Photo: Anthony Tran/Unsplash
Remote workers are lonely. Reportedly. Or at least, certain remote workers are lonely.
I didn’t hear this directly from lonely remote workers themselves. I read it in a recent article on FastCompany.com, written by Rohshann Pilla. Ms. Pilla offered her ideas for how company managers can help remote workers feel less lonely… without making them return to the office.
That’s an actual quote from the article. “Remote workers are lonely, but returning to the office isn’t the solution.”
Returning to the office isn’t the solution, for a simple reason. The office no longer exists. It’s been turned into an empty storage closet.
Actually, it was originally a storage closet in the first place, but when the company expanded, they crammed four desks into that space. The workers weren’t lonely, but they complained about Bob’s body odor, and Janet’s tendency to hum Barry Manilow tunes.
Then COVID arrived and the company sent everyone home, to work remotely. At first, the workers weren’t lonely, because the schools had also closed and the workers were surrounded by their kids. The kids didn’t hum Barry Manilow songs, but they eventually found other ways to get attention, meaning that loneliness wasn’t the biggest problem. The workers soon found themselves yearning for the company closet.
But change is the only constant, and the kids finally went back to school. The company had realized, in the meantime, that they had been paying $30 per square foot for office space downtown, and apparently the workers could do their work reasonably well at home, in their pajamas.
The question of “loneliness” was not even on the company’s radar. It took the folks at Gallup Global Research to survey the remote workers and find out that 25% of them felt “a lot of loneliness” on any given day.
The survey didn’t paint a complete picture of the problem, however, because Gallup didn’t ask the workers, “Which is worse? Your feelings of loneliness, or Bob’s body odor?”
Meanwhile, Ms. Pilla, the President of Aquent Talent, looked at the situation from her perspective, and understood that American companies are not going back to paying $30 per square foot to cram workers into closets, when remote work is so much cheaper. (For example, the workers buy their own coffee and donuts.)
Then we have the lonely remote workers, like myself, who never experienced working in a closet with Bob and Janet, because from the very start, the Daily Post made all its columnists work at home. It was understood that we would be lonely, and that our pain and suffering would spill out into our writing. That was actually the whole idea.
Reading about loneliness, when it’s another person’s loneliness, is mildly entertaining, because then you realize that your own life isn’t so bad after all.
I’m not going to claim that I’m a lonely remote worker, but I’m also not going to deny it. I will mention in passing, however, that I have a cat who actually listens to me. Unlike certain people.
In her article, Ms. Pilla recommends various steps companies can take to combat mental health issues like loneliness and depression, without having to bring employees back into the office. Most of her suggestions involve some kind of online chat room where workers can shoot the breeze together, and talk casually about this and that. Make small talk. Share jokes. Trade insults. Like in a real office.
That seems like a reasonable solution. So long as Janet doesn’t start humming.