It’s not satisfaction levels that should drive homeworking decisions but health and wellbeing

This prophecy was fuelled by reports of employees being satisfied with working from home. Homeworking has been viewed as a win-win situation: employees saving on commute time and employers saving on office space. Last year, reports of reluctance to return to the employers’ workplace began to emerge. Firms like Criteo, the online advertising company, were announcing decisions to make homeworking permanent.

Fast forward to March 2021 and there are signs of employers singing a different tune. Howard Dawber, Head of Strategy at Canary Wharf Group, was reported on BBC News as gauging that employees were fatigued by homeworking and missing office and city life. Employers such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan announced they too were having reservations.

Rather than making sweeping binary decisions at this stage, employers would be well advised to jointly evaluate their and their employees’ experience during the pandemic.

My research in universities, covering academics and non-academics, has provided some robust evidence on professional workers that can be used by employers and employees’ alike. We administered two sets of weekly surveys throughout May and September 2020 involving over 800 staff.

A key finding is that the factors that influence average levels of wellbeing or mental health (measured by anxiety, depression and the meaningfulness of life) in both periods were both downsides of homeworking – loneliness and the inability to detach oneself from work.

These also affected week-by-week levels of wellbeing, but other factors improved these, including job autonomy and the degree of support from colleagues.

Satisfaction with homeworking levels was high, with over 75% reporting this. Still, more than 50% of homeworkers typically reported being anxious in any one week.

Factors specific to the enforced nature of the pandemic – such as whether work could be done normally, or the ability to work at home being affected by caring responsibilities – had no significant effect on average levels and fluctuations in wellbeing. This result suggests we need not be too cautious about using the experience of the pandemic for making decisions about the future of homeworking.

Evaluation of homeworking should prioritise health and wellbeing and guard against unnuanced reports of satisfaction levels. My research suggests that emphasis should be on understanding what lies behind any feelings of loneliness or inability to switch off. As one academic said in our study: “I have this feeling of permanently juggling between and across work and domestic tasks”. The best way to grasp what lies behind such feelings is to engage in intensive employee involvement, itself a source of wellbeing. The focus should be on identifying new ideas, facilitators, constraints and stressors. It must go beyond the typical employee wellbeing initiative, which is targeted at stress not stressors, and hence at coping with and not eliminating the causes of stress.

More generally, homeworking policy must be part of a vision of healthy workplaces, and a realisation that a healthy organisation depends on a healthy workforce.

The author is Stephen Wood, professor of management at University of Leicester.

This article is also featured in our Employee Wellbeing Research 2021. Download your copy of the report.