Employees who work remotely full time by choice – not because an organization requires it – feel greater autonomy and less isolation, improving job satisfaction. But those benefits may fade as more colleagues also work from home, reducing the arrangement’s distinctiveness, new Cornell research finds.

Surveying more than 2,100 employees of a Fortune 500 health insurance company, the researchers found that how working from home is initiated, and how many others do it, shape the experience of a rapidly growing category of workers. The results suggest organizations should be cautious when implementing work-from-home policies and strive for flexibility, the researchers said.

“Working from home is not equally effective for everybody,” said Bradford Bell, the William J. Conaty Professor in Strategic Human Resources and director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies in the ILR School. “Organizations shouldn’t assume that having people work from home will automatically lead to more positive outcomes.”

Bell is a co-author of “It Matters How You Got There and Who Else Is Doing It: Examining the Effects of Two Social-Contextual Characteristics of Working From Home,” published Nov. 4 in Human Resource Management, with first author Kristie McAlpine, M.S. ’14, Ph.D. ’17, assistant professor of management at Rutgers University’s Camden School of Business; and Emmanuelle Léon, professor at ESCP Business School in Paris and a former visiting fellow at ILR.

As hybrid work has taken hold, the average employee who can work from home now is estimated to spend about one-third of their hours there, while as many as 1 in 4 employees are fully remote. Bell’s team focused on the latter – an understudied population, he said – to better understand the social and psychological factors influencing work from home.

Research to date about the “WFH” experience is mixed. On the positive side, remote employees may feel they have more freedom in how to structure and complete their work. On the downside, they may feel more isolated socially, and career prospects could suffer if they are “out of sight, out of mind.”

Studies generally have assumed employees chose their work arrangement, Bell said, but that often is not the case. In a pair of surveys conducted before the pandemic, in partnership with a firm engaged with the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, the researchers collected data from full-time remote employees on whether they had chosen to work from home – when hired, or later on – or were required to, and the density of colleagues doing it.

The results showed “initiation” mattered a great deal: Employees who chose remote work (most of the sample) felt a stronger sense of autonomy and less isolation. That translated to higher job satisfaction, better understanding of their organization and less interest in seeking another job.

“You get the best of both worlds,” Bell said. “If people can choose to work from home, you get a much more positive experience from an employee’s standpoint.”

But across units ranging from three to 30 people, as more employees worked remotely, individuals felt less autonomy. And contrary to the researchers’ expectations, an increased density of remote workers didn’t reduce individuals’ feelings of isolation. The scholars speculated those outcomes reflect work routines becoming more standardized around remote processes, and a greater reliance on less rich virtual interaction.

“That’s a concerning finding for companies, because it suggests that as you scale up working from home, there might be diminishing returns,” Bell said. “Some of the utility of these arrangements might wane as they’re adopted en masse.”

Bell said there are many good reasons why organizations might want employees to spend at least some time in an office – to facilitate collaboration, say, or when working with sensitive information. The findings about choice don’t mean organizations should simply let every employee choose their own arrangement, he said, but that they should build in flexibility and personalization to the extent possible. Then, a policy and rationale must be communicated clearly and consistently across units.

“Organizations should focus on how working from home is initiated and be aware that as you adopt these arrangements, you might lose some of the uniqueness – and therefore some of the psychological benefits – that come along with them,” Bell said. “For employees, it matters how you get there, and who else around you is doing it.”