A 2025 Gallup poll recently introduced a concept termed The Remote Work Paradox where fully remote workers report the highest employee engagement rates yet suffer from the lowest personal well-being among remote-capable jobholders. This insight reveals more than a contradiction as it uncovers a global design flaw in how we think about modern work.

For several years, the tension between productivity and emotional health in remote work has emerged repeatedly in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and human resources (HR) discussions. Many companies, especially small SaaS firms without physical office locations, celebrate improved output from remote staff while simultaneously struggling with employee retention and disengagement from workplace culture. At the same time, accessibility advocates champion the availability of fully remote work options to increase employment among the disabled community, knowing that hybrid or fully on-site requirements cut off access for highly qualified individuals within groups such as the homebound population. Historically, remote work surges in the US have led to increases in employment for underrepresented groups. 

We can look at the human experience through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is a five-tier pyramid in psychology that represents the importance of each need type. Physiological needs come first with elements like air, water, shelter, and clothing. Next are safety needs which include health, employment, resources, and personal security. Only after this is the third tier of love and belonging needs with friendship, intimacy, family, and sense of connection. For example, disabled individuals who experienced loss of mobility later in their careers might express a desire to work in person but recognize that this is not physically possible and place their safety needs before their love and belonging needs as is human. In these cases, fully remote employment is a must-have rather than a perk as so many corporations incorrectly frame this form of work. Just like their non-disabled peers who are also employed in fully remote positions, love and belonging needs, self-esteem needs, and self-actualization needs as the remaining parts of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs may remain unfulfilled where previously workplaces offered a structured setting for socialization. 

To address this disconnect, we must examine what remote engagement is truly built upon and why so many people feel emotionally adrift despite being professionally successful. This requires going beyond surface-level explanations and looking closely at the psychological tradeoffs of autonomy, the structural gaps in emotional development, and the cultural patterns that have shaped how we relate to others. The following sections explore these dimensions, tracing the roots of disconnection and identifying pathways toward more sustainable, reciprocal forms of belonging.

Looking In-Depth at The Remote Work Paradox

The Remote Work Paradox cannot be understood through productivity metrics alone. This concept requires a deeper examination of how autonomy, disconnection, and emotional infrastructure interact over time. Remote employees may excel in goal completion and report satisfaction with their work roles, but they are also navigating a quieter crisis of social depletion and psychological fragmentation. This paradox illustrates that engagement is not synonymous with well-being. Rather, it is possible for people to be highly committed to their jobs while simultaneously feeling profoundly disconnected from others and themselves. To move forward, organizations must move beyond measuring task-based output and begin asking more nuanced questions about the emotional ecosystems surrounding remote work.

Engaged But Struggling

Gallup defines employee engagement as enthusiasm and attachment to one's role, team, and purpose. Likely due to their autonomy and flexible work arrangements, remote workers outperform their in-person peers in employee engagement which directly contributes to business outcomes. However, personal well-being lags as a separate measure that includes emotional states and life satisfaction. Fully remote workers are less likely to be thriving than their hybrid or remote-capable on-site counterparts. These workers report higher levels of anger, sadness, and especially loneliness although slightly less stress than hybrid workers with the measurement being for workers to report whether the previous day had been highly stressful.

Gallup compared remote-capable employees who work fully onsite versus those who work fully remotely. There was a separate category of those who work fully onsite where their job did not have remote capabilities, such as positions which would require in-person, hands-on labor. The comparison between fully onsite remote-capable versus fully remote employment is the most relevant comparison as it controls for job type and industry. Overall, remote workers fare worse emotionally in their personal lives even though their employee engagement levels are higher than other groups. Autonomy without belonging seems to wear people down over time.

Beyond the Workplace: Structural Isolation

Online forums are filled with people describing the emotional toll of working alone. Friend-finding apps like Bumble BFF are packed with profiles from remote workers seeking human connection after spending weeks barely interacting with anyone. This creates a new kind of emotional labor: the pressure to find meaning and connection outside of work, without the social tools to do so. Profile taglines frequently describe a desire for a friend to fill a gap, someone to pull them out of the house, to drag them out of their comfort zone, to simply be there. For some homebound professionals with physical disabilities, this isolation is externally imposed by inaccessible environments and physical limitations.

