Work-from-home has gained swift and massive adoption due to technological advancement and the large-scale disruption evoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Work-from-home, also called telecommuting, involves performing work/business responsibilities from a non-office location or typically from home. The work-from-home format has garnered acceptance as the alternative to traditional office work, but it is not without disadvantages. Thus, a thorough insight into the mechanism of the work-from-home format and how it relates to engagement is necessary for organizational leaders and human resource practitioners to cultivate engagement of remote workers. This article illustrates the current state of scholarly research on work-from-home engagement by using the lens of an integrated literature review. This article explains the forces accompanying the work-from-home format and their interactions with employee engagement. The article proposes a conceptual framework of the work-from-home engagement field. The constructs of the work-from-home engagement field, which are the work-from-home positive forces, negative forces, and positive-negative forces, are explained, and the critical implications for human resource management are highlighted.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a rapid implementation of the work-from-home model. The struggles imposed by COVID-19 and the challenges of the work-from-home pose consequences for being either fully present and complete or fragmented when occupying an organizational role. This article summarizes existing knowledge on employee engagement under the work-from-home design. In addition, it provides new insights and coherent explanations on the development of engagement when employees are working from home. This article offers a conceptual framework regarding employee engagement and the work-from-home format, i.e., the home-work lifeworld matrix. The home-work lifeworld matrix describes and explains the processes or sequence of events while employees work from home. The home-work lifeworld matrix provides a basis for understanding the underlying constructs of engagement; body, time, space, and relations and their interconnectedness when employees work from home. The article proposes assessing engagement holistically by considering different facets of the body, time, space, and relations and specifies the implications for managing employees in home-based work.

Teleworking from home gives workers some degree of temporal and spatial flexibility, and at the same time, poses some consequences in terms of conflicts from the demands, requirements, expectations, and behaviors from the forces associated with both work roles and family roles. This integrative literature review investigated the conditions or forces that are responsible for the bi-directional inter-role conflict and the outcomes of the conflict when employees are teleworking from home, by synthesizing new and grey literature about work-family conflict and home-based teleworking. The forces from the work and family systems which are organizational, personal, spatial, temporal, technological, psychological, and familial are the crux of the work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict as they either cause friction or smoothness to the transition from work roles to family roles and vice versa during home-based teleworking. The forces either act as catalysts or inhibitors during the transition from work (family) roles to family (work) roles. The findings from this review were synthesized into the work-family roles dynamics model by incorporating concepts from physical sciences. The work-family roles dynamics model provides insights into the transition of home-based teleworkers and the work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict that ensue in the work and family systems. This article also offers a definition of work-family conflict based on knowledge from the synthesized literature. The work-family roles dynamics model posits new explanations about teleworking from home and bi-directional inter-role conflict. The work-family roles dynamics theory yields new ideas and questions for future research and implications for human resource management.

COVID-19 transformed work arrangements by increasing the adoption of the work-from-home format. Work-from-home employees are susceptible to continuous job stressors and the permeability of the work-to-home border. Psychological detachment serves as the pathway to recovery from job stressors and for preventing the carryover of work thoughts into the home domain during non-work time. Therefore, this review presents theoretical and practical implications for work-to-home border management by integrating literature about psychological detachment and work-from-home. Work-home border accounting involves examining and minimizing conditions that inhibit psychological detachment, e.g., ICTs demand, overtime, telepressure, interruptions, etc., which are withdrawals from employees' energy or resource accounts, while facilitating psychological detachment through deposits which are non-work activities such as leisure, social support, exercises, etc. This article proposes the work-home border accounting system for managing the work-to-home border. The review suggests the resources employees accumulate through psychological detachment, e.g., wellbeing, life satisfaction, and work-life balance, and the deficits employees accrue if there is a shortfall of deposits required for psychological detachment, e.g., stress, low productivity, work-family conflict, etc. Hence, this article provides a coherent understanding of the processes necessary for psychological detachment during work-from-home.

The severe COVID-19 pandemic triggered an extraordinary global health crisis, resulting in an economic downturn and negative consequences for employees' work lives, especially employee engagement. An overview of how literature has been tackling the impact of COVID-19 on employee engagement is still missing. Hence, this article illustrates how literature has addressed the development and maintenance of employee engagement in various parts of the world due to the global health crisis. The report discusses individual and organizational roles in fostering employee engagement. The article provides general ideas for researchers interested in extending employee engagement studies under critical situations. It also highlights the consideration for human resource management in both individual and organizational contexts. As well, equips organizational leaders and human resource practitioners with productive and enabling power for informed decision-making about improving employee engagement of their workforce during the ongoing pandemic or other stressful events.