research question on work from home

20 Questions to Ask in a Remote Work or WFH Survey (+Examples)

How are your remote team members doing? Productive and satisfied? To find out, ask these questions in a remote work or WFH survey.

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When the majority of the business world moved to a remote work model in 2020, leaders scrambled to ensure their teams had everything they needed to be successful in their new work environment. Today, hybrid and remote teams are more common than ever before, and the new focus is on continually optimizing the work from home experience.

It's essential to understand the following: How are your team members holding up in this new age of distributed workforces? Are they as productive? Are they as satisfied in their jobs? To find out, you’ll need to know what questions to ask in a remote work or WFH survey.

Why you should survey remote workers

One HubSpot study found that remote workers are happier and feel more valued overall. However, it also found that they experienced weaker relationships with their coworkers .

72% of remote workers want to return to the office according to a 2020 Glassdoor survey. Their reasons? Socializing with coworkers and in-person collaboration.

Furthermore, the State of Remote Work report by Buffer found that WFH employees struggle most with unplugging after work, loneliness, collaborating, and communication .

These stats all support the importance of checking in with your remote team members. The right WFH survey questions will help determine the best way to support your team moving forward, ensuring they stay motivated and engaged.

If you're looking for some best practices to keep your remote team engaged and motivated, check out this video:

Work from home experience survey questions

A work from home experience survey focuses on each remote workers’ unique WFH experience. It provides insight into what benefits and challenges your team is finding while working remotely.

These survey questions will focus on team members’ WFH tools , job satisfaction while working from home, and more. We’ve included some examples in the template below.

Survey questions about your team's work from home experience:

• Are the WFH policies clear?
• Are your work objectives clear each day? Each week?
• Do you feel there is adequate communication from your teammates and team leaders?
• How satisfied are you with the frequency of communication from leadership?
• How satisfied are you with the quality of communication from leadership?
• What communication channels work best for you?
• Is it easy to reach your teammates and team leaders when you need them?
• Do you feel supported and trusted by your team leader? By the organization?
• Do you have all the equipment and remote tools you need to complete your work to your usual ability? If not, what do you need?
• What can leadership do to support your work while you work from home?

Other questions to ask remote employees

Outside of the work from home experience, there are other questions you should ask remote employees to nurture a helpful and caring work relationship. These may feel a little more personal, but remote team members are completing work in their personal spaces. As a result, personal experiences and work-life balance with WFH models deserve extra attention.

It's important to think about what personal factors may be affecting productivity for your remote team. This can include distractions in the home, scheduling, and more. Here are some examples in the template below.

Survey questions about other remote work factors:

• Do you feel you have a good work-life balance?
• Do you have a separate and suitable space for work in your home?
• Is it easy to “turn off work mode” at the end of the day?
• Have you been able to stick to a work routine or schedule?
• Do you take regular breaks?
• Do you feel as productive at home as you are at the office?
• Is anything holding you back from completing your work?
• Do you look forward to returning to the office? Why or why not?
• What do you need to feel safe returning to the office?
• What is your biggest WFH struggle?

Employee engagement questions leaders should ask outside of a survey platform

The above questions are instrumental in understanding how your remote team is operating. However, not every question is best presented in survey form. Surveys can feel impersonal and detached, and while anonymous surveys can invite more honest answers , some questions are better suited for a conversational setting.

Here are some questions that can be asked in 1:1 meetings , team meetings , or when you're in person with your team members:

• How do you feel about working from home?
• Is there anyone on the team who has been especially helpful in your WFH transition?
• Do you feel connected enough to your teammates? Why or why not?
• Do you feel you’ve been able to learn and grow in the last few months? If so, how? If not, why not?
• Is there anything new you think I should be aware of at this time?
• What can I personally do to improve your remote work experience?

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15 Questions About Remote Work, Answered

• Tsedal Neeley

A Q&A with Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley.

How should corporate leaders, managers, and individual workers shift to remote work in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic? Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent two decades helping companies learn how to manage dispersed teams. In this edited Q&A, she offers guidance on how to work productively at home, manage virtual meetings, and lead teams from a distance.