However, among those who can leave their homes but choose not to, the repeated use of the word friend as a kind of emotional fix is telling. It reflects how many people are not seeking mutual companionship but rather someone to compensate for a lack in themselves, a kind of tool. In turn, highly empathetic individuals may feel compelled to rescue these posters, further perpetuating an unhealthy dynamic. Even when intentions are not malicious, these exchanges often reduce human connection to a means to an end.

This transactional mindset isn't new. One Psychology Today article outlined how U.S. culture celebrates relationships through the lens of utility, such as asking “what can I get out of this,” mirroring the language of commerce. Such framing corrodes trust, causes imbalance, and denies the inherent value of relationships as mutual, evolving experiences.

This dynamic extends into what Beatriz Victoria Albina calls emotional outsourcing, which is the habit of relying on others for validation, self-worth, and emotional regulation instead of cultivating inner resilience. It’s a learned dependency, increasingly evident in the turn to AI chatbots for comfort, companionship, and pseudo-relationships. But AI didn’t create this need. Another Psychology Today article asked if emotional outsourcing were the future of relationships in the US and described the rise of use of AI chatbots as if people were not already using other humans as tools in emotional outsourcing. In actuality, AI became a stopgap for people who already lacked relational skills and viewed human connection transactionally. Studies still show that most people prefer human interaction for everything from therapy to customer service. When someone prefers AI, it may be less about novelty and more about control, ease of access, and a discomfort with mutual vulnerability.

In real life, emotional outsourcing in relationships creates strain, resentment, and imbalance. As one podcast host noted, she had an epiphany that only she truly knew her needs and it was her responsibility to meet them. That recognition is powerful. Yet, in the United States, a diagnosis-first culture combined with passive talk therapy models can sideline this kind of growth. Many therapy clients report sessions where their dissatisfaction with relationships is pathologized as depression, and therapists provide a listening ear but little relational guidance. Even modalities like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) may be cited as a therapeutic tool used by the clinician but never actually practiced, turning therapy into a revolving door of verbal validation rather than transformation.

By contrast, in many South American cultures, therapy is fundamentally relational and humanistic. In Argentina, for example, therapy is seen as a normal, even aspirational, part of life. Going to therapy is not a reaction to a crisis but a means of learning how to live and connect better.

My own experience with a Colombian therapist highlighted the vast difference between South American and North American approaches. From the beginning, she asked detailed questions to understand not just my feelings but the quality of my relationships and my role in them. She assigned homework that built gradually, asking me to reflect not only on what I needed from others, but how I could model those needs for myself. She affirmed that validation from others is a real human need, but rather than stopping there, she gave me structured tools to seek it out in healthy ways.

Her approach emphasized self-recognition, clarity of personal boundaries, and mindful connection. Instead of villainizing people who couldn’t meet my needs, she taught me to observe and assess: were these people willing to grow alongside me? Could they identify their own needs too just as I was working to do? Were they putting in the work to model how to meet their own needs? In this view, friendship is not a rescue mission or a fix for loneliness but a shared process of becoming more whole. This model offers mutual expansion, where no one is expected to fill someone else’s gaps; instead, the goal is to walk alongside others in growth.

Ultimately, left to their own devices, remote workers often try to recreate the camaraderie of an office through digital stand-ins—Slack banter, virtual body doubling, virtual coffees, friend-finding apps. But without shared rituals or daily interaction, many end up reaching outward in ways that emotionally outsource their needs to friends, family, and even strangers without ever truly understanding what it is that they need and what types of relationships work for them in mutuality. For example, they may lace every message with a new connection from a networking event with self-deprecation, framing everything from their hobbies to their career goals as insufficient, flailing in their attempt to receive constant reassurance from some unmet need, and failing to realize that they are putting emotional strain on the other person who has now been dragged unwittingly into a caretaker role. When this inevitably leads to an end of the relationship, these individuals recognize that they lose new-found friends quickly and eventually turn to AI as an entity that does not require mutuality to remain. However, the deeper solution may be learning how to cultivate emotional strength from within, and from there, to build friendships not out of scarcity but shared humanity.

