Home workers take less time off sick but can also be less healthy – study

People who work from home take less time off sick, tend to work longer hours and even work evenings and weekends, a study has suggested.

However, remote workers are also likely to eat more snacks, drink more, smoke more and put on weight, even though technically home-working can enable them to eat more healthily, feel less stressed and have lower blood pressure.

A review of 1,930 academic papers on post-pandemic workplaces has concluded that whether home working is ‘healthy’ or not can depend on the working environment, the available equipment and how much control or agency workers have over their working day.

People on higher incomes often enjoy home working more, but those with more responsibilities at home such as childcare or housework – often women and those living alone – tended to be more stressed, according to the study.

The study was led by King’s College London, as part of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)-funded Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response, which is a collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency.

The review, published in the Journal of Occupational Health, identified three themes: the working environment at home, the effect on workers’ lives and careers, and the effect on their health.

Professor Neil Greenberg, a psychiatrist at King’s College London and one of the study’s authors, told The Guardian newspaper that workers and employers needed to start considering home working with the same seriousness as they did office working.

“In the old days of office working, people realised that if you put everyone in the same room with no sound-proofing, it was all unpleasant and you didn’t have a very productive workforce,” he said.

“Now that we’ve shifted to a home-working culture, it makes sense for organisations and the government to make sure that people who are home working are doing it in as effective a way as possible.

“Overall, people felt more productive at home,” Professor Greenberg told the newspaper. “It was particularly good for creative things, but much more difficult dealing with tedious matters. A lot of people worried about career prospects – this feeling that if you’re not present in the office, you’re going to get overlooked.”

The transition to home working during Covid was linked “with an increase in intake of vegetables, fruit, dairy, snacks, and self-made meals; younger workers and females benefited the most in terms of healthier eating,” the paper, led by PhD Charlotte Hall, concluded.

One of the studies reviewed found that 46.9% of employees working from home had gained weight, and another put the figure at 41%. Most of the papers reviewed showed that homeworkers were more sedentary.

Professor Greenberg said: “Managers needed to think about finding ways to support their homeworkers and help create their working environment.

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“We need to ask ‘what is the best training for an individual who’s going to become a partial homeworker?’ What we don’t need to do is to ask ‘would it be helpful to train someone to homework?’ The answer is clearly yes,” he added.