The debate about remote work tends to split into two camps. There’s the “working from home is the best thing that ever happened” crowd, and the “we need to get people back to the office” crowd. Both are convinced they’re right. Both are oversimplifying.

A new longitudinal report from the University of Melbourne’s Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, released this month, offers something far more useful than opinions: three years of data from over 8,000 Australian workers across industries, tracking their mental health, social connectedness, physical health, and job satisfaction from 2023 to 2025.

The results are nuanced, and I think everyone in the debate needs to hear them.

The Headline Finding: Hybrid Workers Are Doing Best

Across almost every wellbeing measure, the group that reported the highest scores was hybrid workers — those spending two to three days in the office and the rest at home. They scored higher on job satisfaction, lower on anxiety and depression scales, and reported stronger social connections than both fully remote and fully in-office workers.

This wasn’t a small difference. Hybrid workers scored 18% higher on a composite wellbeing index than fully in-office workers and 12% higher than fully remote workers. The researchers controlled for income, job type, age, and household structure, and the pattern held.

The hypothesis is that hybrid work offers the best of both worlds — the autonomy and reduced commute of remote work, combined with the social interaction and structure of office time. It’s not revolutionary as an idea, but having three years of Australian-specific data to back it up is valuable.

Fully Remote Work: The Loneliness Problem

Here’s where the data challenged my assumptions. I’ve been broadly pro-remote work. I work from home myself, and I value the flexibility enormously. But the report found a consistent decline in social wellbeing among fully remote workers over the three-year period.

In the first year of the study, fully remote workers reported high satisfaction — the novelty factor, the absence of commuting, the freedom to structure their own day. But by year three, that group showed the steepest decline in social connectedness scores and the highest increase in loneliness measures.

Dr Lisa Wang, the study’s lead researcher, noted that the effect was most pronounced in workers living alone and those under 30. “For younger workers who are still building professional networks and social identities, the absence of in-person workplace interaction created a gap that most didn’t find other ways to fill,” she said.

This doesn’t mean remote work is bad. It means that fully remote work, without deliberate investment in social connection, can erode wellbeing over time. And “deliberate investment” means more than a weekly Zoom call.

The Office Isn’t the Answer Either

Before anyone uses this data to justify mandatory return-to-office mandates, the report had equally sobering findings for fully in-office workers.

This group reported the highest commute-related stress, the lowest perceived autonomy, and — notably — the worst sleep quality of all three groups. Workers commuting more than 45 minutes each way showed significantly higher cortisol levels and lower overall wellbeing than those with shorter commutes or no commute at all.

The report also found that in-office workers were more likely to engage in “presenteeism” — showing up to work while unwell — which has its own cascade of health consequences. The pressure to be visibly present often overrides the common sense of staying home when you’re sick.

So no, dragging everyone back to the office five days a week isn’t a wellbeing strategy. It’s a control strategy dressed up as one.

What Actually Predicted Wellbeing

Across all three groups, the factors most strongly associated with positive wellbeing were: autonomy over schedule (the key variable wasn’t location — it was choice), manager quality (the single strongest predictor of workplace mental health, outweighing workload and income), physical movement during the day, regular informal social interactions, and clear boundaries between work and rest.

What Workplaces Should Do With This

If I were advising an employer based on this data, I’d say: offer hybrid arrangements where possible, invest in manager training (your managers are your frontline mental health infrastructure), stop measuring performance by presence, and create social infrastructure for remote workers through regular in-person gatherings and meaningful virtual connection beyond just meetings.

The Personal Takeaway

If you work remotely and you’ve noticed a creeping sense of disconnection, you’re not imagining it. The data suggests it’s a real and predictable pattern. That doesn’t mean you need to go back to the office — it means you need to build social connection into your life with the same intentionality you bring to your work schedule.

Join something. A gym class, a co-working space, a running group, a book club. Work at a cafe once a week. Call a colleague instead of sending a Slack message. These small things add up in ways that protect against the isolation the data is flagging.

The future of work isn’t remote or office. It’s thoughtful. And that thoughtfulness is a wellbeing issue as much as it is a business one.

Jess Morley is a Brisbane-based wellness writer and yoga instructor. She writes about evidence-based wellbeing at SoulShine.