Why People Do Not Know How to Build Reciprocal Connections

In traditional workplaces, social connection was baked into the day-to-day experience. Casual hallway conversations, shared coffee breaks, and spontaneous post-meeting banter allowed people to form relationships with relatively little effort. These interactions were structured by the rhythm of the workplace, creating a kind of social scaffolding that people could lean on without ever needing to fully develop the skills of intentional connection.

This setup created what might be called functional friendships, or relationships based on proximity, resources, and shared routines rather than emotional intimacy. Many people believed they had strong social lives, when in reality, their connection was situational and not deeply reciprocal.

The shift to remote work during the pandemic removed these built-in rituals. Suddenly, relationships required initiative. Conversations had to be scheduled or started from scratch. Without the natural momentum of physical proximity, many people found themselves unable to replicate the same level of interaction. Without structure, the emotional skill gaps became glaringly obvious.

Remote Life Revealed That Proximity Does Not Equal Intimacy

As remote workers in the US found themselves increasingly isolated, many turned to friend-finding apps or social media platforms to fill the void. The pandemic didn't create this issue. It simply exposed it. Without office birthday cakes, group lunches, or daily face time, many people realized that their social muscles had atrophied.

The shift from proximity-based interaction to autonomy-based relationships required skills that people had never built in the US in a country that emphasizes hyper-individualism in what some descriptions present as a cutthroat culture where people believe they must emerge the winner in extracting some resource from a relationship rather than recognizing the value of benefitting mutually from relationships in a ripple effect on societies. More specifically, people did not know how to initiate conversation without a shared task, balance vulnerability with emotional boundaries, offer presence without overstepping into problem-solving, and recognize and respect the emotional labor of others. 

Where in-person work environments once created opportunities for connection, people working remotely now have to create those opportunities themselves. Many are still learning how.

Why Emotional Reciprocity Was Never Taught

At the cultural level, many Western societies value independence, productivity, and performance. Emotional interdependence is often viewed as weakness. As a result, many people were never taught the basics of relational reciprocity, specifically that it is human to need others but overwhelming to others to outsource all of their emotional needs, that being vulnerable does not mean collapsing into someone to be rescued, that giving support does not mean abandoning your own boundaries.

These lessons are often not modeled at home, not taught in schools, and not reinforced in a work culture where connection is seen as secondary to performance. Research has started to explore this topic more in school systems where emotional reciprocity and emotional experiences between teachers and students and parents can correlate with academic success. As one paper describes it in a study conducted in a university setting, “although emotions are individually felt, they are socially constructed between people. Emotions and the appraisals that influence them are very often related to other people and regulated in association with others.” This is key as humans are social creatures. In cultures where a transactional focus on relationships is emphasized with the person who manages to be the receiver of resources being portrayed positively, the point is missed of mutuality in that being able to maintain reciprocal relationships is the true value present in many relationships as self-regulation of emotions is important, but we need these relationships as part of our larger circle of mutual emotional regulation and social-emotional well-being.

When the Empaths Burn Out

Those who are emotionally attuned and socially generous often feel compelled to rescue others who make vague bids for connection, responding to constant self-deprecation, over-apologizing, or emotional dumping. Over time, this one-sided labor wears them down and leads to the disintegration of relationships. In trying to be kind, they end up becoming unpaid emotional caregivers.

The irony is, many of these helpers are the ones who've done the internal work in identifying their needs, honoring their boundaries, and developing relational skills. They're not perfect, but they're fluent. Thus, it is this fluency that makes them such attractive targets for emotional outsourcing as these empaths seem like safe harbors.

