Remote work has its advantages, no doubt, but it’s the cons that demand serious thought

These benefits are tangible and immediate. So, once people experience the convenience of WFH, persuading them back to the office can be difficult.

A few years ago, when the covid pandemic swept the globe, WFH was the only viable way to limit transmission. Even then—while acknowledging its necessity—I warned that although remote work has advantages on the surface, it could also have significant implicit, unseen and unspoken consequences for the corporate world.

For most of human history, our primary work—hunting and food gathering—was a collective endeavour in which everyone participated. Only with the rise of agriculture and private property did work begin to lose its inherently social character, though much farm labour still took place in small groups. The Industrial Revolution’s assembly lines pushed work even further as an individual task.

Today, in an information era of distributed intelligence, knowledge networks, cloud infrastructure and collaborative tools, requiring people to gather in a single office location can seem like clinging to an outdated idea if not an outright relic. Is it so?

Many analyses of human behaviour assume each person has a single, stable identity. Yet, as Nobel laureate George Akerlof argues in his book with Rachel Kranton, Identity Economics (2010), individuals adopt multiple identities shaped by context.

We are one person at home and another at work; the self we present at an office party may differ markedly from the one we assume around college friends.

Context powerfully shapes behaviour—altering our dress, language and even the body language we adopt. At times, the identities we inhabit in different settings can diverge more from each other than two different individuals do.

Through most of human history, people rarely had to inhabit two distinct identities within the same physical context. The commute was part of a daily ritual of switching from one identity to another.

But with WFH, employees have to maintain both their work and home identities in a domestic environment. This can create conflicts.

For example, while a parent is fully focused on a video meeting, a child might enter the room seeking help with homework—a responsibility tied to the home role. Which should take priority?

Even the clothes one wears can contribute to this tension. Research on enclothed cognition indicates that what we wear—even the parts not visible below the camera frame, can influence our mindset and work performance. As a result, WFH can heighten identity clashes and become a source of stress for remote workers.

There’s no doubt that work, especially knowledge work, can be split into individual responsibilities and done independently from diverse locations. Modern technologies can turn disparate efforts into a single deliverable. But a crucial question remains: Is an organization’s strength defined solely by the quality of its work output?

Enduring companies are the backbone of an economy. Their survival depends not only on output quality but on the strength of their culture. This is built on emotional bonds among employees, not just within teams but across the organization, from security staff to canteen workers. Proximity is crucial to forming these emotional bonds. The remoteness of WFH, compounded by switched-off cameras in virtual meetings, makes cultivating emotional bonds at work far more difficult.

Given the advantages of WFH, I do not argue that WFH should never be adopted. Rather, I want to remind us that as we move away from the social nature of work, we must create compensatory mechanisms. In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam notes that the Industrial Revolution drew millions from rural communities into factory towns.

Assembly lines and crowded urban neighbourhoods bred isolation. But society responded with new social infrastructure: public parks for people to gather, trade unions that brought workers together and team sports. These innovations helped restore the social fabric. As we reshape work today, we should do likewise.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has cautioned that despite the rise of social media, today’s young are among the loneliest on record. Echoing this concern, former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that youth loneliness is an epidemic, with health effects comparable to smoking about 15 cigarettes a day.

Taken together, these trends suggest that Gen Z may enter the workforce with high emotional vulnerability.

Yes, remote work can ease our fuel crisis, but we should respect the inherently social nature of work shaped over millennia.

The author is chief evangelist, Fractal Analytics, and author of ‘MicroStimuli: The New Science of Persuasion’