In these difficult times, we’ve made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers. To get all of HBR’s content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

The coronavirus pandemic is expected to fundamentally change the way many organizations operate for the foreseeable future. As governments and businesses around the world tell those with symptoms to self-quarantine and everyone else to practice social distancing, remote work is our new reality. How do corporate leaders, managers, and individual workers make this sudden shift? Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent two decades helping companies learn how to manage dispersed teams . In this edited Q&A, drawn from a recent HBR subscriber video call in which listeners were able to ask questions, she offers guidance on how to work productively at home, manage virtual meetings, and lead teams through this time of crisis.

• Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean of faculty and research at Harvard Business School. She is the coauthor of the book The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI and the author of the book Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere . tsedal

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What’s next for remote work: An analysis of 2,000 tasks, 800 jobs, and nine countries

For many workers, COVID-19’s impact has depended greatly on one question: Can I work from home or am I tethered to my workplace? Quarantines, lockdowns, and self-imposed isolation have pushed tens of millions around the world to work from home, accelerating a workplace experiment that had struggled to gain traction before COVID-19 hit.

Now, well into the pandemic, the limitations and the benefits of remote work are clearer. Although many people are returning to the workplace as economies reopen—the majority could not work remotely at all—executives have indicated in surveys that hybrid models of remote work  for some employees are here to stay. The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people.

Now that vaccines are awaiting approval, the question looms: To what extent will remote work persist ? In this article, we assess the possibility for various work activities to be performed remotely. Building on the McKinsey Global Institute’s body of work on automation, AI, and the future of work, we extend our models to consider where work is performed. 1 The future of work in Europe: Automation, workforce transitions, and the future geography of work , McKinsey Global Institute, June 2020; The future of work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow , McKinsey Global Institute, July 2019; Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation , McKinsey Global Institute, December 2017. Our analysis finds that the potential for remote work is highly concentrated among highly skilled, highly educated workers in a handful of industries, occupations, and geographies.

More than 20 percent of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office. If remote work took hold at that level, that would mean three to four times as many people working from home than before the pandemic and would have a profound impact on urban economies, transportation, and consumer spending, among other things.

The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people.

More than half the workforce, however, has little or no opportunity for remote work. Some of their jobs require collaborating with others or using specialized machinery; other jobs, such as conducting CT scans, must be done on location; and some, such as making deliveries, are performed while out and about. Many of such jobs are low wage and more at risk from broad trends such as automation and digitization. Remote work thus risks accentuating inequalities at a social level.

The potential for remote work is determined by tasks and activities, not occupations

Remote work raises a vast array of issues and challenges for employees and employers. Companies are pondering how best to deliver coaching remotely and how to configure workspaces to enhance employee safety, among a host of other thorny questions raised by COVID-19. For their part, employees are struggling to find the best home-work balance and equip themselves for working and collaborating remotely.

In this article, however, we aim to granularly define the activities and occupations that can be done from home to better understand the future staying power of remote work. We have analyzed the potential for remote work—or work that doesn’t require interpersonal interaction or a physical presence at a specific worksite—in a range of countries, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We used MGI’s workforce model based on the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to analyze more than 2,000 activities in more than 800 occupations and identify which activities and occupations have the greatest potential for remote work.

The potential for remote work depends on the mix of activities undertaken in each occupation and on their physical, spatial, and interpersonal context. We first assessed the theoretical extent to which an activity can be done remotely. This depends on whether a worker needs to be physically present on-site to do a task, interact with others, or use location-specific machinery or equipment.

Many physical or manual activities, as well as those that require use of fixed equipment, cannot be done remotely. These include providing care, operating machinery, using lab equipment, and processing customer transactions in stores. In contrast, activities such as information gathering and processing, communicating with others, teaching and counseling, and coding data can theoretically be done remotely.

Additionally, employers have found during the pandemic that although some tasks can be done remotely in a crisis, they are much more effectively done in person. These activities include coaching, counseling, and providing advice and feedback; building customer and colleague relationships; bringing new employees into a company; negotiating and making critical decisions; teaching and training; and work that benefits from collaboration, such as innovation, problem-solving, and creativity. If onboarding were to be done remotely, for instance, it would require significant rethinking of the activity to produce outcomes similar to those achieved in person.

