The impact of COVID-19-induced factors on “Work from Home” of employees

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 pandemic resulted in lockdown affecting all businesses globally. Everyone was forced to work from home (WFH) leading to challenges in productivity and motivation. Methodology: One thousand working professionals who worked from home participated in the online survey with semi-structured questionnaire using nonprobability Snowball sampling technique. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the findings and to collect data method. Results: Participants were asked about their biggest worries during lockdown COVID-19 situation and their biggest worry was infection to COVID-19/death. Professionals were asked whether they were affected or not affected due to “WFH” in COVID situation. The questionnaire items were clubbed into six major categories of job role overload, lifestyle choices, family distraction, occupational discomfort, job performance, and distress, and majority categories were affected. Conclusion: Thus, it is observed that the increase in work commitments leads to distress among employees while distractions from family members disrupt the quality of work. While good job performance contributes to life satisfaction, distress significantly diminished it. This paves the way for more studies to be done on work–life balance under WFH arrangements for as long as the pandemic of COVID-19 is prevalent.

Keywords

• covid-19
• motivation
• pandemic
• productivity
• work from home