Work from Home: Benefits and Drawbacks for Employee Well-being

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Remote jobs can help workers create more satisfying lives, with greater psychological well-being and work engagement, but only if that work occurs during regularly contracted hours, according to new research from Cornell University’s ILR School.

The negative impacts of working at home outside of work hours were particularly high for women, the researchers found.

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked interest in remote work, but research by Duanyi Yang, assistant professor of labor relations, law and history, yielded mixed findings on the impact of working from home on employees’ well-being and work attitudes. workers.

In "Working from Home and Worker Wellbeing: New Evidence from Germany," forthcoming in ILR Review, Yang and his co-authors focus on the distinction between working from home during regular work hours, which they refer to as as replacement work from home, and working from home outside of those hours, which they refer to as extension work from home.

Using a survey of 7,857 employees within 814 German establishments, their research found that home-based outreach work is associated with lower psychological well-being, higher turnover intentions, and higher work-family conflict. In contrast, work-from-home replacement results in greater commitment and is not associated with greater work-family conflict or turnover.

Additionally, they found that home-based extension work has more negative effects on women’s well-being and work-family conflict. Specifically, psychological well-being is 11% lower for women who work from home as extension workers than for women with similar characteristics who do not work from home.

“Given evidence that remote work can bring benefits to workers and employers, but only when work from home is limited and not extended, an important next step is to determine how new labor standards and management practices can help protect against home-based outreach work,” Yang said.

For example, he said, in 2016, France passed a law giving workers the "right to disconnect" from workplace communication devices to ensure work doesn’t spill over into private time. Similarly, in Australia, large public sector unions are currently negotiating with government employers to include the right to disconnect in upcoming collective agreements.

"In the United States, managers, executives, and worker representatives also have the opportunity to counter implicit expectations of ’always on’ and develop new norms that embrace both remote work and clear boundaries between work and family life. "Yang said. “In the context of a tight labor market, employers may be more open to encouraging time limits to prevent worker burnout and limit turnover.”

Conclusions

The COVID-19 pandemic period has dramatically increased experience with and interest in working from home, but previous studies raise unclear expectations about the implications of working from home for workers and their organizations. This study proposes and investigates a critical distinction between home-based replacement work and home-based outreach work . The general conclusion is that working from home can be an important element of work quality or a new strategy to get more from workers, depending on how it is structured.

First, workers who perform replacement work from home (occurring during normal or contractual hours) have higher levels of well-being and job satisfaction compared to workers who do not work from home and those who perform replacement work from home. extension from home. Home-based replacement work brings benefits with respect to well-being and job satisfaction, while home-based extension work does not. In fact, outreach work from home creates risks for employers because it increases interest in leaving work. While employers may push work-from-home outreach to try to increase productivity, work-from-home outreach encourages people to consider quitting, even beyond the impact of working longer hours or facing greater work pressure. .

Second, working from home is associated with more perceived conflict between work and family domains. Given the media’s naïve portrayals of working from home, it is important to recognize that working from home can create, rather than resolve, work-family challenges. That doesn’t mean working from home should be discouraged. Instead, our findings point to specific and gendered risks, but also help minimize the risks of working from home by encouraging clear temporal boundaries, even when spatial boundaries are blurred. Practitioners and advocates should recognize that home-based outreach work is more problematic (and impacts women more) and focus on limiting that practice specifically. More research that captures how temporal, spatial, and relational boundaries are managed is also warranted.

Third, our analysis of who engages in home-based replacement and extension work confirms the value of this conceptual distinction. Although critical opinions about working from home have raised important questions about the high job demands or work pressures that lead employees to work from home, it is the extent of working from home, specifically, that is associated with much longer hours. long. Furthermore, being a woman and having a minor child at home is uniquely associated with the replacement of working from home. Previous studies that have not made this distinction are mixing practices with varied antecedents as well as varied consequences.

Working from home is likely here to stay, in some form and for many workers. Researchers, practitioners, and advocates can help frame these new practices to support worker well-being and equitable career outcomes by paying attention to how remote work is organized and how those working from home are evaluated.