Employees’ Perception on Working from Home: A Case Study in Brunei

Work from Home (hereon WFH) emerged as an effective intervention to protect workers from COVID-19 infection and ensure the continuity of businesses. However, the global workforce and business entities responded differently to this new paradigm shift due to disparities in implementing effective and employee-centric WFH strategies. Accordingly, this research uses the perceptual attitudes and experiences of employees to evaluate the existing organizational arrangements for WFH and their efficacy to facilitate employees in performing their jobs from home during the pandemic. We employed a qualitative approach and interviewed 15 employees of Organisation XYZ to investigate their perception of the organisation’s WFH arrangements and recorded their experiences. The study found that employees’ perceptual attitudes toward WFH during COVID-19 constitute four main components namely organisational support, personal factors, employee performance, and WFH transition. Further analyses elucidate that there are several components (themes) that positively and negatively impacted and shaped employees’ experience of WFH. Our study suggests effective strategies to facilitate organizations gearing up for the transition to WFH during the pandemic by understanding the underlying factors that influence employees’ perceptions and experiences of WFH.