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The COVID-19 pandemic spurred major, and possibly enduring, changes in paid work. In this chapter, we explore the continuity and change in several work day dimensions, including where it is performed, the amount of time spent working, the length of the work day, and who people are with when they work, as well as variation across population subgroups. We use nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to analyze change across the 2019 to 2021 period. While the shift to working primarily at home in 2020 is dramatic and continuing into 2021, working primarily at the workplace remains the modal experience for Americans. We find differences by gender, education, parental status, and age in which workers perform their jobs at home, and we find much more continuity in how much people work and when they work.

This paper aims to compare employee well-being, information flow and relationships with co-workers and supervisors for people working at home and working in different office types before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A nationwide study of 2,845 Estonian office workers in autumn 2019 and 2,972 in spring 2020 was carried out.

It was discovered that in normal circumstances, people at home had similar results to those in a cell office or activity-based office. Open-plan offices were found to be the worst in respect to the facets of work studied. However, in the context of the pandemic, the playing field became more level in some respects and worse in the case of activity-based offices.

When telework is well arranged both in terms of facilities and organising the necessary communication and information flow, then it is a viable alternative to working in an office. What is more, employers need to pay more attention to the physical and social work conditions in open-plan offices and also activity-based offices in the context of a pandemic.

Previous studies have only compared telework with working in an office in general. Comparing working at home with different kinds of offices gives valuable insights.

The authors track the well-being of individuals across five European countries during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and relate their well-being to working from home. The authors also consider the role of pandemic-policy stringency in affecting well-being in Europe.

The authors have four waves of novel harmonised longitudinal data in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden, covering the period May–November 2020. Well-being is measured in five dimensions: life satisfaction, a worthwhile life, loneliness, depression and anxiety. A retrospective diary indicates whether the individual was working in each month since February 2020 and if so whether at home or not at home. Policy stringency is matched in per country at the daily level. The authors consider both cross-section and panel regressions and the mediating and moderating effects of control variables, including household variables and income.

Well-being among workers is lower for those who work from home, and those who are not working have the lowest well-being of all. The panel results are more mitigated, with switching into working at home yielding a small drop in anxiety. The panel and cross-section difference could reflect adaptation or the selection of certain types of individuals into working at home. Policy stringency is always negatively correlated with well-being. The authors find no mediation effects. The well-being penalty from working at home is larger for the older, the better-educated, those with young children and those with more crowded housing.

The harmonised cross-country panel data on individuals' experiences during COVID-19 are novel. The authors relate working from home and policy stringency to multiple well-being measures. The authors emphasise the effect of working from home on not only the level of well-being but also its distribution.

This chapter examines the extent to which Working from Home (WfH) affects the temporal alignment of work and private life, i.e., the consideration of personal and family interests in work scheduling, for male and female employees with and without children. A distinction is made between telework that is formally recognized home working time by the employer, and informal overtime at home that is not recorded. It is argued that while the first represents a job resource, by increasing flexibility in work scheduling, the latter constitutes a job demand, which hinders the consideration of personal and family responsibilities in work time planning. Due to differences in status beliefs, identification and the distribution of childcare, gender gaps as well as differences according to family responsibilities are predicted in these associations. Using data from the German BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey 2018, the temporal alignment of work and private life is found to be positively associated with telework, particularly so for men, and negatively associated with informal overtime at home, particularly so for women. While mothers do not benefit from telework during regular working hours in particular, they have the worst temporal alignment of work and private life when they work informal overtime at home.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how recordkeepers in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Iceland and Italy experienced accomplishing their tasks from home over varying lengths of time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A multilingual survey including 44 questions was designed and administered to the six countries identified above in 2022. This research was preceded by an environmental scan looking at existing studies considering archival and records management responses to the pandemic.

The impact of working from home on recordkeeping and, more generally, work performance was perceived differently by the survey respondents depending on various factors. The study also identified a number of similarities across countries, such as an increased awareness of the importance of records management shared by organizational actors. Surprisingly, the pandemic did not appear to have a great impact on the perceived quality of records management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study aiming to capture records professionals’ perceptions of their role while working from home during the pandemic.

Post‐industrial predictions of a rapid growth in new technology homeworking have gained widespread currency to become part of the conventional wisdom. However the evidence, including primary research material, suggests that the claims for new technology homeworking, both regarding its extent and its alleged benefits, have been considerably overestimated. In particular, new technology homeworking by itself does not appear to open up opportunities for women to improve their position in the labour market; the demographic changes predicted for the 1990s may provide a better bet. Nevertheless, there is a danger in assuming that all firms apply the same strategy when employing homeworkers; at least three different variations can be identified and this has important implications for personnel managers. The overestimation of new technology homeworking stands in stark contrast to traditional homeworking where the extent has been considerably underestimated. This marginalisation of traditional homeworking stems in large part from the distortion caused by the conceptual split between private and public realms. The failure to find evidence to support the growth of new technology homeworking leads to a consideration of how the arguments may better be considered as rhetoric designed to advance a certain set of ideas – in particular that set associated with “privatisation” as a political ideology.

This paper has three aims: Firstly, it puts the pandemic-induced surge in homeworking into context by charting trends in homeworking in the UK since the early 1980s. Secondly, it examines what effect the growth in homeworking during the pandemic has had on employees' self-reported levels of productivity. Thirdly, it assesses whether the spike in homeworking is a flash in the pan or a permanent feature of the post-pandemic world.

