Research pick: Home work - "COVID-19 work from home stressors and the degree of its impact: employers and employees actions"

Working from home became, if not obligatory, then certainly de facto for many employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. At this stage in the pandemic as the new normal becomes entrenched the advantages of working from home have been recognised by employee and employer alike and for many the pandemic practice has become de rigueur.

Researchers from Oman writing in the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation have looked at the stresses and strains that the practice of homeworking has put on employees and the people they live with. Anna C. Bocar of the Faculty of Business Management Studies at Gulf College in Maabelah, Muscat and Shad Ahmad Khan and Ferdinand J. Epoc of the College of Business at the University of Buraimi in Al Buraimi found that fundamentally issues arise because the home does not necessarily have the infrastructure or facilities for many types of job.

Jobs that were pushed out of the workplace and into domesticity by social distancing, lockdown, and isolation rules meant employees had to find ways to carry on their normal work in the domestic setting in a way that many had not done before and also to accommodate family life. Employees in all kinds of sector – legal, financial, media, any where communication and work could be digitalised were affected.

The team found that it is the employee’s personal perspective that mattered the most in terms of the stresses and strains they faced during enforced working from home. Moreover, only when employees begin to take action themselves to remove the stressors that their employers recognise the problems and take action themselves, the employers are not proactive in helping their employees, in other words. The research points to how things must change if employees are to carry on working from home and for those who return to the workplace how things must change before the next major crisis.

Bocar, A.C., Khan, S.A. and Epoc, F.J. (2022) ‘COVID-19 work from home stressors and the degree of its impact: employers and employees actions’, Int. J. Technology Transfer and Commercialisation, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp.270–291.