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We examine the role flexible working has for gender equality during the pandemic, focusing on arrangements that give workers control over when and where they work. We use a survey of dual-earning working parents in the United Kingdom during the peak of the first lockdown, namely, between mid-May and mid-June 2020. Results show that in most households in our survey, mothers were mainly responsible for housework and child care tasks both before and during the lockdown period, although this proportion has slightly declined during the pandemic. In households where fathers worked from home during the pandemic, respondents were less likely to say that mothers were the ones solely or mostly responsible for housework and child care. Fathers who worked from home were more likely to say that they were doing more housework and child care during the lockdown period than they were before. Finally, we explore what we expect to happen in the post-pandemic times in relation to flexible working and gender equality. The large expansion of flexible working we expect to happen may help reduce some of the gender inequalities that have exacerbated during the pandemic, but only if we reflect on and change our existing work cultures and gender norms.

The number of people working from home (WFH) increased radically during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate people’s experiences of WFH during the pandemic and to identify the main factors of advantages and disadvantages of WFH. Data from 29 European countries on the experiences of knowledge workers (N = 5748) WFH during the early stages of lockdown (11 March to 8 May 2020) were collected. A factor analysis showed the overall distribution of people’s experiences and how the advantages and disadvantages of WFH during the early weeks of the pandemic can be grouped into six key factors. The results indicated that most people had a more positive rather than negative experience of WFH during lockdown. Three factors represent the main advantages of WFH: (i) work–life balance, (ii) improved work efficiency and (iii) greater work control. The main disadvantages were (iv) home office constraints, (v) work uncertainties and (vi) inadequate tools. Comparing gender, number of children at home, age and managers versus employees in relation to these factors provided insights into the differential impact of WFH on people’s lives. The factors help organisations understand where action is most needed to safeguard both performance and well-being. As the data were collected amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we recommend further studies to validate the six factors and investigate their importance for well-being and performance in knowledge work.

PurposeThrough the lens of Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this study explores how remote working inhibits employee engagement. The authors offer a fresh perspective on the most salient work- and nonwork-related risk factors that make remote working particularly challenging in the context of Covid-19.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use data from semi-structured interviews with 32 employees working from home during the Covid-19 lockdown. Based on the interpretivist philosophical approach, the authors offer new insights into how employees can optimize work- and nonwork-related experiences when working remotely.FindingsThe authors show that the sudden transition from in-person to online modes of working during the pandemic brought about work intensification, online presenteeism, employment insecurity and poor adaptation to new ways of working from home. These stress factors are capable of depleting vital social and personal resources, thereby impacting negatively on employee engagement levels.Practical implicationsEmployers, leaders and human resource teams should be more thoughtful about the risks and challenges employees face when working from home. They must ensure employees are properly equipped with the relevant resources and support to perform their jobs more effectively.Originality/valueWhile previous research has focused on the benefits of remote working, the current study explores how it might be detrimental for employee engagement during a pandemic. The study provides new evidence on the most salient risks and challenges faced by remote workers, and how the unique Covid-19 context has made them more pronounced.

In the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (WFH) became of great importance for a large share of employees since it represents the only option to both continue working and minimise the risk of virus exposure. Uncertainty about the duration of the pandemic and future contagion waves even led companies to view WFH as a ‘new normal’ way of working. Based on influence function regression methods, this paper explores the potential consequences in the labour income distribution related to a long-lasting increase in WFH feasibility among Italian employees. Results show that a positive shift in WFH feasibility would be associated with an increase in average labour income, but this potential benefit would not be equally distributed among employees. Specifically, an increase in the opportunity to WFH would favour male, older, high-educated, and high-paid employees. However, this ‘forced innovation’ would benefit more employees living in provinces have been more affected by the novel coronavirus. WFH thus risks exacerbating pre-existing inequalities in the labour market, especially if it will not be adequately regulated. As a consequence, this study suggests that policies aimed at alleviating inequality, like income support measures (in the short run) and human capital interventions (in the long run), should play a more important compensating role in the future.

Working from home has become engraved in modern working life. Although advocated as a solution to combine work with family life, surprisingly little empirical evidence supports that it decreases work–family conflict. In this paper we examine the role of a supportive organizational context in making working from home facilitate the combination of work and family. Specifically, we address to what extent perceptions of managerial support, ideal worker culture, as well as the number of colleagues working from home influence how working from home relates to work–family conflict. By providing insight in the role of the organizational context, we move beyond existing research in its individualistic focus on the experience of the work–family interface. We explicitly address gender differences since women experience more work–family conflict than men. We use a unique, multilevel organizational survey, the European Sustainable Workforce Survey conducted in 259 organizations, 869 teams and 11,011 employees in nine countries (Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom). Results show that an ideal worker culture amplifies the increase in work family conflict due to working from home, but equally for men and women. On the other hand, women are more sensitive to the proportion of colleagues working from home, and the more colleagues are working from home the less conflict they experience.