For instance, while teaching has moved to remote work during the pandemic, parents and teachers alike say that quality has suffered. Similarly, courtrooms have functioned remotely but are unlikely to remain online going forward out of concern for legal rights and equity—some defendants lack adequate connectivity and lawyers, and judges worry about missing nonverbal cues in video conferences.

So we have devised two metrics for remote work potential: the maximum potential, including all activities that theoretically can be performed remotely, and a lower bound for the effective potential for remote work, which excludes activities that have a clear benefit from being done in person (Exhibit 1).

To determine the overall potential for remote work for jobs and sectors, we use the time spent on different activities within occupations. We find that remote work potential is concentrated in a few sectors. Finance and insurance has the highest potential, with three-quarters of time spent on activities that can be done remotely without a loss of productivity. Management, business services, and information technology have the next highest potential, all with more than half of employee time spent on activities that could effectively be done remotely (Exhibit 2). These sectors are characterized by a high share of workers with college degrees or higher.

Remote work potential is higher in advanced economies

The potential for remote work varies across countries, a reflection of their sector, occupation, and activity mix. Business and financial services are a large share of the UK economy, for example, and it has the highest potential for remote work among the countries we examined. Its workforce could theoretically work remotely one-third of the time without a loss of productivity, or almost half the time but with diminished productivity. (Exhibit 3). Other advanced economies are not far behind; their workforces could dedicate 28 to 30 percent of the time to working remotely without losing productivity.

In emerging economies, employment is skewed toward occupations that require physical and manual activities in sectors like agriculture and manufacturing. The potential for time spent on remote work drops to 12 to 26 percent in the emerging economies we assessed. In India, for instance, the workforce could spend just 12 percent of the time working remotely without losing effectiveness. Although India is known globally for its high-tech and financial services industries, the vast majority of its workforce of 464 million is employed in occupations like retail services and agriculture that cannot be done remotely.

Although India is known globally for its high-tech and financial services industries, the vast majority of its workforce of 464 million is employed in occupations like retail services and agriculture that cannot be done remotely.

A hybrid model that combines some remote work with work in an office is possible for occupations with high remote work potential

For most workers, some activities during a typical day lend themselves to remote work, while the rest of their tasks require their on-site physical presence. In the US workforce, we find that just 22 percent of employees can work remotely between three and five days a week without affecting productivity, while only 5 percent could do so in India. In contrast, 61 percent of the workforce in the United States can work no more than a few hours a week remotely or not at all. The remaining 17 percent of the workforce could work remotely partially, between one and three days per week (Exhibit 4).

Consider a floral designer. We estimate that between half and one-quarter of his job can be done remotely. He can take orders by phone or online and contract for delivery through an app, but floral arrangement itself requires being in a shop where the flowers are stored in a refrigerated case and ribbons, moss, vases, and other materials used to create a floral design are at hand. To make a floral designer’s job more remote would require dividing his various tasks among all employees in a flower shop. In contrast, credit analysts, database administrators, and tax preparers, among others, can do virtually all of their work remotely. In general, workers whose jobs require cognitive thinking and problem solving, managing and developing people, and data processing have the greatest potential to work from home. These employees also tend to be among the highest paid.

The ability to work remotely also depends on the need to use specialized equipment. According to our analysis, a chemical technician could work remotely only a quarter of the time because much of her work must be done in a lab housing the equipment she needs. Among healthcare occupations, general practitioners who can use digital technologies to communicate with patients have a much greater potential for remote work than surgeons and x-ray technicians, who need advanced equipment and tools to do their work. Thus, among health professionals overall, the effective remote work potential is just 11 percent.

Even for the same activity, the context in which a job is done matters. Consider the activity “analyzing data or information,” which can be done remotely by a statistician or financial analyst but not by a surveyor. Crime scene analysts and workers who analyze consumer trends both engage in what O*NET describes as “getting, processing, analyzing, documenting and interpreting information,” but the former must go to the location of, say, a murder while the latter can do his work in front of a computer at home. A travel agent can calculate the cost of goods or services from a kitchen table, but a grocery clerk does that from behind a counter in a store.

And then there are jobs that require workers to be on-site or in person more than four days a week. Due to the physical nature of most of their work activities, occupations such as transportation, food services, property maintenance, and agriculture offer little or no opportunity for remote work. Building inspectors must go to a building or construction site. Nursing assistants must work in a healthcare facility. Many jobs declared essential by governments during the pandemic—nursing, building maintenance, and garbage collection, for example—fall into this category of jobs with low remote work potential.

