Enablers of work from home culture: an integrated empirical framework

PurposeWith the emergence of COVID-19 and increased infections, organizations urged their employees to work from home. Furthermore, with the on-going pandemic, employees take measures to ensure individual safety and their families. Hence, work from home culture can result in long-term employee satisfaction. However, no study addresses the development of work from the home culture in an integrated framework. Therefore, the current research explores the role of safety during the pandemic, organizational commitment and employee motivation on work from home culture, which may influence employee satisfaction. Furthermore, job demands and home demands were also evaluated for employee satisfaction.Design/methodology/approachThe study used existing scales of the factors to develop the measures and collect perceptual responses from employees working from home, supported with a pre-test. The study executed a survey with effective responses from 132 individuals spread across different sectors to validate the hypotheses. The responses were analysed using partial least squares in ADANCO 2.2.FindingsFindings suggest safety concerns along with organization commitment enhances work from home culture. Such work from home culture enhances employee motivation and employee satisfaction. Furthermore, job demands and home demands also influence employee satisfaction.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors knowledge, the study is the foremost to develop an integrated empirical framework for work from home culture and its antecedents and consequences. The study has several important implications for managers.

Walking the tightrope between work and home:The role of job/home resources in the relation between job/home demands and employee health and well-being.

The present study investigated the role of job/home resources in the relation between job/home demands and exhaustion, job satisfaction, work-home interference, and home-work interference during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explored the prevalence of job/home demands and resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, and examined whether working at different locations (i.e., working from home or at the office) affects how both job/home demands and resources are associated with employees' health and well-being. An online cross-sectional survey study using self-report questionnaires was carried out among the networks of the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH) association (N=153). The findings of this study illustrated that (1) cognitive job demands/resources and emotional home demands/resources were crucial in predicting employee health and well-being; (2) a conceptual match was detected between corresponding demands and resources; (3) subgroup analysis showed that employees were not heavily affected by the different working locations during the pandemic. In conclusion, this study confirms the positive role of job/home resources. We suggest that cultivating specific job/home resources and establishing an appropriate match between specific job/home resources and corresponding job/home demands is necessary to ensure employees' health and well-being in times of a pandemic.

Is Working from Home a Blessing or a Burden? Home Demands as a Mediator of the Relationship Between Work Engagement and Work-Life Balance.

As COVID-19 pandemic made its incursion into the world of work in early 2020, many employees were compelled to work from home to slow down the transmission of the disease. Since then, it has been asked whether working from home is a blessing or a burden. We respond to this question by building on the Affective Events Theory to examine whether work engagement is related to work-life balance (WLB), and whether home demands mediate this relationship, using data from 219 knowledge workers drawn from universities in the South-eastern region of Nigeria primarily working from home when they were surveyed. Results of regression analysis using PROCESS macro showed that work engagement related positively to home demands; in turn, home demands related negatively to WLB. The results further revealed that work engagement related negatively to WLB and that home demands mediated the negative work engagement-WLB connection. Theoretical as well as practical implications of the study are discussed, limitations are highlighted, and suggestions for future research are outlined.

Enablers of work from home culture: an integrated empirical framework

Purpose With the emergence of COVID-19 and increased infections, organizations urged their employees to work from home. Furthermore, with the on-going pandemic, employees take measures to ensure individual safety and their families. Hence, work from home culture can result in long-term employee satisfaction. However, no study addresses the development of work from the home culture in an integrated framework. Therefore, the current research explores the role of safety during the pandemic, organizational commitment and employee motivation on work from home culture, which may influence employee satisfaction. Furthermore, job demands and home demands were also evaluated for employee satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach The study used existing scales of the factors to develop the measures and collect perceptual responses from employees working from home, supported with a pre-test. The study executed a survey with effective responses from 132 individuals spread across different sectors to validate the hypotheses. The responses were analysed using partial least squares in ADANCO 2.2. Findings Findings suggest safety concerns along with organization commitment enhances work from home culture. Such work from home culture enhances employee motivation and employee satisfaction. Furthermore, job demands and home demands also influence employee satisfaction. Originality/value To the best of the authors knowledge, the study is the foremost to develop an integrated empirical framework for work from home culture and its antecedents and consequences. The study has several important implications for managers.

The role of leisure crafting for emotional exhaustion in telework during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: After the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, many employees transitioned from in-office work to telework to slow down the spread of the virus. Building on the Job Demands-Resources model, we examined day-level relationships between job demands, home demands and emotional exhaustion during telework. Moreover, we tested if leisure crafting (i.e., the proactive pursuit and enactment of leisure activities targeted at goal setting, socializing, growth and development) is negatively related to emotional exhaustion. We expected that proactive personality would be positively related to leisure crafting. Finally, emotional exhaustion was predicted to relate negatively to job performance. METHODS: We tested our assumptions using a daily diary study on seven consecutive days with 178 employees (964 observations in total). RESULTS: Multilevel path analysis supports the assumptions that daily job demands as well as daily home demands during telework are positively related to emotional exhaustion. As predicted, we found leisure crafting to be negatively related to emotional exhaustion, and proactive personality to be positively related to leisure crafting. Finally, emotional exhaustion was negatively related to job performance. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our study supports a health-promoting role of leisure crafting above the unfavorable relationships between job demands and home demands with emotional exhaustion.