r/technology • u/TracksandTreks • Aug 15 '26

Society Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees

https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/08/12/remote-workers-report-highest-well-being-study-7700-employees
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u/BromoFom Aug 15 '26

Not to mention that corporate-minded snakes only worship one god: metrics. If there are studies backing up claims like this, they at least might pay attention.

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u/Pseudoboss11 Aug 15 '26

Employee happiness isn't a metric I've seen tracked at any place I've worked at.

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u/BromoFom Aug 15 '26

I’ve seen it at mine, probably because I work in social work/behavioral health. It never leads to any substantive change even though the surveys always come back with horrendous results, but at least we get to shuffle around crappy managers every six months or so because of it.

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u/lolmemelol Aug 15 '26

Employee satisfaction (eNPS) is measured twice per year at my employer.

It has been tanking, but still technically above the benchmark for our industry. If it goes down any further, I wouldn't be surprised if they stop talking about it.

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u/correcthorsestapler Aug 15 '26

My last job had employee satisfaction tracked regularly. Then the company went into austerity mode, removed a bunch of benefits including coffee in the cafeteria (but only for night shift; day shift got to keep their free coffee), and employee satisfaction cratered. I remember our supervisor having a meeting with our module to discuss the results and, instead of sympathizing, he asked why the scores were low and want us to come up with solutions to improve morale. Our supervisor was more concerned about how he would be viewed because of the low score. We told him that all the issues we had were due to decisions out of our control, and that the company had turned a deaf ear to employee feedback. The meeting ended up being a waste of time because he kept going around and around wanting us to improve things and we kept telling him that management had to do the work, not us.

Funny enough, that was the last time they had people fill out that questionnaire. Morale was so low throughout the company that they’d rather not even bother collecting the data on it.

Same thing happened at the company I worked for before that one. Morale dropped due to management decisions, employees gave their lowest scores, so management stopped asking.

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u/RakeattheGates Aug 15 '26

Yup we had the ESAT survey once a year but the boomer CEO and C suite ignored the overwhelming support for more flexibility and WFH as we transitioned back to the office after covid and forced everyone back in the office 4 days a week. Doesn't really mean shit if employees have no recourse other than quitting.

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u/Thurwell Aug 15 '26

Ah but the satisfaction of which employees? At every place I've worked the people who consistently get promoted, to the point they're making the decisions, aren't the workers. It's the schmoozers who rise to the top. And who are they going to schmooze if everyone is remote? Having also worked in a fully remote company I can tell you they schmooze along just fine. But they certainly don't enjoy it as much.

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u/DynamicDK Aug 15 '26

It is tracked at mine. And my department is fully remote.

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u/ellonite1 Aug 15 '26

I think he meant more of it might benefit the bottom dollar if employee happiness is higher. They obviously don't care about the happiness itself but if that makes the employees more productive, less prone to burn out/quitting, taking less vacation days, then they'll listen

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u/bihari_baller Aug 15 '26

Employee happiness isn't a metric I've seen tracked at any place I've worked at.

My place of employment has engagement surveys annually that tracks this.

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u/Bananonomini Aug 15 '26

They're generally filed under retention and attrition costs

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u/fortune-o-sarcasm Aug 15 '26

If only this was true. They pretend to be metric driven but actually it's only the cherry picked metrics that they like.

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u/Arkios Aug 15 '26

I wish that were true. When we first hit Covid and everyone was WFH, my employer sent out a survey to all employees to see how happy they were WFH compared to the office. The most baffling part is that they then disclosed the results to us, it was 91% that preferred WFH over being in the office. There were other metrics around general happiness/productivity/etc… but it was an overwhelming majority that supported WFH and the metrics showed it was better in every way.

Guess who mandated an RTO once Covid was over? The excuse was “culture” required people to be in the office which can’t be quantified in any meaningful way. They of course weren’t stupid enough to send out another survey like they had before, because the numbers obviously wouldn’t coincide. The actual reason was that the CEO hated WFH and was tech illiterate and didn’t want to be on Zoom/Teams calls all the time. He came into the office almost the entirety of Covid.