Working from home has led to people neglecting mental health, study finds

Workers are putting in longer hours, taking fewer sick days and suffering increased anxiety as the Covid-19 pandemic takes it toll on physical and mental health, research suggests.

Half of 2,000 employees surveyed by insurance giant Aviva said they never fully switch off from work, revealing an "always-on" culture following the merging of home and work as a result of the pandemic.

With leaving the office no longer a marker of the end of the work day, most young adults now regularly check their emails after the virtual office has supposedly closed, the poll found.  

Additionally, the number of people who have taken no sick days has risen by almost a fifth this year to 84 per cent, according to the survey. More than a third of respondents said they had carried on working even when they felt unwell.

More than half of those surveyed said were neglecting their physical and mental health due to the pressures of work, and almost as many were troubled by how much their work interferes with their personal life.

Unions have criticised the government for insufficient advice to employers and staff about how to manage the new working environment.

Amy, who works as a researcher, told The Independent she had suffered a relapse of mental health issues while working at home.

“I try to clock off on time, but I find that my mind is often still focused on work long until the evening and I wake more worrying about work than I ever have done. I never really feel like I leave the office to ‘go home’,” she said.

“This has had quite a big impact on my mental health and sleep. I used to suffer from depression and I’ve recently had my first relapse in two years, which seems to be fully related to work stress, not helped by hearing Skype notifications pinging on my computer even once I’ve logged off.”

Psychotherapist Sarie Taylor told The Independent that “people not switching off from work is simply habitual, often doing it because we can and the more we do something, the more we see it as accepted or necessary, again this is just how habits work.

She added: “When our world shrinks, just as it has during lockdown, our thinking can become much more contaminated and we are also much more likely to believe our thoughts to be true. This means we take thoughts more seriously such as, ‘I need to work long hours to prove my worth at work,’ and may result in someone working every evening as they really believe that is true when in fact it isn’t, it’s a worry or an anxious thought about what the future may look like."

Aviva urged people to have set hours, even if working from home, to "ditch" technology occasionally and speak to someone in person or over the phone if possible.

Bosses should set a good example about work culture in their organisation, the report recommended.

Debbie Bullock, wellbeing lead at Aviva, said: "The working environment can be a key driver of mental health conditions amongst the working population, so it's no surprise that the blurring of lines between home and work has contributed towards the increasing numbers reporting mental health issues.

"Our research suggests the pandemic may have exacerbated the issue. Without the usual bookends of commutes or school runs to help structure the day, many employees find it hard to switch off.

"Plus, juggling work and home life in the same location has been stressful for many, with employees feeling they are never entirely at work, but never fully away from it either.

"Christmas is usually a time of year when employees can switch off, but without offices to step away from, many will struggle to detach from work.

"Employers should take note and listen to employee concerns and better support workplace wellbeing."

Emily, a civil servant, said she recognised the findings of the report in her own working life.

“The culture of everyone at the moment is working with no leisure time," she told The Independent. "Now I’m working all the time I would be communicating, so I wake up, have breakfast, and immediately start working at 8am. Then I don’t finish until 7pm. It seems like the whole world is just developed into this 24-hour work culture”.

"When I’ve been sick, I have my laptop at home, whereas I’d normally try and keep it at work, and maintain a sense of work life balance. [Before the pandemic] I’d take the whole day off. Now, if I'm feeling sick I sleep in for two hours and then check emails. I never take the day off, no one else does.”

Dan Shears, head of health and safety at the trade union GMB, said many employees are “very much working without direction; unclear about timescale, unclear about expectation”. 

But others, he said, were enduring “complete micromanagement where certainly there is a lack of trust in the worker to work from home. And as a result, there is almost a continual phone call and email checking-up culture, and neither of these things is the right balance”.

“This is causing a tsunami of poor mental health, and employers will have to prepare for people being off sick with stress in 2021," he added.

“The most obvious thing to do is to create a contract around this setting clear parameters about when work contacted various levels of work, how much work they're doing, and just making sure there was clear and regular contact to know what's going on.

“There's been a real absence of that detailed and good-quality advice and guidance from the government on how employees should manage this. So we have seen some poor responses from employers, but not been helped by lack of guidance on exactly what they should be doing.”