Are people happier working from home? According to a recent study called ‘Are You Happy While You Work‘, people are not necessarily happy while working from home, but are less negative working from home than in an office or on work premises. This may come as a bit of a shock, and that’s because this study was aimed at momentary happiness, that is, how you feel while you are actually working.
The study used data collected from a cool UK-based app, Mappiness, to gather intel on people’s moods and what they were doing at that moment. Because of the limited pool of data, it’s impossible to generalise for everyone, but the results are super interesting!
The Study Results – Working From Home Is Better
All round, people had negative associations with paid work. However, the authors of the paper found ‘that the negative association between paid work and happiness is twice as large when that work is undertaken at work, compared to working at or from home’. Wow-wee! Working ‘at work’ is twice as negative as working from home. You know what that means? Working at home is two times better than working at work.
Not only is the all round effect on your attitude ‘less bad’, there’s further evidence to suggest people who are able to perform their work from home are better workers:
‘Evidence from a recent field experiment in which opportunities to work at home were randomly assigned to workers indicated not only that workers randomly assigned to work at home were more productive than those assigned to remain on company premises, but that they were also more satisfied with their work, had higher psychological attitude scores and were less likely to quit the firm.’ (Emphasis mine)
Working from home has us less cranky, more productive, more satisfied, and less likely to quit. Awesome.
Work = Stress = Not So Happy, Jan
Notice how I haven’t suggested that working from home actually makes you happy while you’re working? According to the study, although people often reflect on work positively, that’s not how they feel about it while they’re slogging it out. In fact, on happiness and relaxation scales, working was way down the bottom of the list. The only thing worse than working was being sick.
But why does working have such a negative effect on people’s momentary wellbeing? The authors of the study don’t have any firm conclusions, but they do suggest that it has something to do with the stress associated with work:
‘Even though people are so positive about paid work when reflecting on the meaning and value of their lives, actually engaging in paid work comes at some personal cost to them in terms of the pressures and stress they face while working.’
So although working from home might not make us super happy in the moment, it is, by this study, better than working ‘at work’.
Do you feel this study matches how you feel or do you enjoy every moment of your working day? Let us know in the comments!
Image from © Lime Lane Photography
This post was written by Stevie Schafer. Stevie is an Admin Ninja and Editorial Assistant here at the Virtual Assistant. She loves cats and shares her life with a mischievous grey rescue tabby. She writes about working from home, freelancing, and other fun things on her own blog, Stevie Writes.
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