However, under social distancing and lockdown policies, many employees are not able to go to their offices as usual. To control the crisis, some countries and cities even need to institute lockdown measures to restrict the activities of their citizens. During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals have been and are continuing to be advised to maintain social distancing to minimize the chance of infection. Employees needed to go to their offices on every working day. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.īefore the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, most companies had not adopted the work-from-home (or working from home, WFH) approach. Amanda Chu, Principal Investigator ( for access to sensitive data.įunding: This work was partially supported by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research grant “Big Data Analytics on Social Research” (grant number CEF20BM04). Data requests will need to be submitted to Dr. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Due to ethical restrictions, data are available from The Education University of Hong Kong for researchers who meet the criteria for access to sensitive data. Received: JAccepted: DecemPublished: January 13, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Chu et al. PLoS ONE 17(1):Įditor: Mohammad Hossein Ebrahimi, Shahrood University of Medical Sciences, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN The research findings provide evidence that management’s maintenance of a healthy work-life balance for colleagues when they are working from home is important for supporting their psychosocial well-being and in turn upholding their work productivity.Ĭitation: Chu AMY, Chan TWC, So MKP (2022) Learning from work-from-home issues during the COVID-19 pandemic: Balance speaks louder than words. Interestingly, non-work-related activities had no significant effect on productivity. Stress when working from home promoted non-work-related activities during working hours, whereas happiness improved productivity. We found that among the three stress relievers, work-life balance was the only significant construct that affected psychological well-being.
We collected a total of 500 valid responses and analyzed the results with structural equation modelling. In order to collect honest responses on sensitive questions or negative forms of behavior including stress and non-work-related activities, we adopted the randomized response technique in the survey design to minimize response bias. We studied the effects that three stress relievers of the work-from-home environment–company support, supervisor’s trust in the subordinate, and work-life balance–had on employees’ psychological well-being (stress and happiness), which in turn influenced productivity and engagement in non-work-related activities during working hours.
Despite the findings of previous research that working from home can improve productivity, the scale, nature, and purpose of those studies are not the same as in the current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. During the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, many employees have switched to working from home.
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