A Way Forward from Transaction to Transformation

To build real, reciprocal friendships, people must shift from extraction to expansion. What would this look like? Firstly, there would be self-recognition before expectation where people identify their own needs before placing their feelings of lack on someone else. Secondly, there would be curiosity over control where people would ask others about their lives without the agenda of being fixed or fixing them. Thirdly, there would be presence over performance where the connection is allowed to grow from shared experience and not emotional urgency. 

Community groups, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals, and mental health practitioners have a role here. They can provide the training wheels for remote workers relearning how to connect after a life online during the pandemic and a previous social life filled with functional friendships in in-person work settings. People can grow through workshops, structured social events, or accessible resources on healthy communication. Perhaps ultimately the Remote Work Paradox showed us that there is a need for significant social-emotional skill development in the US even in adulthood to combat the loneliness crisis and the self-reported low levels of personal well-being by fully remote workers. 

Ultimately, mutual friendship is a skill. One that can be taught, practiced, and refined but only when people are willing to recognize that friendship, like all meaningful relationships, is not something that is found but is built. As demonstrated in the articles on academic success when exploring the presence of emotional reciprocity in relationships in a learning environment, organizations can likewise recognize the importance of building community environments that focus on emotional reciprocity in relationships for community members, recognizing that work performance and personal well-being can simultaneously improve with the presence of more emotionally healthy relationships. 

DEI, HR, and Community Health: Designing the Future

The challenges posed by The Remote Work Paradox cannot be solved by corporate wellness slogans or occasional team-building activities. These challenges require a reorientation of how DEI, HR, and community health practitioners think about belonging and engagement in fully remote environments. Historically, workplace inclusion efforts have focused on representation and bias reduction. Yet, in a post-2020 workforce, emotional infrastructure has become just as essential. Engagement without well-being is not sustainable. High-output employees will eventually burn out if the environments in which they work do not promote psychological safety, peer connection, and emotional self-regulation.

Moving from Engagement to Emotional Sustainability

Remote workers report the highest employee engagement and yet the lowest overall well-being. This contradiction reveals a core problem in that the systems currently in place are designed to measure how hard someone works, not how well someone lives. Emotional sustainability, a term increasingly used in occupational health circles, refers to an individual’s capacity to maintain emotional resilience, motivation, and psychological health over time. Without this, engagement is short-lived.

In fully remote contexts, DEI and HR professionals must rethink their mandates. Their roles can no longer be centered solely on internal equity metrics or virtual morale events. Instead, these leaders must turn toward systemic support strategies that address emotional sustainability and psychological scaffolding.

Three Critical Roles for HR and DEI Professionals

In an era of remote work, the isolation of fully remote workers has highlighted a need for population support in exercising their social and emotional muscles to better navigate the flexibility and autonomy of working online that also has left them largely with a self-reported low quality of life. 

1. Teaching Management of Remote Autonomy as a Core Competency

Rather than assuming that employees know how to structure their day, manage energy, or engage socially outside of the workplace, organizations can create training programs that treat these competencies as learnable skills. These trainings should include modules on structuring workdays to include recovery breaks, identifying emotional depletion signals, creating boundaries between digital workspaces and personal spaces, and initiating and sustaining social interaction in digital and physical contexts. Managing autonomy is not an innate trait. Without training, it becomes an emotional liability. The myth that remote workers can just figure it out undermines retention and inclusion efforts alike.

2. Replacing Virtual Team-Building with Well-Being Architecture

Virtual happy hours, forced games, and synchronous video chats with work team members as workplace requirements often harm more than they help. Employees with chronic illness, sensory sensitivities, and other conditions often find these experiences draining or exclusionary. For example, a disabled employee struggling with fatigue and a positional disability may feel overwhelmed by camera expectations, posture policing, or being asked to participate with high energy during a time when their capacity is limited.

Rather than create more synchronous events, HR departments can instead implement asynchronous storytelling prompts with opt-in formats, anonymous peer appreciation systems that allow recognition without performance, well-being “flex” hours that permit social or reflective time built into the workweek, and optional community channels that center shared identity, interest, or challenge, without tying presence to visibility. The goal is to create a culture where belonging is not conditional upon extroversion or performative enthusiasm.

