Is remote work making us paranoid?

The number of people working remotely has skyrocketed since January 2020, with approximately half the U.S. labor force working from home in the early days of the pandemic, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Those workers tend to be more educated and wealthier than workers whose jobs cannot be performed remotely, and low-wage workers have been much more likely to lose their jobs during the pandemic.While some have returned to the office since last spring, a significant number have not. Many estimates of how many workers office workers projected to work permanently at home, post-pandemic, range from 20% to 30%, up from under 10% before the coronavirus. But millions more Americans communicating completely virtually with their co-workers does not mean our emotional office dynamics have caught up yet to our new videoconference world. Many are feeling a spectrum of new anxieties about their interactions with colleagues.