I was reading a very interesting article the other day on the negative impacts of telecommuting (Will remote work kill innovation and create an epidemic of loneliness?).
I think everyone is now familiar with my opinion on the practice of telecommuting: it’s not inherently good or bad, and setting an arbitrary number of days for all employees is just plain stupid, and proof that we’ve never asked ourselves what working remotely really means in the employee’s life cycle (Why does an employee want or need to work remotely?)
Questionable arguments for returning to the office
In any case, there are plenty of good but mostly bad reasons why companies are trying to force a return to the office (Who wants to kill remote working?), with arguments that run counter to the conclusions they themselves drew from the COVID experiment (Difficult will be the return to the office).
I’m not even mentioning the grotesque situations where, in increasingly distributed organizations, people are forced to return to offices where they only work with one or two people, or even no one at all, since everyone else is on remote sites. Sure, they see people, but they hardly know them, and have even less reason to talk to them.
But I specifically wanted to address the issue of loneliness, which in my opinion is less a remote work problem than an HR problem (a little) and a social problem (a lot).
During the COVID and the period that followed, I listened a lot to our employees, carried out regular surveys and talked a lot with my friends.
What emerged was that what they were missing wasn’t the office, but the people , and with this in mind, Zoom aperitifs are reaching their limits.
But saying “people” doesn’t mean colleagues. To take my own example, I continued to see friends who lived in my neighborhood. At first for lunchtime strolls (you remember…the self-generated attestations that meant that a one-hour outing could be extended by another hour with a single click…), then more officially as the restrictions were lifted, for a drink on the terrace or in each other’s homes before properties were allowed to welcome people inside…
And I think a lot of people did. Colleagues, friends, we continued to see each other, but in a different way, in a different place.
The most important thing for a human being is to see people. No matter who Do you know why elderly people go shopping at the supermarket during rush hour whereas they could go at another time and not keep feeding the queues in front of the checkouts? Simply to see people, because they no longer see anyone in their daily lives.
I hear the same thing from my other friends and colleagues: “Don’t worry, we see people! Well, almost.
Young people at greater risk of isolation
I’ve also heard people say, and I’ve also seen and read in the media, that they’ve found themselves plunged into an often profound solitude, mainly young people, but not only.
I quote from the post in question
“An October 9 dossier in Le Monde alarms us about what it calls an “ epidemic of loneliness ” among young people aged 18 to 24. According to an IFOP study, 62% of 18-24 year-olds regularly feel lonely. The same is true of a January 2024 study by the Fondation Jean Jaurès, revealing that 71% of 18-24 year-olds feel lonely. And 63% of young people who feel lonely say they suffer from it (in the IFOP survey). Sociologists are quick to accuse social networks of being both allies and enemies of bonding. One of them, quoted by Le Monde, points out that “with all the codes of intense sociability that are associated with youth, it’s easy to be stigmatized, at these ages, when you’re seen alone”. This pushes the young people concerned to withdraw even further from the world”.
How to explain this
It’s quite intuitive These are populations who are just beginning to build their lives, and where the rate of chosen or suffered celibacy is quite high, not to mention those who are not celibate but are not yet living together.
These are also people who may have had to relocate when they finished their studies or for this particular job, and have not had the time to make friends or build up a network.
It’s easy to see that young people aren’t the only ones affected, but they’re more likely to be than others.
We’re not going to ask people to pair up with just anyone to combat the so-called evils of remote working, but – and this is something that had jumped out at me before COVID – the fact that they had no, few or no more friends….
No more friends ? Yes, mainly due to over-investment in work , which means they are less and less likely to see each other, call each other and then lose sight of each other.
Or simply that we don’t have the time to make friends.
But we’re not just talking about over-investment in work. Often it’s just an over-investment in one’s presence at work. Not the same thing, but the same results
This reminds me that, in the mid-2000s, Sam Palmisano, then president of IBM, said at a conference given to students at a leading French business school, to the delight of the students and the horror of the teachers
“ And you, go and do social networking, not online but in bars
Personally, I’ve always encouraged my staff to take time out to see their friends and make new ones, even if it meant kicking them out of the office when they stayed too late (a good way, that said, of combating presenteeism).
When colleagues replace friends
To which I was sometimes told: “But we have our colleagues”.
To which I replied
1°) You’re not going to spend your whole life in the same company. So when you change companies, you’ll have to start from scratch without a base of friends who will be there you wherever you are.
