Returning to the office - even just a few days a week - might be what fully remote workers actually need
New research finds that remote workers - especially those living alone - suffer more mental distress than workers who go into the office.
Fewer people are working from home - and that's probably a good thing.
In fact, new research suggests they might be happier and more successful if they go back to the office.
While return-to-office mandates from major employers like JPMorgan Chase $(JPM)$ and Amazon (AMZN) can be frustrating for employees, evidence suggests that people are personally and professionally better off coming into work, even just a couple of days a week, than when they're fully remote.
As work-from-home rates slowly decline, the stay-at-home model is becoming a relic of the pandemic. The share of fully remote workers dropped to 11.1% in May 2026 from its peak of 17.8% in January 2022, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
"Remote and hybrid work used to be a privilege, but its benefits over in-person work have decayed across the board," Chris Martin, senior economist at Glassdoor, told MarketWatch.
The irony is that the very perks that once made remote work so attractive - like having more privacy to focus, or more time for life outside of work - may have unintentionally erased the boundaries that keep professional and personal lives separated.
Perhaps worse, there's evidence to suggest it's further fueled the loneliness epidemic.
A recent paper in Science by Harvard University economist Amanda Pallais found that fully remote work sharply changes the social structure of the workday by removing opportunities to interact with other people. Between 2022 and 2024, a staggering 84% of remote workers spent their entire workday operating completely alone, compared to just 23.2% of on-site workers, the paper noted.
For remote workers living alone, that isolation has compounding effects that ripple far beyond their professional lives. Relative to workers whose jobs require being on site, researchers found that remote work increased the likelihood of going an entire day without actively engaging with another person - like collaborating in a meeting - by 43.4 percentage points.
Even more severely, it drove a more extreme form of isolation for solo workers: The likelihood of not seeing a single person all day, even in passing, jumped by nearly 25 percentage points.
The result, researchers found, was a "precipitous" rise in mental distress - including feeling worthless, hopeless, restless or nervous - concentrated among remote workers living alone. The paper estimated that the rise of remote work explained 32% of the generalized increase in mental distress nationwide between the prepandemic period of 2011 to 2019 and the postpandemic period of 2022 to 2024.
What about work-life balance?
Another perceived benefit of remote work has been that eliminating a daily commute gives employees more free time to balance their personal responsibilities with their professional ones.
But, in fact, fully remote workers now report the lowest level of work-life balance when compared to hybrid workers and other employees, according to Glassdoor's 2026 Worklife Trends Midyear Check-in report - perhaps because it's harder to shift out of work mode at home.
"That hour saved from commuting could have been replaced with more time working," said Glassdoor's Martin. In fact, the Glassdoor report noted that remote workers may be feeling increased pressure to log more working hours at home, effectively erasing the time they saved by skipping the commute.
Remote workers in Glassdoor's report ranked their career opportunities lower than their in-person peers, as many employers prioritize in-office staff for promotions - suggesting that being fully remote could also hurt career growth.
Martin noted some virtual jobs stipulate no promotions during onboarding, as some employers who are enforcing return-to-office rules actively favor their on-site staff for advancement.
That pressure can easily translate into mental stress for remote workers. Glassdoor data show a spike in anxiety among current job holders, both virtual and in-person, with reviews mentioning job insecurity jumping 63% over the past year and direct references to layoffs climbing by 29%.
"Workers are anxious about layoffs, and that stress might be exacerbated by remote work," Martin said. This can make remote workers feel like they need to work even harder to stand out. "Remote work contributes to burnout, since remote workers feel they need to work twice as hard to succeed at work," Martin added.
To be sure, remote work can still offer major benefits for parents, in particular.
According to new Pew Research Center data, working from home provides tremendous flexibility for people raising children. Roughly two-thirds of parents who primarily work from home reported having ample freedom to make it to their kids' events, while a comparable amount said their jobs rarely or never force them to miss out on those occasions. By comparison, 55% or fewer of those who rarely or never work from home could say the same.
Finding a happy medium
The influx of return-to-office mandates may have become more widespread since the pandemic because of employer skepticism about their remote employees' performance. According to Cisco's 2025 Global Hybrid Work study, 81% of employers and 77% of employees acknowledged these mandates stemmed from a lack of trust in remote productivity.
Yet there's evidence suggesting that employees who work remotely at least part time are just as effective as those with a fully in-office schedule, according to 2024 research from Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University.
Bloom's experiment on more than 1,600 workers at Trip.com $(TCOM)$ revealed that staffers who logged on from home twice a week maintained the exact same productivity levels and promotion rates as their colleagues who were in the building full time. Plus, the shift from a strict five-day office mandate to a flexible hybrid model caused employee turnover to drop by 33%.
A hybrid scheduled offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility needed for personal responsibilities, combined with the face time necessary for social connections and career growth, the research found.
"Hybrid work is one of the few instances where there aren't major trade-offs with clear winners and clear losers. There are almost only winners," Bloom told the Stanford Report, the official news publication for Stanford University.
-Julian Torres
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 27, 2026 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)
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