Mental Health and Work from Home: An In-Depth Survey

Impact working from home has on mental health Survey

Technology has taken significant leaps in recent years, impacting how people work, including where they’re logging their hours from. According to WFH Research, a scholarly data collection project, about 0.4 percent of full paid workdays in the United States were worked from home in 1965. In the 1990s, this more than doubled to one percent, and then in the mid-2010s when more people had internet access from home, the number of people working from home leaped to four percent. Today, even more people regularly work from home –and navigate the perks and challenges that accompany remote work.

Introduction of Remote Work and Its Growing Post-COVID Popularity

Before COVID-19, the number of remote workers was already on the rise, roughly doubling every 15 years. Within just a few years’ time, workers had access to connectivity software such as Gmail and Slack, alongside video-conferencing platforms such as Webex and Zoom, reducing the need for face-to-face collaborations and in-office work.

In a 2022 press release, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that about nine million people, or 5.7 percent of workers, worked from home in 2019. In the weeks and months that followed, mandatory stay-at-home orders fast-tracked existing work-from-home trends, with workers clocking in from home about 60 percent of the time in 2020. In 2023, this number dropped to 25 percent of hours coming from remote work. While this is significantly lower than the number of remote hours during the peak of COVID, it still indicates a fivefold increase over 2019 norms.

Despite a push for workers to return to the office in 2023, working from home has remained popular, with many workers expressing a strong preference to clock in remotely at least a couple days per week. Workers cite a variety of reasons for their preference to work from home—greater flexibility, improved work-life balance and fewer work-related expenses.

The Goals of Our Survey

We wanted to delve into how working from home has impacted workers’ mental health. Have the perceived benefits of remote work translated into greater life satisfaction? Do workers truly enjoy the peace and solitude of working from home, or has it led to boredom and social isolation? How do they perceive their own mental health, and are they as likely to experience burnout as their in-office counterparts? Finally, does working from home really lead to better work-life balance?

Details on Our Survey Sample

To get some answers, we conducted a survey of 358 people. Of these people, 45 percent work from home at least some of the time and 30 percent work from home 15 hours per week or more. Key factors that may influence an individual’s experience as a remote worker include:

Gender: Our respondents were evenly split between those identifying as male or female, and two respondents identify as nonbinary. Of these respondents, 45 percent work from home, including 20.39 percent of those identifying as male and 24.02 percent of those identifying as female. Within the work-from-home group, 45.9 percent identify as male and 54.09 percent identify as female.
Work-from-home environment: Of those who work from home, about 75 percent have a dedicated environment for working. Of those who don’t work from home, 32 percent have a dedicated workspace.
Age: The survey divided respondents into six age groups. Of survey participants, 33 (nine percent) were aged 18-24, 55 (15 percent) were aged 25-34, 93 (26 percent) were aged 35-44, 21 (six percent) were aged 45-54, 49 (14 percent) were aged 55-64, and 107 (30 percent) were aged 65 and over.
Number of remote hours worked per week: Among those who work from home, 56 people (35 percent) work from home 15 hours per week or less, 40 people (25 percent) work from home 16-30 hours per week, 31 people (19 percent) work from home 30-40 hours per week, and 32 people (20 percent) work from home 40 hours per week or more.
Breaks taken throughout the workday: Within the work-from-home group, 18 percent never take breaks, 12 percent rarely take breaks, 23 percent occasionally take breaks, 19 percent regularly take breaks, 7.5 percent often take breaks, and 18.5 percent constantly take breaks.
Household income: Among respondents who provided annual income information, 23 percent earn $0-$24,999; 16 percent earn $25,000-$49,999; 15 percent earn $50,000-$74,999; 12 percent earn $75,000-$99,999; three percent earn $150,000-$199,999; and seven percent earn $200,000 or more.

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Key Survey Findings

To learn about how remote work impacts mental health, we asked a series of questions to both work-from-home employees and those who work in traditional settings. These questions relate to sleep, socialization and stress, giving us insight into how working from home impacts mental health compared to clocking in from an office environment.

Those Who Work from Home Feel Positively about Remote Work

In general, those who work from home are more likely to see their job positively. When asked to rate their job’s impact on their mental health on a scale of 1-5, with “1” indicating negative feelings and “5” indicating positive, those who work from home provided an average rating of 3.1. On the other hand, those who work in traditional settings gave a neutral rating of 2.5.

Women were slightly more likely to report a link between good mental health and remote work, rating their experience at 3.22. By comparison, men reported a slightly lower, but still positive, score of 3.16.

Those Who Work from Home Have More Social Interactions

Does working from home lead to social isolation? Not according to about 80 percent of our survey respondents who work remotely. Altogether, about four out of five work-from-home employees reported a social satisfaction level of 3 or above on a 5-point scale. On average, those who work from home reported the quantity or quality of social interactions at 3.31. This held true for both men and women.

By comparison, those who work in traditional settings had an average answer of 3.00. Interestingly, women in this category reported higher average satisfaction levels with an overall average rating of 3.17. Men, on the other hand, expressed lower levels of satisfaction compared to women as well as their male work-from-home counterparts with an average score of 2.88.

We also asked participants how often they experienced loneliness or social isolation. The work-from-home group scored an average of 2.11 out of 5. While this indicates somewhat low levels of loneliness, it’s well above the average score of 1.03 reported by those who work in traditional office environments.

