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During the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (WFH) has become the norm for many employees and their families in Germany. Although WFH has been suggested as a form of flexible work to foster work–life integration (especially for workers with greater care responsibilities), studies have also pointed to its risks when the boundaries between these two life spheres become blurred. To help disentangle these inconsistent findings in relation to work–family conflict, this study focuses on two main concerns: the relevance of additional forms of flexibility for those who work from home (i.e., temporal flexibility, job autonomy, fixed rules about availability) and the implications of WFH for employees’ social relationships with co-workers and supervisors. Based on linked employer–employee data collected in the spring of 2021, the study examined work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC) among a sample of 885 employees who worked from home. The results indicate that three factors – temporal flexibility, job autonomy, and fixed rules about availability as a way to set boundaries between work and family life – are important predictors of fewer work–family conflict. This equally applies to employees with caring obligations who overall experience more work–family conflicts while WFH. For those who cared for relatives, autonomy contributed even to fewer work–family conflicts. Supportive relationships with supervisors and co-workers are certainly directly beneficial when it comes to avoiding conflict, but they also reinforce the positive implications of flexible work, whereas poor relationships counteract the benefits of such flexibility. Thus, employers need to provide additional forms of flexibility to employees who work from home and should pay attention to social relationships among their employees as a way to support families and other individuals.

While based on ideas initially introduced in the 1970s (e.g., Sieber, 1974), the concept of work–family enrichment was first proposed by Greenhaus and Powell in 2006. This framework asserts that enrichment is experienced either through an instrumental path or an affective path. Enrichment occurs by means of the instrumental path when individuals have the belief that engagement in one role has directly increased their ability to perform in the other role. According to Greenhaus and Powell (2006), role experiences offer five categories of resources that may be acquired by an individual: skills and perspectives (e.g., interpersonal skills), psychological and physical resources (e.g., self-efficacy), social-capital resources (e.g., networking, information), flexibility (e.g., flexible work arrangements), and material resources (e.g., money). Enrichment occurs by way of the affective pathway when an increase in resources in one role enhances mood, spilling over, and permitting for increased functioning in the other role. In this way, a parent who plays with children before work, developing a good mood, may then bring those emotions into the workplace. This, in turn, may increase their ability to interact positively with coworkers, thus improving performance.

The link between abuse and five labor-market outcomes is analyzed for a large sample of poor women from Washington State. Women abused as adults earned at least 25% less than unabused women in outside employment. Separating earnings into components, women who experienced abuse as children or adults fared significantly worse than unabused women in terms of the probability of work, the average number of months worked per year, and the wage. Sexual abuse was associated with the worst outcomes. Abuse was also associated with worse self-employment outcomes, especially among women sexually abused as adults.