Making daily decisions to work from home or to work in the office: The impacts of daily work- and COVID-related stressors on next-day work location.

Abstract

To protect workers' safety while gradually resuming on-site operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are offering employees the flexibility to decide their work location on a daily basis (i.e., whether to work from home or to work in the office on a particular day). However, little is known about what factors drive employees' daily decisions to work from home versus office during the pandemic. Taking a social ecological perspective, we conceptualize employees' daily choice of work location (home vs. office) as a way to cope with stressors they have encountered on the previous day, and conducted a daily diary study to examine how five categories of work-related and COVID-related stressors during the pandemic (identified through a pilot interview study) may jointly predict employees' next-day work location. We collected data over five workdays from 127 participants working in a Chinese IT company which allowed employees to choose their work location on a daily basis amid the pandemic. We found that experiencing more work-family boundary stressors and work coordination stressors on a certain day were associated with a greater likelihood of working in the office (vs. at home) on the next day, while experiencing more workload stressors prompted employees to work at home (vs. in the office) on the next day. Furthermore, we found that COVID-19 infection-related stressors moderated the effects of technology stressors and workload stressors on next-day work location. Our research findings offer implications for understanding the driving factors of daily work location choices during and beyond the pandemic.

COVID-19 and Stressful Adjustment to Work: A Long-Term Prospective Study About Homeworking for Bank Employees in Italy

“…Actually, in Reopening, HW, although possibly alternating with work at the office, was still a novelty or even a hazard for most employees and most organizations, thus, representing a relevant source of stress ( Hecker, 2020 ; Fukumura et al, 2021 ; Hamouche, 2021 ). Homeworkers not only have experienced an abrupt overlap between work and family lives ( Moretti et al, 2020 ) but also had to challenge a new working strategy, for which workers and organizations were largely unprepared ( Söderbacka et al, 2020 ; Shao et al, 2021 ; Xiao et al, 2021 ), so that most individuals were caught off guard and had to adjust by their means ( Guler et al, 2021 ).…”

Working from home during the COVID‐19 crisis: How self‐control strategies elucidate employees' job performance

“…Such demands led to a decrease in employees' well‐being (e.g., Zacher & Rudolph, 2021 ). However, the pronounced demands in times of the COVID‐19 crisis, such as demands resulting from the blurriness of the work–family boundary (Shao et al, 2021 ), likely also pose constant challenges for employees' job performance (e.g., Gilboa et al, 2008 ). Corroborating this assumption, many employees reported to be less productive when working from home during the pandemic (e.g., Zacharakis & Loos, 2020 ).…”

Employees’ reactions toward COVID-19 information exposure: Insights from terror management theory and generativity theory.

“…During an unprecedented public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations must be able to both understand and address the challenges faced by their employees and stakeholders (e.g., McCarthy et al, 2021; Mo & Shi, 2020; Moen et al, 2020; Shao et al, 2021; Truxillo et al, 2020; Zhu et al, 2021). Our research identified employees’ death-related reactions as important pathways through which information exposure to a global health crisis may have implications for work behaviors.…”