2°) If one day things go wrong, you’ll find yourself alone, just when you need to be supported.
3°) Beware of the notion of “friends” or “family” at work. You’re more like teammates, with all that that implies (what does the culture and management of Netflix tell us about today’s world?).
4°) When you’ve spent your day talking about professional matters, it’s good to clear your head by talking to people from other sectors, professions and backgrounds.
Of course, outside work I see people with similar activities, but we don’t talk much about work and, above all, 75% of them have jobs and work in sectors totally different from mine. This clears the mind and also allows me to learn many things that may come in handy one day.
5°) You can’t build a network from behind your desk I’ll always remember my manager, when I started out in consulting, telling us “how can you find out what’s going on in companies, what their needs are, if you stay in the office until 8 p.m.? Go out, see your former classmates who are working elsewhere, meet people…” Sam Palmisano before his time
In short, I’ve always found that the void of friendship around people is a ticking time bomb. A job can be lost or quit, a couple can split up, but in the end, it’s only friends who stay for good.
But that takes time.
Let’s say you spend 8 hours a day with your colleagues, i.e. a minimum of 1,744 hours a year for a fixed-price executive, 3 hours a day with your nearest and dearest plus 14 hours on weekends and vacations (you have to get some sleep), i.e. just under 3,000 hours a year, which doesn’t leave much time for friends. The reflex being not to jeopardize one’s couple and family, it’s on the “additional” time spent at work that this time must be found.
Need to belong vs. need to possess
And that’s where I come in: a social problem.
Because companies want to monopolize this time. They call it commitment or a sense of belonging, it doesn’t matter, they want 100% of employees‘ time, attention and thoughts to be focused on their work, regardless of the collateral damage to the employee’s equilibrium.
The sense of belonging sought by the employee is replaced by a need to possess (the employee) on the part of the company. From afar it looks the same, but up close it’s radically different.
To varying degrees, some companies excel in this area, verging on the unacceptable.
What I found was a surrogate family. During the week, I ate all my meals at the office. I went to the Google doctor and the Google gym. Mycolleagues and I piled into Airbnbs on business trips, played volleyball in Maui after a big product launch and even spent weekends together, once paying $170 and driving hours to run an obstacle course in the freezing rain.
[…]
My manager felt like the father I wished I’d had. He believed in my potential and cared about my feelings. All I wanted was to keep getting promoted so that as his star rose, we could keep working together. This gave purpose to every task, no matter how grueling or tedious.”
[…]
Like most of my colleagues, I’d built my life around the company. It could so easily be taken away. People on leave weren’t supposed to enter the office — where I went to the gym and had my entire social life.
[…]
Now I see that my judgment was clouded, but after years of idolizing my workplace, I couldn’t imagine life beyond its walls.
[…]
After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be.
[…]
When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a job.
The New York Times : After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again
Remote working reveals isolation more than it causes it
Of course, this is an extreme case, not everything is so dark everywhere, especially as in this case there’s also a case of harassment (but is that surprising?) but you get the general idea.
To come back to the subject of isolation, I don’t think the problem is the work itself, but the propensity – sometimes totally conscious, sometimes not – that certain companies and managers have to isolate employees first from their friends, then from their close relations and their families, under the guise of corporate culture and engagement.
And by the time they realize it, it’s often too late and the damage has already been done.
The problem is not that remote working isolates, but that it makes people realize that they are isolated. It’s not just the company that’s to blame, but it does bear a share of the responsibility.
When you realize that if you can’t see your colleagues, you can’t see anyone, there must be a red light on somewhere.It’s your balance that’s at stake and, counter-intuitive as it may seem, your ability to perform well in your company over the long term.
It’s for all these reasons that I think we’re dealing more with a rampant societal problem, on a scale we can barely imagine .
Bottom line
It’s not so much remote working that isolates people as it is allowing them to realize that they are isolated. It doesn’t create the problem, whose causes are deep-rooted, but it reveals it.
In this sense, companies have a responsibility to preserve their employees’ balance, which they struggle to do, even unconsciously, by nibbling away at every minute, every bit of their employees’ attention, with the result that too much of what they think of as engagement becomes a disengagement bomb.
But in the end, and this is what counts, it creates isolated and sometimes broken people.
Image : loneliness and remote work de Lazy_Bear via Shutterstock
