Work from home or work from office- what do employees seek in the long term?

Abstract

With the onset of Covid-19, millions of employees worldwide and in India have transitioned to working from home. With government regulations in place, companies are forced to maintain less than 50% workforce at offices and the remaining at home, working remotely. Fortunately, the work-from-home model has worked successfully for most companies, increasing productivity in some cases. Most employees also wanted to continue working remotely post-pandemic. However, all the disruptions and uncertainty have taken a toll on the employees' Quality of work life. The effect on the Quality of work-life due to the change in the working environment depends on several factors starting from the type of organization, the demographics of the individual in terms of age & gender, level of command in the organizational hierarchy, living status and availability of administrative support. The purpose of the research is to understand the effects of various demographic, environmental and organizational factors on the Quality of work-life of professionals who adopted work-from-home practices in the post-COVID-19 world. We conducted qualitative research based on one-on-one interviews for our study. The idea was to keep the discussions open-ended and gather in-depth information about the experience of respondents who worked remotely from home and then relate it to the demographic, organizational & environmental parameters affecting their Quality of work life. We analyzed the data collected from interviews to understand the positive and negative impacts of Work from home on Quality of work life. Finally, based on the findings, we suggested a set of recommendations to improve QWL in a WFH environment.