Does remote work feel weird? Anthropology can explain why

Along with wearing masks and keeping hand sanitizer handy at all times, the pandemic normalized one more thing: not having to go to the office for work.

While Covid made it a necessity, remote work has continued in one form or another long after the era of enforced social distancing ended. On the surface, it looks like a convenient arrangement for employers and employees alike. While companies reduce expenses by entirely doing away with a physical workplace, employees minimize commuting, have more autonomy over their work hours, and spend more time with their loved ones.

But not everything is roses and sunshine in the land of remote work. A survey by Gallup shows how fully remote workers are more likely to experience negative emotions, like sadness, loneliness, anger, and stress, than their counterparts at the office. And here's the irony: the flexibility and autonomy that makes remote work attractive in the first place is the cause for these negative emotions, as managing time independently and coordinating work with others can become stressful in the absence of clear boundaries.

But what is it about remote work that makes employees feel this way? To answer this, we turn to an academic discipline that's typically not associated with businesses—anthropology.

Remote work: Designed for efficiency, not serendipity

Along with conducting fieldwork in remote jungles and islands, anthropologists also began studying industries and businesses in urban areas to see how everyday work shapes people and how people shape work every day. After all, every business problem is a human problem at its core.

And that's where the subfield of business anthropology emerged.

Gillian Tett, an anthropologist by training who went on to become a business journalist, refers to two anthropological concepts to explain the shortcomings of remote work:

• Incidental information exchange: Informal and unplanned conversations with colleagues not only help in gathering information that might not have an immediate utility but also widen their vision and give them more context about themselves and their role.

• Sensemaking: This is the process by which individuals and groups understand confusing situations or events through information available to them. It requires a shared cultural context to assist individuals and groups in creating narratives that help them interpret experiences and take required actions.

A physical workplace naturally enables incidental information exchange and sensemaking—employees cross paths with people outside their immediate teams during lunch or coffee breaks and at locations like parking lots or water coolers. Here, employees get to exchange information, gain different perspectives, and make sense of their workplace and its myriad people. (Even gossiping at work is considered a form of sensemaking!)

Such informal, serendipitous communication—as opposed to formal, scheduled meetings—helps employees cultivate better work relationships, which provides a sense of belonging and emotional support that reduces uncertainty, boosts wellbeing, and translates to improved performance at work.

However, the nature of remote work falls short in enabling employees to have such unplanned, informal conversations. In the office, an employee can see what their colleagues are doing at their desks—whether they're squinting at their screen with headphones on or having a laugh while chatting with another colleague—and make a judgment call on approaching them based on how busy they seem to be.

Remote employees lack such non-verbal cues, as they don't see colleagues physically but typically through an internal communciations platform. All they see are names with colored dots—green, yellow, red, grey—that indicate their status at work. And these can often be misleading: some stay active (green) even if they're away from their desk, while others remain offline (grey) or busy (red) to avoid being disturbed while completing tasks.

In such situations, it can be difficult to predict whether unplanned interactions can be perceived as unsolicited interruptions. So remote employees tend to limit their interactions to their immediate teams, preventing the organic cross-functional interactions that happen naturally in an office setting.

When communication becomes siloed, incidental information exchange and sensemaking suffers. As a result, remote employees might feel a sense of alienation as they struggle to map their everyday work with the company's mission without a shared context in place. This state of mind can become a fertile ground for negative emotions like the stress, anger, and loneliness that were reported in the Gallup survey.

Preserving what makes work human

As the pandemic wound down, organizations began to introduce return-to-office mandates to get employees back to the workplace. But such blanket mandates run the risk of backfiring on organizations in the form of increased attrition and resentment. After all, if work is viewed simply as a series of tasks to be executed, it's only rational that employees would prefer doing so from the comfort of their homes.

That's why organizations must go beyond the narrow focus on getting employees back to the office. A more sustainable way forward lies in nurturing an organizational culture that bridges work and the human need for connection, belonging, and meaning. To accomplish this, organizations should:

• Prioritize collective outcomes over individual output

• Create a workplace environment that employees want to be a part of

• Design a work model that's flexible, accessible, and fair

Also read: You can build a good product once. But can you do it again?

In an experiment to make office spaces more flexible and accessible, we at Zoho created multi-point distributed workplaces—small, remote offices around regional centers in a hub-and-spoke model—across different countries. This approach, which we call "transnational localism", helps our employees reap the benefits of both remote and at-office work: They can stay close to their loved ones and cut down on long commutes but also visit the hub offices to collaborate face-to-face with their colleagues on projects.

With AI and hyper-automation looming over every sector, we can be certain for now that, irrespective of how intelligent machines might seem, they can't automate human abilities like conflict management, emotional intelligence, and moral judgment that are crucial in the workplace. Such abilities can only be passed down from one person to another or absorbed through observation; they can't be taught using video calls, slide decks, or chatbots.

Yes, remote work can be convenient for employees and employers in the short term. But to endure in the long run, organizations should build their cultures with the intent of preserving the human element at the heart of work. Because, as anthropology shows, work will always remain a deeply human enterprise that's defined and driven by people.