An increasing number of businesses, tempted by the prospect of saving on hefty office costs, are telling their staff to work from home at least some of the time. The Government believes this should become the “default” position for employees post-lockdown, despite research showing that working from home can not only reduce productivity but can also increase – and has increased – levels of loneliness and mental distress – even for those who do not live alone. The Observer has more.
With ministers still debating how to manage the return to workplaces in the wake of Covid restrictions, a study by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) found that the biggest increases in mental distress and loneliness during the pandemic were felt by the most isolated group – those working from home and living alone. However, in a finding that surprised researchers, people working from home and living with others also experienced a significant increase in loneliness not felt by those working outside the home.
Analysts examined data from interviews carried out with 8,675 people before the pandemic and in May, July and November 2020. They found that people able to work from home have been protected from financial difficulties that can drive poor mental health. When financial circumstances, loneliness and demographic characteristics were controlled for in the research, however, people working from home recorded bigger increases in mental distress.
“More of us than ever now work from home and use technology to replace many aspects of work previously done in person, but this cannot fully replicate the working environment for everyone,” said Isabel Taylor, Research Director at NatCen. “As the Government considers current working guidance, individuals, employers and government departments should be aware of the impact working from home is likely having on people’s mental health.”
People were first advised to work from home by the Government in March last year. A month later almost half of U.K. workers were working from home at least some of the time. While limited numbers of people have returned to their workplaces since, advice to work from home has continued into 2021.
The advice could end on July 19th, though a debate about the measure remains. Experts from SAGE have warned in official papers that some measures are “likely to be needed beyond the end of the current roadmap process” to avoid “the likelihood of having to reverse parts of the road map”.
Government sources have denied reports that it was drawing up plans to give workers the right to work from home for ever if they wished to do so. However, they are planning a shift towards greater flexibility for workers in the future. Even before the pandemic hit, the 2019 Conservative election manifesto vowed to “encourage flexible working and consult on making it the default unless employers have good reasons not to”. …
The new NatCen paper states that there are other considerations that should be taken into account, including the interactions between colleagues and the clearer divide between work and personal lives that could be playing a part in its findings about mental health distress.
Worth reading in full.
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Wow!!!
Who would have thunk
Yes quite amazing, less productivity and more mental illness. Things going to plan.
Build Back Better = You Own Nothing
Build Back Better = Davos Elite Get Richer
Build Back Better = Bio-Security State
Build Back Better = Rolling Lockdowns Forever
Build Back Better = Travel Restrictions
Build Back Better = Increasing Isolation
Build Back Better = Protein Intake Reductions
Build Back Better = Digital Currencies
Build Back Better = Social Credit Score Control
Build Back Better = Master Slave Societies
Build Back Better = Rules For Thee… None For Me
The NEW NORMAL that nobody sane voted for…
https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1411522589923569667?s=20
Brainwash Back Better = Total Surveillance and Totalitarianism
All hail corporate fascism!
Yeah , but these fuckers will own everything, you know nice shiny things, paintings ,fine wines, big cars, big houses, gated obviously let them eat cake.. go figure.
Well, quite – but it does show the cognitive dissonance in the locktivist camp – the Guardian/Observer are pretty much the bedwetters’ journal, and on the one hand they are occasionally publishing sensible (albeit very obvious) articles like this, but at the same time they are continuing with the scaremongering approach – e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/03/fears-of-summer-chaos-in-schools-and-offices-as-covid-restrictions-are-swept-away
As I’m sure most on here know, the weasel phrase “provide clarity” is normally locktivist-speak for “impose / enforce / continue with restrictions”.
The readers of these newspapers make me sick. I wonder who they think is emptying their bins, keeping the utilities flowing to and from their homes, picking, packing and delivering their internet orders? Do these essential workers ever cross their minds?
Only as a comfortable abstraction.It’s cheap and easy to declare your solidarity with an abstraction. It’s a bloody nuisance when the abstraction turns into a real person.
Especially when they decide to not follow the voting “advice” you hectored them with those thick gamons, and now I’ll have to pay more for the cleaner!
If seems contradictory but the usual line is that the remedy is more support for the afflicted rather than removing the root cause
SAGE “experts”? In what? Destroying economies, mental and physical health, society, education, any and all forms of ethics and morals, for starters. Granted, they are experts in manipulating politicians, instilling terror and lying, which is possibly a line of expertise and wisdom roughly on a par with “Rillington Place” Christie’s skills in murdering women.