The paper uses cross-sectional and longitudinal data taken from three nationally representative surveys of workers: (1) the Labour Force Survey (LFS), an official government survey carried out between 1981 and 2019; (2) a special module of the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN), also an official government survey, which has been run every week since the pandemic began in March 2020; and (3) the Understanding Society Covid-19 Study, an online survey of the same people interviewed on six occasions during 2020.

The recent surge in homeworking in the UK during the pandemic has been dramatic. Before 2020, it had taken almost 40 years for homeworking to grow by three percentage points, but its prevalence grew eight-fold virtually overnight as people were instructed to work at home if they can because of the pandemic. Despite theories and predictions to the contrary, employees reported that their productivity was not adversely affected. Seven out of ten employees said that they were able to get as much done while working at home in June 2020 as they were able to do six months earlier. By September 2020, this proportion had risen to 85%. However, around one in six homeworkers reported that their productivity had fallen.

While there are solid theoretical reasons for the paper's findings, these data do not allow us to test all of the mechanisms involved. In addition, our outcome measure relies on employees' self-reports of how their hourly productivity changed when working at home and is not based on a direct measure of changes to output per hour. However, surveys of employers also suggest that, on average, productivity has not been reduced by the pandemic-induced surge in homeworking.

This paper argues that a higher level of homeworking is here to stay. Nine out of ten employees who worked at home during the pandemic said that they would like to continue working at home when they did not have to. Furthermore, those keenest to continue working at home were the most productive, hence providing a business case for a sustained increase in the prevalence of homeworking after the pandemic has passed. Nevertheless, the experience of homeworking varies with those with higher domestic commitments reporting significantly lower levels of productivity.

There is an urgent need to investigate what effect enforced, as opposed to voluntary, homeworking has had on employee productivity. In addition, in order to decide whether continued homeworking should be encouraged or discouraged, policymakers and employers need to know what effect continuing with these arrangements is likely to have on employee productivity. This paper answers these questions using robust survey data collected in the UK throughout 2020, complemented by evidence taken from a variety of employer surveys.

This paper aims to understand how the residents have utilized domestic spaces and furniture during three months' lockdown time for the Covid-19 virus spread measures and to explore how domestic living practices were adjusted which had been the daily urban activities previously.

The research method is a qualitative interpretivist philosophical approach with a quantitative data collection. Short questionnaires were conducted via e-mails with attached links via SurveyMonkey. The sample was the group of people who had been in active urban life before the pandemic and had been actively working at the office spaces.

Separate learning/working spaces were urged at home, at least for the set intervals in the daytime. Production in the kitchen also acted as an interactive production and entertainment. Balconies and terraces were re-discovered and acted as “urban-substitute open spaces”. The living room became the new venue for domestic interaction especially during working-learning breaks, for watching movies, personal care or reading sessions. Computers, tablets and smartphones became the urban activity base due to online meeting applications for social reasons, online shopping, working and learning. The separation of domains at home became essential.

The study only focuses domestic uses of white-collar workers; during the lock-down period, Covid-19 pandemic. Sampling constraints are the employees who were active urban life before the pandemic and working at the office space. Sharing the house at least with one other roommate, sibling or spouse with or without children. Individuals who had not been working outside the home before the pandemic, people aged over 65, retired, permanent home workers, housewives, freelancers and other such demographic structures are excluded from the study.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first wave lockdown began between early March–June 2020, and millions of people were confined to the dwellings. “Staying home” stood for working-learning-shopping-interacting online, more production in the kitchen, using the living room as a domestic multi-functional venue, spending time on the terraces and balconies as domestic open spaces. The active living in the urban context dramatically shifted to “at-home living”.

The study only focuses on the three months' interval in which strict rules for staying home were enforced in Istanbul, Turkey. Schemas, charts and tables are generated concerning the input. The study challenges the making meaning via praxis of “to dwell” and urban living. Nevertheless, the main questions of housing such as production, social aspects, shared spaces, interaction are re-configured and the substitute urban space is created at home.

The purpose of this paper is to study the experiences of middle-class working mothers from the ITES (Information Technology Enabled Service) sector in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their experiences of work from home are studied in the backdrop of the ideal worker model at work and the adult worker model at home. Further, the study aims to identify the need for sustainable, inclusive practices for working mothers in Indian organizations to break the male breadwinner model in middle-class households.

A qualitative approach to collect data from 39 middle-class mothers working in MNCs in four metro cities in India. The semi-structured, in-depth interviews focused on their experiences of motherhood, care and work before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic made it evident that the ideal worker model in organizations and the adult worker model at home were illusions for working mothers. The results indicate a continued obligation of the “ideal worker culture” at organizations, even during the health crisis. It made the working mothers realize that they were chasing both the (ideal worker and adult worker) norms but could never achieve them. Subsequently, the male breadwinner model was reinforced at home due to the matrix of motherhood, care and work during the pandemic. The study concludes by arguing the reconstruction of the ideal worker image to make workplaces more inclusive for working mothers.

The study is placed in the context of Indian middle-class motherhood during the pandemic, a demography less explored in the literature. The paper puts forth various myths constituting the gendered realities of Indian middle-class motherhood. It also discusses sustainable, inclusive workplace practices for mothers from their future workplaces' standpoint, especially in post-pandemic times.