With the overnight growth in Working from Home (WFH) owing to the pandemic, organisations and their employees have had to adapt work-related processes and practices quickly with a huge reliance upon technology. Everyday activities such as social interactions with colleagues must therefore be reconsidered. Existing literature emphasises that social interactions, typically conducted in the traditional workplace, are a fundamental feature of social life and shape employees’ experience of work. This experience is completely removed for many employees due to the pandemic and, presently, there is a lack of knowledge on how individuals maintain social interactions with colleagues via technology when working from home. Given that a lack of social interaction can lead to social isolation and other negative repercussions, this study aims to contribute to the existing body of literature on remote working by highlighting employees’ experiences and practices around social interaction with colleagues. This study takes an interpretivist and qualitative approach utilising the diary-keeping technique to collect data from twenty-nine individuals who had started to work from home on a full-time basis as a result of the pandemic. The study explores how participants conduct social interactions using different technology platforms and how such interactions are embedded in their working lives. The findings highlight the difficulty in maintaining social interactions via technology such as the absence of cues and emotional intelligence, as well as highlighting numerous other factors such as job uncertainty, increased workloads and heavy usage of technology that affect their work lives. The study also highlights that despite the negative experiences relating to working from home, some participants are apprehensive about returning to work in the traditional office place where social interactions may actually be perceived as a distraction. The main contribution of our study is to highlight that a variety of perceptions and feelings of how work has changed via an increased use of digital media while working from home exists and that organisations need to be aware of these differences so that they can be managed in a contextualised manner, thus increasing both the efficiency and effectiveness of working from home.

During the COVID pandemic, many companies, schools, and public organizations all around the world asked their employees to work from home i.e. to adopt what are called “smart working” modalities. This has and will presumably have a serious impact on both employees and employers, which still needs to be clarified and investigated: indeed, if smart working becomes a common working modality, this may have a significant impact on both organizations and employees. This paper reports the results of an online survey of “smart workers” in Italy during the COVID pandemic, when a great number of employees suddenly moved to working from home with no or little preparation. The study offers interesting indications about the involvement and usefulness perception of smart working by the sampled people and makes it possible to single out different categories of employees based on their attitude towards this modality. Also, it points out the potential impact on socialization among colleagues, and the consequent implications for knowledge sharing and knowledge management. From the collected responses, a fully positive or negative conclusion about working from home was not possible, nor a clear indication about the efficiency and effectiveness of this working modality. The analysis, instead, highlighted the presence of different but numerically similar groups of people, i.e. those who were not satisfied at all with the experience, those who were very satisfied, and those who were “undecided”. Furthermore, respondents underlined the importance and the difficulty to maintain working contacts and the intense use of communication systems made for this purpose. Lastly, collected opinions on positive and negative aspects of working from home provided some practical suggestions about how to successfully implement this solution.

We hypothesized that visits to green and blue spaces may have enabled respite, connection and exercise during the COVID-19 pandemic, but such benefits might have been inequitably distributed due to differences in financial difficulties, opportunities to work from home, and localized restrictions in spatial mobility generated by ‘lockdowns’. A nationally representative online and telephone survey conducted in 12–26 October on the Social Research Centre’s Life in AustraliaTM panel (aged ≥ 18 y, 78.8% response, N = 3043) asked about access, visitation, and felt benefits from green and/or blue spaces. Increasing financial difficulty was associated with less time in and fewer visits to green and/or blue spaces, as well as fewer different types visited. Financial difficulty was also associated with feelings that visits to green and/or blue space had less benefit for maintaining social connection. Working from home was associated with more frequent and longer visitation to green and/or blue spaces, as well as discovery of ones previously unvisited. Working from home was also associated with increased levels of exercise and respite resulting from visits to green and/or blue spaces. Residents of Melbourne, a city of 4.9 million who were in ‘lockdown’ at the time of the survey, appeared more likely to benefit from visits to green and/or blue spaces than residents of Sydney, Australia’s largest city at 5.2 million, who were not in lockdown. Residents of Melbourne compared with Sydney reported consistently increased visitation of, discovery of, and greater levels of various felt benefits derived from green and/or blue spaces, including more respite, connection, and exercise. Comparatively shorter distances to preferred green and/or blue spaces and closure of alternative settings at the time of the survey completion in Melbourne compared with Sydney may provide partial explanation, though more acute responses to experiencing green and/or blue spaces within highly cognitively demanding antecedent conditions posed by lockdown are also plausible and warrant further investigation with other health indicators. These results were robust to adjustment for a range of covariates including preferences for natural settings, which were consistently associated with greater levels of green and/or blue space visitation and felt benefits. Collectively, these results indicate that parallel efforts to generate (or renew) felt connection to natural settings, to increase working from home opportunities, and to mitigate financial difficulties may be important to help maximize the population health benefits of urban planning strategies intended to improve the availability of, and to reduce inequities in access to, green and blue spaces. Benefits felt more commonly by people living through lockdown underlines the role previous investments in green and blue space have played in enabling coping during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background Globalization and technological progress have made telework arrangements such as telework from home (TWFH) well-established in modern economies. TWFH was rapidly and widely implemented to reduce virus spread during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, and will probably be widespread also post-pandemic. How such work arrangements affect employee health is largely unknown. Main objective of this review was to assess the evidence on the relationship between TWFH and employee health. Methods We conducted electronic searches in MEDLINE, Embase, Amed, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Scopus for peer-reviewed, original research with quantitative design published from January 2010 to February 2021. Our aim was to assess the evidence for associations between TWFH and health-related outcomes in employed office workers. Risk of bias in each study was evaluated by the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and the collected body of evidence was evaluated using the the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. Results We included 14 relevant studies (22,919 participants) reporting on 28 outcomes, which were sorted into six outcome categories (general health, pain, well-being, stress, exhaustion & burnout, and satisfaction with overall life & leisure). Few studies, with many having suboptimal designs and/or other methodological issues, investigating a limited number of outcomes, resulted in the body of evidence for the detected outcome categories being GRADED either as low or very low. Conclusions The consisting evidence on the relationship between TWFH and employee health is scarce. The non-existence of studies on many relevant and important health outcomes indicates a vast knowledge gap that is crucial to fill when determining how to implement TWFH in the future working life. Systematic review registration number PROSPERO registration ID # CRD42021233796 .