The ability and opportunity to work from home has become a necessity for many in Australia’s workforce, especially since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Crawling out of bed and taking seconds to walk to your computer to log in for the day, also known as “telecommuting,” could have mental health benefits for some workers, a new study shows.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne analyzed data from the annual Household, Income and Labor Dynamics (HILDA) Survey from the years 2002 to 2023 to track the work and mental health of more than 16,000 workers.
The years 2020 and 2021 were not included in the study because people’s mental health could have been more affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A key feature of the study was to investigate whether the effects of working from home and travel time differed between people in good and poor mental health.
In terms of hybrid working, this has delivered a major well-being improvement for women, but only in certain situations.
When women spent some time in the office or office each week and worked from home, the greatest mental health gains were noted.
The gains were comparable to those of a 15 percent increase in household income.
For women with poorer mental health, flexible working arrangements led to better mental health.
The research shows that there is less work stress and that helping women combine work and life are other benefits of working from home.
For men, working from home had no measurable effect on mental health, positive or negative.
The report noted that this could be due to the unequal distribution of household and care tasks, which disproportionately fall on women and limit their spatial mobility.
Workers with poorer mental health appear to be more sensitive to long commute times and are likely to benefit from flexible working arrangements.
For women who commute to work, there was no discernible effect. But for men, longer commutes equated to worse mental health for those who were already having problems.
For a man in the middle of mental health care, adding half an hour to his one-way trip reduces reported mental health by about the same amount as a 2 percent drop in household income, the authors wrote.
For employees who don’t have problems with their mental health, commuting and working from home have little impact on them. Yet they still value flexibility, the study shows.
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