Articles

Flourishing employees: How can we keep remote employees happy in their work?

14th May 2024

The remote working culture is here to stay. We know that working from home can be highly productive and that it brings cost savings to organisations and individuals, and offers some very welcome autonomy to workers. And people want it. Recent figures suggest that a whopping 95% of us would like some kind of work flexibility, and that 40% of us are now working at home at least once a week. Many employees are now saying that they would refuse a job or would change employer if they didn’t have the option to work remotely, and people cite work life balance, increased productivity and better mental health as key benefits (ONS, 2022; ONS, 2023).

But, judging by the evidence of what makes people happy at work, and despite its clear advantages, remote working comes at a cost to employee job satisfaction. And forward-looking organisations need to make some intentional choices about how to compensate for the cons of remote working whilst capitalising on the pros.

So what does make us happy at work?

Have a think about your own career. Of all the different jobs you have had, which gave you the highest levels of job satisfaction – the job when you felt most positive about heading into the office? And what were the factors that made this so positive?

Most people, when asked this question, highlight two key factors: enjoyable work, and great colleagues (Roelen, 2008). Enjoyable work can come in different forms. It generally involves varied tasks, and is usually work that aligns with our values -allowing us to find some meaning in our work, and feel some sense of pride in our organisational goals. We are happier at work when we feel that we are doing a decent job, which encompasses feeling productive, being able to see a tangible outcome of our work and feeling that we are growing and developing professionally.

Working with great colleagues, first and foremost, is about connections. It’s about having people who can share things with you – a joke in a meeting, a moan about how awful the new finance manager is, a shoulder to cry on when you don’t get your promotion, or someone who can share your joy when you land a new contract. Colleague relationships that edge towards actual friendships are even better. Research attests to the pleasure we get from after work drinks, and away days, Christmas parties and friendly office competitions are often cited as some of people’s favourite moments at work (Ali, 2020). The power of food at work is an interesting one. Breaking bread together is of course a long held bonding ritual in all cultures, and the modern workplace equivalent, celebrating someone’s birthday with a bit of cake in the office, has a real power to connect.

Another aspect of ‘great colleagues’ is having a good boss, generally defined as one who is very engaged in their team’s work, and clearly trusts and values their employees. People really appreciate good line management, but in general we spend much more time each week with our colleagues, and so although it does matter, the impact a line manager can have on overall job satisfaction is dwarfed by the power of a shared Victoria sponge.  

Other factors can also make a difference. The research points to the value of agreeable working conditions, an organisation you believe in and a workload that is reasonable – not too much or too little. Money comes in here too and it’s important to feel that you are being fairly rewarded for your work, both in comparison to others in your own organisation (that’s really important) and to a lesser extent, in comparison to those elsewhere.

Some of those factors can be just as satisfying, perhaps even more so, for the home worker. I mentioned that variety is a really key aspect of a satisfying job, and one of the joys of the autonomy we get when working remotely is that we can make our working days as varied as we want. Productivity can also increase when we work at home as we aren’t being distracted by office noise or background chatter and we aren’t being interrupted by our teammates every few minutes. But other satisfiers are more tricky to achieve.

The most obvious job satisfaction cost relates to developing and maintaining personal connections with our colleagues. Remote meetings allow us to collaborate effectively and the content of work meetings can generally be covered just as well (arguably better) online as in person. But the incidental social moments are largely missed – the chit chat whilst you get your coffee, the banter before the meeting starts, the chance to catch a colleague’s eye as Jeff from accounts makes his usual Star Wars reference. And the cake (am I too focused on cake?) and the lunches and the drinks after work just don’t happen when we’re all hunkering down in our own spaces.

The other big job satisfaction challenge for the hybrid worker, is professional growth. The job satisfaction literature clearly shows that feeling that you are learning and developing makes you happy at work, and this is much less likely to happen from home. Research shows us that up to 90% of learning at work is done on an ad-hoc, informal basis (Tannenbaum et al., 2022) and that this kind of learning is particularly important for younger workers who, when they are in the office, spend up to 30% of their working time learning informally (De Grip, 2024). We learn about the culture by watching how people interact, we hone our own strategies through listening to our peers and we identify solutions by just leaning over and asking a colleague a quick question. None of that happens at home.

People want to work from home. It’s cheaper, more convenient, less time consuming and offers far more autonomy than workers have ever had. But there are costs, not just to the organisation, but to the individual. If organisations are invested in creating fulfilling cultures, full of satisfied workers, then we need to start thinking differently about managing our remote workers. And perhaps cake is the best place to start.