This mixed pattern of remote and physical activities of each occupation helps explain the results of a recent McKinsey survey of 800 corporate executives  around the world. Across all sectors, 38 percent of respondents expect their remote employees to work two or more days a week away from the office after the pandemic, compared to 22 percent of respondents surveyed before the pandemic. But just 19 percent of respondents to the most recent survey said they expected employees to work three or more days remotely. This suggests that executives anticipate operating their businesses with a hybrid model  of some sort, with employees working remotely and from an office during the workweek. JPMorgan already has a plan for its 60,950 employees to work from home one or two weeks a month or two days a week, depending on the line of business.

Hybrid remote work has important implications for urban economies

Currently, only a small share of the workforce in advanced economies—typically between 5 and 7 percent—regularly works from home. A shift to 15 to 20 percent of workers spending more time at home and less in the office could have profound impacts on urban economies. More people working remotely means fewer people commuting between home and work every day or traveling to different locations for work. This could have significant economic consequences, including on transportation, gasoline and auto sales, restaurants and retail in urban centers, demand for office real estate, and other consumption patterns.

A McKinsey survey of office space managers conducted in May found that after the pandemic, they expect a 36 percent increase in worktime outside their offices, affecting main offices and satellite locations. This means companies will need less office space, and several are already planning to reduce real estate expenses. Moody’s Analytics predicts that the office vacancy rate in the United States will climb to 19.4 percent, compared to 16.8 percent at the end of 2019, and rise to 20.2 percent by the end of 2022. A survey of 248 US chief operating officers found that one-third plan to reduce office space in the coming years as leases expire.

The impact of that will reverberate through the restaurants and bars, shops, and services businesses that cater to office workers and will put a dent in some state and local tax revenues. For example, REI plans to sell off its new corporate headquarters before even moving in and instead begin operating from satellite offices. In contrast, Amazon recently signed leases for a total of 900,000 feet of office space in six cities around the United States, citing the lack of spontaneity in virtual teamwork.

As tech companies announced plans for permanent remote work options, the median price of a one-bedroom rental in San Francisco dropped 24.2 percent compared to a year ago, while in New York City, which had roughly 28,000 residents in every square mile at the start of 2020, 15,000 rental apartments were empty in September, the most vacancies in recorded history.

Nor is residential real estate immune from the impact of remote work. As tech companies announced plans for permanent remote work options, the median price of a one-bedroom rental in San Francisco dropped 24.2 percent compared to a year ago, while in New York City, which had roughly 28,000 residents in every square mile at the start of 2020, 15,000 rental apartments were empty in September, the most vacancies in recorded history. Conversely, bidding wars are breaking out in suburbs and smaller cities as remote workers seek less harried, less expensive lifestyles and homes with a room that can serve as an office or gym—though it is unclear how successful companies will be with workers scattered in far-flung locales.

Remote workers may also shift consumption patterns. Less money spent on transportation, lunch, and wardrobes suitable for the office may be shifted to other uses. Sales of home office equipment, digital tools, and enhanced connectivity gear have boomed.

Whether the shift to remote work translates into spreading prosperity to smaller cities remains to be seen. Previous MGI research in the United States and Europe has shown a trend toward greater geographic concentration of work  in megacities like London and New York and high-growth hubs, including Seattle and Amsterdam . These locales have attracted many of the same type of younger, highly educated workers who can best work remotely. It remains to be seen whether the shift to remote work slows that trend, or whether the most vibrant cities remain magnets for such people.

Organizations will have to adjust their practices to capture potential productivity gains from remote work

Is remote work good for productivity? Ultimately, the answer may determine its popularity, especially given the long period of waning labor productivity  that preceded the pandemic. So far, there is scant clarity—and widespread contradiction—about the productivity impact. Some 41 percent of employees who responded to a McKinsey consumer survey in May said they were more productive working remotely than in the office. As employees have gained experience working remotely during the pandemic, their confidence in their productivity has grown, with the number of people saying they worked more productively increasing by 45 percent from April to May.

