talk to my colleagues 7 or 8 times a day on various calls and meetings, as well as chat with them on Teams, Slack, email and phone calls. I also only now talk to my neighbours, my partner, children, friends, and the people at the gym when I visit at lunch. Before I used to nod hello to people as I passed them in a work corridor. The isolation is real.

Devaluing Commercial Property

Of course, completely separate from any points just made, and absolutely unrelated to the pressure CEOs, business leaders, and governments are putting on workers to return to office-based work, is the utterly coincidental fact that commercial landlords are losing huge amounts of money on their building assets and investments when we work from home.

The more people work at home, the less these buildings hold their value, the less they are rented, and the less they can be sold off (negative equity, anyone?). Over a third of all businesses are considering downsizing, and this excludes the ones that already have.

What’s more, the supporting eco-system of multi-national chain stores also suffers when office workers aren’t there to pick up the bill; Starbucks, Pret a Manger, McDonald's, you name it, they all take the hit. These said multinationals also happen to invest, or at least have stakeholder interest in, commercial property values.

It’s almost as if you follow the money and everything becomes clear. But only cynics would take this view. Working from home is, of course, an unproductive con, and I for one am a burned-out digital employee who can’t wait to get back to a carpet-tiled utopia.

Yours truly,

Every Boomer Ever — I suffered therefore so should you x