3. Embedding Accountability Around Emotional Health

Just as teams track deliverables, they can also track well-being touchpoints. Employee experience dashboards can include opt-in wellness indicators. Pulse surveys can ask about emotional energy levels and not just job satisfaction. Management can be trained to have conversations about workload in tandem with emotional bandwidth. Instead of waiting for signs of burnout, organizations can proactively create workflows that center restoration alongside performance.

Human Resources departments can also build cross-functional partnerships with mental health providers to deliver on-demand group coaching, emotional skills workshops, or therapeutic support in a way that reflects cultural and neurodivergent diversity.

Expanding the DEI Mandate: From Workplace Inclusion to Social Inclusion

The original premise of DEI was to ensure representation and equity in professional spaces. This work is incomplete if it ignores the lived experience of employees beyond work hours. Remote workers often experience loneliness not because of work tasks but because of the absence of structured community interaction. Especially for disabled, LGBTQ+, or neurodivergent employees, traditional social venues may not be accessible or psychologically safe.

DEI professionals can broaden their scope by investing in localized community-building partnerships, structured social learning events open to employees and their networks, inclusive mentorship programs that pair employees across disciplines and demographics, and emotional resilience curricula as part of leadership development.

For instance, a company might partner with a neighborhood nonprofit to host a monthly gathering for remote employees in target cities and local community members focused on storytelling, culture sharing, or co-creating art. This not only promotes in-person human connection but strengthens employer brand visibility and builds community equity.

Designing Infrastructure for Connection: The Role of Community Health Leaders

Public health officials and community wellness leaders also have a stake in this issue. Loneliness has been recognized as a national public health crisis in the US. Fully remote work, while improving employment access for historically excluded groups, also exacerbates structural isolation unless community-level interventions exist.

Local health organizations can support remote workers by designing connection literacy programs that teach emotional reciprocity, boundary-setting, and conflict navigation; launching low-stakes, high-welcome online and in-person community events that require no prior social circle to attend; and creating outreach models for individuals with mobility impairments or health conditions that restrict social participation.

These programs should not be framed as remedial but as developmental. Many adults in the Western world were never taught how to build reciprocal friendships or lost this skill over time due to the fixation in cultures such as US culture on transactional relationships. The shift to screen-based living has deprived many people of the chance to practice social skills and understand the value of preserving relationships themselves rather than looking at who is the winner of a relationship as the extractor, a fact that leads to a history of disintegrating relationships with the extractor noting this pattern but perhaps failing to recognize why they are the common denominator. 

A Shift in Language: From Team-Building to Community-Building

Language shapes expectations. Team-building centers the company. Community-building centers people. When organizations invest in community development—both internally and externally—they position themselves not only as employers but as architects of better lives. This has ripple effects on recruitment, retention, and brand reputation.

Community-building can include microgrants for employee-led social projects, paid volunteer hours for cross-functional teams to contribute to local organizations, publicly accessible webinars that promote relational skills and social wellness, in-person and online local interest-based groups, and in-person options to include employees with all ranges of mobility such as moderated interest-based groups hosted at employees’ homes who are homebound where this is possible. 

These initiatives create belonging not through top-down messaging but through shared lived experience.

Building a Future Worth Working In

As remote work becomes a long-term reality, the question is not how to lure people back to the office but how to reimagine what belonging and employee wellness looks like without in-person work. Belonging cannot be borrowed simply from replicas of physical proximity as people once experienced with functional friendships in the office. The removal of this element has exposed a gap but also created an opportunity to rebuild a better level of belonging through modeling what connection looks like as something built through shared values, structured emotional learning, and reciprocity. 

The future of DEI and HR can morph into designing human sustainability more than just measuring diversity. The most inclusive companies will be the ones that treat belonging not as a brand value, but as a skill, an infrastructure, and a collective responsibility to ripple out into the community rather than keep these initiatives internal to the company.