Women who work from home report the highest levels of loneliness at a score of 2.13. On the flip side, women who work outside the home have the lowest loneliness rating of 0.9. In contrast, men who work from home report a loneliness score of 2.08, while men who work outside the home had an average rating of 1.13.

Those Who Work from Home Report Better Sleep Quality

When we asked about sleep quality on a scale of 1-5, participants answered with an average overall score of 3.05 out of 5. Among those who work from home, the average sleep score came in at 3.25, with the number of hours worked from home having a direct impact on sleep quality:

For those who work 40+ hours, the average score was 3.42
For those who work 16-34 hours from home, the average score was 3.17
For those who work fewer than 15 hours per week from home, the average score was 3.09

On the other hand, the sleep quality score of non-work-from-home participants was below average at 2.88.

Those Who Work from Home Report Higher Job Satisfaction

Among all workers who participated in our survey, the average job satisfaction rating was 3.38 on a 5-point scale. However, those who work from home seemed to be happiest in their jobs, reporting an average of 3.85 points with 88 percent of these workers reporting a score of 3 or above. The overall job satisfaction rating among those who work in traditional settings is considerably lower at 3.01, with 65 percent of people answering with a 3 or higher.

The Mental Health Impact of Working from Home vs. Working in an Office

In our survey, we found that those who work from home enjoyed more and better-quality social interactions, higher job satisfaction and better sleep. However, we wanted to go deeper and determine whether this translated into better mental health. To gauge that, we asked questions related to how individuals perceive their mental health as well as their levels of stress and burnout.

Those Who Work from Home Report Slightly Better Mental Health

When we asked survey participants to rate their mental health on a 5-point scale, with 5 being the best score, they provided an overall average score of 3.59. Among those who work from home, this score averaged out to 3.61, and among those working in traditional settings, the score came in slightly lower at 3.56.

For more insight, we looked at participants’ gender. Overall, women reported a mental health score of 3.50. Women working from home reported a slightly lower score of 3.44 while women in the non-work-from-home crowd had a higher score of 3.87. Men who worked from home had the highest mental health score of 3.82, compared to 3.59 among their in-office counterparts and the overall score of 3.68.

Those Who Work from Home Report Slightly Higher Stress Scores

An individual’s stress levels play a vital role in their mental health, so we wanted to see whether those who work from home experience more or less stress than traditional workers. When we asked participants to rate their stress levels on a 5-points scale, with a lower score being more desirable, workers indicated an overall neutral score of 2.26. By comparison, the work-from-home group reported slightly more stress with a score of 2.60, while those who work in a traditional setting reported below-average levels of stress at a rating of 1.99.

Those Who Work from Home May Be More Likely to Experience Burnout

Does a person’s work environment make them more or less vulnerable to burnout? We asked our participants to rate their levels of burnout on a 0-5 scale, with 5 indicating constant. Overall, participants gave an average rating of 1.96 for this category. Surprisingly, those who work from home report an above-average burnout score of 2.27, while those in traditional work environments report a lower overall rating of 1.71.

Other Observations

When It Comes to Stress, Men Report Higher Levels than Women

From our survey results, it appears that a worker’s gender has some influence on the levels of stress they report. For example, on a 5-point scale, we find that women in traditional work environments report the lowest stress levels at an average score of 1.94, while men in traditional work environments are on their heels with an average rating of 2.06. By comparison, in the work-from-home group, women report a neutral score of 2.55 and men report a slightly higher rate of 2.67.

Those Who Work from Home May Have an Easier Time Disconnecting

Do those who work from home have a harder time disconnecting at the end of the day? Among those who answered this question, 66 percent said they had no trouble disconnecting while 34 percent reported difficulty. It appeared that those who work from home have a generally harder time transitioning out of their workday, with 38 percent of these workers reporting a difficult time disconnecting compared to 27 percent of those in traditional work environments.

Those Who Work from Home May Experience More Work-Related Physical Symptoms of Stress

When we asked workers whether they experience work-related physical symptoms of stress, such as headaches or muscle tension, 39 percent report that they do. This includes 48 percent of people who work from home compared to 31 percent of people who work in traditional settings.

Additional Notes about the Survey

While this survey provided valuable insight into people’s experiences working from home, it had a few limitations that may have impacted results.

First, when we asked participants how many hours per week they worked from home and they answered that they didn’t work remotely at all, some phrasing we used may have logged those participants as if they worked a traditional job. However, some of these individuals may have been retired, off work temporarily or permanently because of an injury or disability, or otherwise unemployed. Their employment status may impact their experiences and answers related to loneliness, burnout and job satisfaction.

Second, there may be bias and subjectiveness in participants’ answers. Those who work from home likely do so because it’s their preference, and not because they don’t have opportunities to transition to an office environment. For that reason, participants may perceive their satisfaction levels to be higher in a remote setting than they believe their levels would be in a traditional work environment. This could account for why remote workers report higher job satisfaction, better sleep and better mental health, but they’re also more likely to report feelings of burnout and stress.

Finally, all answers are self-reported, adding another layer of subjectivity. Feelings of stress, loneliness and burnout exist on a spectrum, and tolerance for stress varies from one person to another. Individuals aren’t always able to accurately analyze their own stress levels and may overestimate or underestimate the impact their jobs have on physical and mental health.