History will record the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when humanity conducted its largest ever experiment in remote work. Hundreds of millions of workers shifted to home-based working almost simultaneously, in conditions of crisis, without preparation or precedent. Several years later, the results of that experiment are in — and they are more complicated than either the enthusiasts or the skeptics of remote work predicted.
The productive performance of remote workers was the first dimension of the experiment to be assessed, and the results were largely positive. Contrary to fears that employees would be less productive outside of the office, most organizations found that output remained stable and in some cases improved. This finding was widely cited as evidence that remote work was not merely viable but superior to office-based working.
The mental health dimension of the experiment has taken longer to assess — and the results are less flattering. Mental health professionals report widespread and persistent psychological difficulties among long-term remote workers. The same freedom and flexibility that enable productivity — the absence of structure, the solitude, the blurring of work and personal life — also create the conditions for burnout. Remote work appears to be simultaneously good for productivity and challenging for mental health.
This finding has significant implications for how remote work should be managed. A working arrangement that produces short-term performance gains at the cost of long-term wellbeing is not, on balance, a success. Organizations and workers need to develop approaches to remote work that preserve the productivity benefits while actively managing the mental health risks. This requires moving beyond the binary debate about whether remote work is good or bad and toward a more nuanced understanding of the conditions under which it succeeds or fails.
The experiment continues. Remote work is too deeply embedded in the professional landscape to be easily or widely reversed. The task for organizations, workers, and researchers is to learn from the first phase of the experiment and design the second phase more intelligently — with wellbeing, as well as productivity, as an explicit measure of success.