Work from home: a boon or a bane? the missing piece of employee cost

Abstract

This paper examines the discourse on work from home in global and Indian contexts. It shows a long-held excessive focus on employee benefits which deflected the attention away from employee costs. Even though there was discussion on costs in the recent past, it mainly focused on employers’ costs. However, a growing body of recent research shows that the framing of work from home as an employee benefit creates normative pressures on employees to intensify their work. The authors argue that current discourse, which portrays work from home as an employer cost and simultaneously an employee benefit, can steepen the normative pressures on employees, creating undesirable outcomes.