Employee teleworking (working-from-home) experience assessment during COVID-19 lockdown: A dual-edged sword

Abstract

Teleworking reportedly comes with numerous benefits, including enhanced work-life balance, flexibility, reduced travel time, increased productivity, and higher morale. Nevertheless, it has also been reported to project many challenges, with psychosocial problems such as stress and burnout on top of the list. Interestingly during the lockdown, it was suspected to yield two-sided impacts among many teleworkers, such two-sided impact including bringing about increase in productivity for some and decrease in others. This situation has been presumed by some to be connected to lack of social interaction as well as the socio-demographics difference of the workers. Therefore, the research question of our study is; what are the effects of the demographic characteristics of teleworkers on their positive and negative working-from-home experience? This study adopted a random sampling approach for the data collection from teleworkers across Europe, using an online cross-sectional survey with distribution done via platforms such as LinkedIn and also among individual workers. At the end, 399 responses were collected and data was analysed using Chi-square tests to determine the difference in the impacts of teleworking on employees based on their socio-demographics. All analysis were done using SPSS. The results of our study underline the importance of businesses evaluating and improving their workers’ teleworking work experiences, irrespective of their socio-demographics. This study’s findings, which are important to both employers and employees as they navigate the changing workplace, emphasize the need to understand the complex consequences of remote work on workers’ job satisfaction and well-being.