Is working remotely bad for your health?
Imagine rolling out of bed in the morning and, rather than racing to get out the door and into morning traffic, you could go for a run or make yourself breakfast. It’s the kind of daydream every chainedto-his-desk office worker has now and then. And for many, that daydream has become a reality.
Following the Great Recession and the rise of the app-driven gig economy, more and more American workers have found themselves jettisoned from traditional office spaces and thrust into jobs that require them to work remotely, at least some of the time, time.com wrote.
A 2016 study from Harvard and Princeton found that the percentage of the US workforce employed in freelance or other ‘alternative’ work arrangements climbed from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015. And a recent Gallup poll found that 43 percent of employed Americans now work remotely at least some of the time — with nearly one-third of them working remotely four days a week or more.
These momentous shifts in the way Americans work have generated a lot of new research on the health effects of remote jobs and self-employment. The latest evidence shows that so-called ‘alternative’ work arrangements come with both benefits and risks.
The good news: Remote workers who are also self-employed are likely to experience greater levels of job satisfaction and wellbeing than their pals in traditional work roles, said Peter Warr, emeritus professor at Sheffield University’s Institute of Work Psychology in the UK. Assuming a self-employed person’s income is adequate — and that’s a very big assumption — her freedom to set her own schedule and complete work as she sees fit is a great predictor of jobrelated happiness, Warr’s research suggested.
But it’s important to differentiate between what researchers term ‘necessity’ self-employment and ‘opportunity’ self-employment.
“Necessity self-employeds are people who lost a job, scrambled, and became self-employed to make a living,” said Irvin Schonfeld, a professor of psychology at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center.
On the other hand, ‘opportunity’ selfemployed individuals are those who made the choice to leave their traditional workplace gigs, he said.
Many people are likely a mixture of both categories. (There are those who may have pondered going it alone, but weren’t willing to make the jump until a lost job forced them into it.) But in any case, Schonfeld said the necessity self-employed folks “may be a little more vulnerable because they may not prefer the autonomy that comes with the job”.
Schonfeld coauthored a recent study on stress among self-employed people who run solo businesses. When talking to the people in the study, he said, the most common complaints he heard had to do with income insecurity.
“Not knowing what could happen to their income in two or three months was a big source of anxiety,” he said.
Lack of affordable health coverage was also an oft-mentioned concern. “The Affordable Care Act was not perfect, but it was particularly good for the self-employed because at least they could get health insurance,” he said.
“If the government takes that away, that’s going to be hard on them.”
Income instability and poor access to affordable health care have both been linked to reduced physical and mental health. There’s also evidence that some freelancers ‘overcommit’ to work and find it difficult to disconnect or relax, which they say negatively affects their mental health. But overall, the health effects of self-employment seem to vary from person to person and — like office jobs — can be either positive or negative.