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This research investigates the challenges and benefits of working from home and the needs that organisations should understand when adopting working from home practices.

Self-determination theory was used to understand the drivers of motivation when working from home, to provide a deep understanding of how organisations may support employees working from home. A cross-sectional qualitative survey design was used to collect data from 511 office workers during May and June of 2020.

Employees' needs for competence were thwarted by a lack of direction and focus, unsuitable work environment, work extensification and negative work culture. Employees' experiences and needs for relatedness were more diverse, identifying that they enjoyed spending more time with family and having a greater connection to the outdoors, but felt more isolated and suffered from a lack of interaction. Employees' experiences of autonomy whilst working from home were also mixed, having less autonomy from blurred boundaries between home and work, as well as childcare responsibilities. Conversely, there was more freedom to be able to concentrate on physical health.

Employee’s needs for competence should be prioritised. Organisations must be conscious of this and provide the support that enables direction and focus when working at home.

Swathes of research were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, but overwhelmingly focused on quantitative methods. A qualitative survey design enabled participants to answer meaningful open-ended questions, better suited to explain the complexity of their experiences, which allowed for understanding and richness not gained through previous studies.

Drawing on boundary theory, this study aims to analyse whether the intensity of working from home will be related to higher exhaustion through family boundary permeability, with this relationship being more robust when overwork climate is high.

In this paper eight hundred eighty-three white-collar employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lithuania were surveyed online.

The results confirmed the hypotheses, demonstrating that family boundary permeability may explain the relationship between telework intensity and exhaustion. Furthermore, the mediating relationship between the intensity of working from home, family boundary permeability and exhaustion were moderated by overwork climate. Employees who felt the pressure to overwork were more likely to have a more permeable family boundary when working from home and appeared to experience a much higher psychological cost in terms of emotional exhaustion.

The study provides an insight into the relationships between the intensity of working from home, boundary permeability and exhaustion and their boundary conditions when working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study examines the extent to which job demands and resources are related to job stress and engagement among young employees exposed to remote work. The study draws on the job demands–resources (JD-R) model, adapted to working from home during the pandemic.

The study uses data from a survey among young employees (35 years and younger) in a large, telecommunications company in Norway (N = 303), conducted in May 2021. Linear regression analysis was employed.

The results show that the difficulty of work tasks is positively related to stress while time spent working from home, managing work–life balance and receiving support from leaders are negatively related to stress. Furthermore, overtime, support from leaders and colleagues and managing work–life balance are positively related to job engagement. Having a dedicated workspace at home is not related to either job stress or engagement and no gender differences exist.

The study theoretically contributes to the literature by showing that the nature of work plays out differently for the well-being of employees working from home. In terms of practical implications, the study suggests that adjusting the level of difficulty of work tasks and providing support can alleviate stress among young employees. Providing the option to work from home may reduce stress among these young employees, however working from home may face limitations regarding enhancing job engagement.

This study aims to understand how knowledge workers working from home during COVID-19 changed their views on physical work environments and working-from-home practices.

This study conducted a survey targeting workers in the USA recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. A total of 1,651 responses were collected and 648 responses were used for the analysis.

The perceived work-life balance improved during the pandemic compared to before, while the balance of physical boundaries between the workplace and home decreased. Workplace flexibility, environmental conditions of home offices and organizational supports are positively associated with productivity, satisfaction with working from home and work-life balance during the pandemic.

While the strict traditional view of “showing” up in the office from Monday through Friday is likely on the decline, the hybrid workplace with flexibility can be introduced as some activities are not significantly affected by the work location, either at home-based or corporate offices. The results of this study also highlight the importance of organizations to support productivity and satisfaction in the corporate office as well as home. With the industry collaboration, future research of relatively large sample sizes and study sites, investigating workers’ needs and adapted patterns of use in home-based and corporate offices, will help corporate real estate managers make decisions and provide some level of standardization of spatial efficiency and configurations of corporate offices as well as essential supports for home offices.

The pandemic-enforced working-from-home practices awaken the interdependence between corporate and home environments, how works are done and consequently, the role of the physical workplace. This study built a more in-depth understanding of how workers who were able to continue working from home during COVID-19 changed or not changed their views on physical work environments and working-from-home practices.

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.

This paper aims to explore gender differences in terms of self-employment for US Millennials, relating them to working from home as well as other factors.

