Why Canadian HR leaders should rethink how they support remote teams to prevent burnout, loneliness, and disengagement
New research from Gallup has revealed an interesting paradox that human resources professionals will want to pay attention to: remote workers are the most engaged with their jobs compared to hybrid or in-person colleagues – they’re also the saddest.
The engagement comes at a cost – the more engaged employees are with their work, the less energy they have left over for their personal lives and their own wellbeing.
While employers may be tempted to dismiss this finding – because employees are still engaged with their work – there are long-term, organizational consequences to letting remote employees’ wellbeing slide, according to one expert.
“If employees are left to their own devices … they are much more accountable to themselves,” says Matthias Spitzmuller, associate professor of organizational behaviour at Smith School of Business.
“That accountability also translates to higher performance expectations that employees have for their own work. It's somewhat counterintuitive, because we expect them to slack off, when in reality, in most cases, they actually raise their own expectations for themselves.”
The ‘autonomy paradox’ of remote worker engagement
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, 31 per cent of exclusively remote workers globally are engaged at work — compared to 23 per cent engagement for hybrid and on-site remote-capable employees, and 19 per cent for on-site employees whose roles are not remote-capable.
However, remote workers also report the most negative emotions; 30 cent of exclusively remote employees experienced sadness the previous day — more than any other group. They also reported the highest levels of anger (25 per cent) and loneliness (27 per cent).
The problem stems from the idea of autonomy, Spitzmuller explains; remote workers are generally given more autonomy over their days, which on the surface seems like a good thing, but it can be harmful in the long run.
“Over the years, I've looked at many data sets in which we're looking for drivers of motivation and performance and engagement, and the one factor that always jumps out at me, because it has such a powerful effect, is autonomy,” Spitzmuller says.
“What remote workers definitely have is they have much more autonomy. They have much more discretion over what to do, at what times and with whom, with which methods.”
This “autonomy paradox”, says Spitzmuller, explains why remote workers, who are more motivated and engaged in their work than any other group, are also the saddest, loneliest and angriest – not to mention the most likely to be thinking about leaving, along with their hybrid counterparts.
“If you leave motivated employees to their own devices in the absence of traditional control mechanisms, they actually tend to overcompensate,” he says.
“They work harder. They work more.”
Source: Gallup
Remote work and social exclusion
Remote worker wellbeing isn’t an easy nut to crack – in fact, it requires employers to embrace a completely different mindset around what they think employees need to thrive.
Lucas Monzani, professor of organizational behaviour at Ivey Business School at Western University, explains that a key drawback of remote work is its negative effect on communication – since remote workers completely rely on technology for their connection to their workplace, a vital social aspect of work is lost.
“The computer medium – the camera, the Zoom, the chat – reduces the quality of our social interactions,” he says, adding that even generic corporate communication can drive a wedge between remote workers and their organizations.
“Communicating through email or chat, you cannot capture the tone of what is being said, and people misinterpret or do not get the full understanding … so that can generate confusion and frustration, anger. It can increase the sense of isolation, because people feel that they are not understood.”
Social connection or “relatedness” is one of the three aspects of self-determination that are essential to employee motivation, Monzani explains, along with autonomy and mastery. While remote work offers employees autonomy and opportunities for mastery, he says, it is seriously lacking in the area of social connection – and it’s more serious than employers realize.
“This increased autonomy, the tradeoff is … reduced fulfillment of your need for social exchanges of being around people, of having these relationships at work that extend beyond the job description,” he says.
“Some people actually have friendships at work, or acquaintances or social relations, which they enjoy connecting with. So one first thing that remote work does … it reduces that sense of being connected with other people.”
Clarity, planning, and fewer interruptions improve performance
Remote work isn’t all bad, with one big advantage being fewer interruptions and clearer work plans. As Spitzmuller explains, with fewer opportunities for interaction and check-ins involved in remote work, organizations should adapt to be more organized and clearer about jobs and tasks.
“If you ask employees at the beginning of a workday, ‘How would you like to spend your time today?’ and then at the end of the day you follow up, ‘How did you actually spend it?’ With remote workers, there's much more alignment between the prospective plans for a day and actual time spent on those activities,” Spitzmuller explains.
This gives remote workers an advantage in that they are interrupted less throughout the day by casual followups with managers. Remote work also encourages troubleshooting to occur during the planning stage, not on the fly as can happen in face-to-face situations.
“If you see employees day to day, the idea is that oftentimes you can work through problems on the go, like, ‘My door is always open for you, come on in if you have got any questions,’” Spitzmuller says.
“Whereas if you know that people are virtual, you're not going to see them for extended periods of time, managers are much more willing to think through, ‘What could be the challenges here, what could be potential remedies, and how can we proactively define your role in a way to minimize the risk of that happening?’ So I think HR departments, organizations, they are much more mindful, much more thoughtful about how to design work when it when it happens to be remote.”
Source: Gallup
Declining well-being and boundary collapse
The emotional cost of remote work is significant – as the Gallup report revealed, 45 per cent of remote employees reported experiencing stress the previous day, compared to 39 per cent of on-site remote-capable employees and 38 per cent of non-remote-capable employees.
Spitzmuller points to the blurring of work-life boundaries during the pandemic as an important learning experience and what HR and employers should be leaning away from – recalling the emergence of a “night shift” that hadn’t existed before.
“At the end of the day, it's a zero-sum game, because the time and the resources that you leave at work, they also come at the expense of the time and resources that you have for your private lives,” Spitzmuller says.
“What we have seen, for example, during COVID when most people were working remotely … somewhat counterintuitively, the average workday became longer. What also adds to that is that the boundaries between work and our private lives blurs to a much greater extent with virtual work.”
Genuine interaction needed for remote workers
Employers can also look to COVID-era work practices for lessons on how to connect, Monzani says. Social interaction is essential for remote workers to counteract the disconnection they are experiencing due to the technological distance, and the solutions are similar to what was done during lockdowns.
“You really have to invest in the social distance, reduce the social distance … I mean the perceived closeness that I have in an exchange with a co-worker,” he says.
Monzani points to simple communication as one way to decrease social distance – basically, when writing an email to a fully remote colleague or employee, think twice before using corporate jargon, as it could be contributing to their sense of isolation: “Generate the space to connect others on a human level.”
Spitzmuller emphasizes the need for HR to proactively build healthy practices into virtual work by modeling sustainable workplace behaviour “that also allows for healthy boundaries between work and private lives.”
He also urges the integration of intentional, meaningful social contact: “You can have Slack channels dedicated to pets or hobbies or activities like that, where people connect with each other in a meaningful way, in intentional social interactions.”
