A lot of us are tired of working from home, survey finds. Some even consider quitting
A survey of 2,000 Americans revealed that the benefits of staying in your pajamas and working from home all day aren’t all rainbows and butterflies.
Sixty-three percent of respondents said they felt like the cons outweigh the pros — so much so that 3 in 10 people said they have considered quitting their job since the coronavirus pandemic banned them from their workplaces, according to the survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Front, a company that offers collaborative email for customer communication.
The same amount of people said they even considered changing careers altogether.
The top reasons why people have considered quitting are unreasonable workloads in short periods of time (17%), lack of connection to their team (14%), and their company’s poor handling of their transition from in-person to remote locations (14%).
And without a train to catch or traffic to beat, many people who have been working from home said they feel like their work days are longer than usual; 50% of respondents said they spend five or more additional hours working remotely each week.
Some of the reasons why at-home offices proved to be busts are communication over too many platforms (41%), a “significant uptick” in online messages with co-workers (34%), insufficient IT support (34%), and general confusion due to spotty communication between different teams across a company (32%).
“More apps create more noise – and noise is stressful in an already challenging year,” Nate Abbott, head of product at Front, said in a news release sent to McClatchy News.
“Every new app for collaboration comes with its own notifications – a popup in your browser, on your phone, or yet another email,” Abbott added. “The world is distracting enough right now. People don’t need more ways to collaborate, they need collaboration to happen in the right places.”
More than half (57%) of respondents said their job has become more stressful since the pandemic began, with half of them saying they receive more than 20 additional emails each week, particularly because of all the new messaging apps companies have had to take up to make remote work possible.
“Particularly with a remote workforce, teammates need to be able to collaborate and lean on each other, while being closer to their customers. There’s really no better opportunity to witness the impact of your work than when you can see the effect of your work on a customer’s life,” Abbott said.
The survey’s margin of error is 2.2% with a 95% confidence interval, a spokesperson for OnePoll told McClatchy News in an email.
This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 4:20 PM with the headline "A lot of us are tired of working from home, survey finds. Some even consider quitting."