Russel Grant should start calling himself a modeller.
In fact I think the COVID pre-dick-shuns should be broken down by sign of the zodiac…
Taurans face additional lockdowns this summer due to a worrying uptick in predicted cases, Librans to be allowed on holidays to Octarine list destinations.
Russell Grant is a male model in the same way SAGE are scientists
15 months later someone noticed !
Radical Evil | PBS America | UK
“Stefan Ruzowitzky asks why normal people become mass murderers in this sobering film about the Nazi death squads, who ruthlessly gunned down about two million Jewish civilians in Eastern Europe. In the words of author Primo Levi, ‘Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.”
They believed they were doing it for the common good.
Did they? More likely because they were murdering thugs.
No, they believed in what they were doing, thuggery was taught as a virtue by German philosophy
The Germans who actually pulled the triggers were almost certainly murderous thugs, but they were relatively few in number. Far more numerous were their local helpers (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians) whom the Nazis had duped into believing that the Jews were responsible for Communist atrocities.
For many, one of the advantages of work is that it gets you away from the family.
It was always a reason why so many married male teachers came in early and left late – to avoid having to deal with their own dear little ones!
ABSOLUTELY.
I reckon loneliness and mental distress are caused by listening to too much BBC propaganda whilst working at home.
Getting people back into the workplace is fine as long as the employer doesn’t demand all employees must be vaccinated in order to attend. Such a scenario poses problems for the unvaxed (I know several who are very nervous about this, two especially have major concerns about conflict between the injection and the meds they’re already taking). It could mean they work from home permanently (fine) but would be invariably passed over for promotion (because hardly anyone sees them) and excluded from the working society.
Knowing the ghastly adverse reactions from these things, it’s asking them to take a major chance with their health and life.
We say that employers can’t demand these things; but it seems to me that all our rights are being destroyed lately, so I trust nothing and no-one.
Remembering the elderly who were denied seeing their loved ones before they died, despite the fact that the staff or carers could.
And the lockdown zealots call us heartless
I imagine a single parent living in a small appartment, must find WFH an absolute joy.
I bet Matt Hancock wished that he could’ve worked from home away from those pesky security cameras.
Daily reminder that Branch Covidians were already mentalists
People are drained by the constant bad news, confinement, loneliness, the lack of holidays; they have put on weight, they have lost fitness, those who got Covid lost fitness, and now many have what appear to be side effects from the “vaccines” too, strange flare ups in osteoarthritis, tinnitus, arrhythmias, etc. Generally, much of the nation is feeling older and tireder.
Sage don’t care.
Turkeys sell well at Christmas.
Actually, yes. Commuting in subhuman conditions also causes stress and misery for many. Nothing wrong with giving people flexibility to work from home where possible. It also frees up capacity on the infrastructure for those who cannot work from home. It will be especially beneficial where I live (Tokyo) where trains used to run everyday at 200% capacity. It’s like being herded like an animal. The problem arises when it is enforced and you have to spend 16 months at home with no entertainment outlets as all the restaurants, pubs, museums, stadiums, music venues are shut.
As for productivity, I’m working harder now (in terms of desk job hard) than I ever have. It’s not as hard as labouring or scaffolding of course, before anyone accuses me of not knowing what real work is.
I work from home but don’t live alone, and I hated lockdown so much. It was lonely and terribly depressing. My housemate believes every word the government tells her, so suddenly there was a tremendous divide between us. I would love to discuss my views with her, but she doesn’t want to discuss the subject because she says it upsets her. This really increased my loneliness – living with somebody who used to be a good friend but has become an alien from another planet, and we can’t even talk our differences through. With us both working from home, she feels the need to talk through her work with me. I’m happy to listen to her in the evening but it is irritating in working hours when I’m trying to get on with my work, mostly because I can’t also discuss my work with her because she doesn’t understand what I do at all. Then there was the feeling like I was living with the enemy, and I had to hide from her if I travelled outside our area or met more than one friend or even when I had work out of the home she interrogated me as to why I was allowed to do this. The whole situation added up to a very lonely and very depressing time. I would rather live alone than live through lockdown with a lockdown fanatic.