The authors use a population-based survey, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which allows to compare home-based vs non-home-based self-employed women and men on a wide variety of characteristics. Descriptive analyses reveal the unconditional relationships between the covariates of interest, and the authors use ordinary least squares regression to reveal the conditional correlations between working from home and earnings for both women and men.

The authors find that working from home is highly negatively correlated with earnings for women, but not for men, and that working from home may trump the other characteristics typically associated with lower earnings.

The regression subsample is relatively small (n = 245), leading to omitted variable bias in the regression. The “working-from-home” variable is potentially endogenous. The small sample size does not allow the authors to use detailed information on the self-employment industry. Future research should focus on finding larger samples and a way to instrument for working from home.

Work/life trends and communications technology have made working from home more prevalent (Mateyka et al., 2012). It is important for researchers and policymakers to understand the gendered implications of basing a business at home.

The study is the first to use population-based data to focus specifically on gender gaps in earnings of self-employed Millennials in relation to working from home.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relevance of the intersections between work and personal life. Measures introduced to slow the spread of COVID-19 have included an increase of working from home and the temporary closure of schools and child-care facilities, leading to a lighter workload for some and a heavier workload for others. These consequences are likely to affect employees’ work–life balance (WLB), although the impact may differ across groups of employees depending on the nature of their work, family and personal demands and resources. This mixed-method study examined how Dutch government employees perceive their WLB during the pandemic and how differences in what employees are experiencing can be explained. In May/June 2020, an online survey (N = 827) and an interview study (N = 17) were conducted at a government organization whose employees were obliged to work from home partly or exclusively. Results indicate that demands changed when working entirely from home and resources became more important to maintain WLB satisfaction. Being able to manage boundaries across life domains and find a new routine also appeared to be crucial for WLB satisfaction.

This paper seeks to show how the shift of paid work from traditional locations into the home environment raises serious questions of identity for managers who have started to work from home and who have to “cope with” the sometimes conflicting demands imposed by different socio‐cultural spheres.

Based on an empirical study of working from home, three case studies are presented, which articulate and summarise different modes of engagement with both paid and domestic work and respective identity issues.

Adding to the extant literature on working from home, the findings indicate that the success or failure of working from home is intrinsically tied into issues related to homeworkers” identity.

The empirical data are taken from a period when homeworkers had to “learn” how to cope with being both “at home and at work”. Further empirical enquiry might focus on longitudinal aspects of the relationship between working from home and identity.

With regard to working from home policies it is advisable to take into account questions of identity, rather than applying exclusively task‐based or technical aspects when considering the organisational benefits of this form of spatial and temporal flexibility.

In conceptualising working from home from an identity perspective, new insights have been gained into the reasons why this mode of work sometimes fails to deliver on its promises, yet proves outstandingly successful on other occasions.

This study aims to investigate the impact of working from home and its duration on job satisfaction.

The analysis was conducted on a representative panel data set from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey - Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE) for 2016–2021 using endogenous regression models. The impact of working from home on job satisfaction before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and separately for men and women, was analysed.

Working from home was found to positively affect job satisfaction in the Russian labour market. From 2016 to 2021, men and women who worked from home were more satisfied with their jobs than their counterparts who did not work from home. The positive impact of working from home on job satisfaction was observed before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, remote workers (RWR) putting in more than eight hours per day reported lower job satisfaction.

Working from home can be considered as a measure to combat unemployment, increase employment and improve the utilisation (distribution) of human resources. Further research is required to analyse the impact of health issues and the need to care for young children or infirm persons on job satisfaction in remote work. A more detailed analysis is required of the factors that affect the job satisfaction of women who work remotely.

To ensure that labour productivity increases and not decreases, employers are advised to develop more detailed working arrangements and labour management for RWRs. Especially for such assigned workers, task control regulations must be developed. To increase the motivation of individuals to work remotely, overtime should be paid at a higher rate.

Unclear working time regulations lead to overwork, irregular working hours and burnout. For RWRs, this leads to lower job satisfaction and a consequent drop in productivity.

The empirical investigation is based on a representative panel of Russian data with six waves. Wide ranges of job characteristics were incorporated as determinants. The problem of causality was investigated. For models with an endogenous regressor, instrumental variables were tested and selected.