With nine months of experience under their belts, more employers are seeing somewhat better productivity from their remote workers. Interviews with chief executives about remote work elicited a mixed range of opinions. Some express confidence that remote work can continue, while others say they see few positives to remote work.

With nine months of experience under their belts, more employers are seeing somewhat better productivity from their remote workers.

One impediment to productivity may be connectivity. A researcher at Stanford University found that only 65 percent of Americans surveyed said they had fast enough internet service to support viable video calls, and in many parts of the developing world, the connectivity infrastructure is sparse or nonexistent. Developing digital infrastructure will require significant public and private investment.

For women in particular, remote work is a mixed blessing. It boosts flexibility—not needing to be physically co-located with fellow workers enables independent work and more flexible hours—as well as productivity, with less time wasted commuting. Yet remote work also may increase gender disparity in the workplace, exacerbating the regressive effects of COVID-19. The female workforce in many economies is more highly concentrated in occupational clusters like healthcare, food services, and customer service that have relatively low potential for remote work. Previous MGI research on gender parity found that jobs held by women are 19 percent more at risk than jobs held by men simply because women are disproportionately represented in sectors most negatively affected by COVID-19.

Some forms of remote work are likely to persist long after COVID-19 is conquered. This will require many shifts, such as investment in digital infrastructure, freeing up office space, and the structural transformation of cities, food services, commercial real estate, and retail. It also risks accentuating inequalities and creating new psychological and emotional stresses among employees, including from isolation. For most companies, having employees work outside the office  will require reinventing many processes and policies. How long before someone invents the virtual watercooler?

The authors wish to thank Olivia Robinson, Gurneet Singh Dandona, and Alok Singh for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Stephanie Strom, a senior editor at the McKinsey Global Institute.

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The massive surge in the number of people working from home may be the largest change to the U.S. economy since World War II, says Stanford scholar Nicholas Bloom .

And the shift to working from home, catalyzed by the pandemic, is here to stay, with further growth expected in the long run through improvements in technology.

Looking at data going back to 1965, when less than 1% of people worked from home, the number of people working from home had been rising continuously up to the pandemic, doubling roughly every 15 years, said Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor in Economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Before the pandemic, only around 5% of the typical U.S. workforce worked from home; at the pandemic’s onset, it skyrocketed to 61.5%. Currently, about 30% of employees work from home.

“In some ways, one of the biggest lasting legacies of the pandemic will be the shift to work from home,” said Bloom.

Bloom shared his research on working from home at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute ’s “The Future of Work” Winter 2023 Colloquium, which focused on how the ways we work are changing.

DCI Director Richard Saller moderated the event , which featured scholars from Stanford and beyond discussing working arrangements and attitudes, challenges to office real estate, learned lessons about the power of proximity, and more.

Below are seven takeaways from Bloom’s discussion:

• The employees. About 58% of people in the U.S. can’t work from home at all, and they are typically frontline workers with lower pay. Those who work entirely from home are primarily professionals, managers, and in higher-paying fields such as IT support, payroll, and call centers. The highest paid group includes the 30% of people working from home in a hybrid capacity, and these include professionals and managers.
• The move. Almost 1 million people left city centers like New York and San Francisco during the pandemic. Those who used to go to the office five days a week are now willing to commute farther because they are only in the office a couple days a week, and they want larger homes to accommodate needs such as a home office. This has changed property markets substantially with rents and home values in the suburbs surging, Bloom said. Home values in city centers have risen but not by much.
• The commute. Public transit journeys have plummeted and are currently down by a third compared to pre-pandemic levels. This sharp reduction is threatening the survival of mass transit, Bloom said. These are systems that have relatively fixed costs because the hardware and labor, which is largely unionized, are relatively hard to adjust. A lot of the revenues come from ticket sales, and these agencies are losing a lot of money.
• The office. Offices are changing, with cubicles becoming less popular and meeting rooms more desirable. As some companies incorporate an organized hybrid schedule in which everyone comes in on certain days, they are redesigning spaces to support more meetings, presentations, trainings, lunches, and social time.
• The startups. Startup rates are surging, up by 20% from pre-pandemic numbers. The reasons: working from home provides a cheaper way to start a new company by saving a lot on initial capital and rent. Also, people can more easily work on a startup on the side when their regular job offers the option to work from home.
• The downtime. The number of people playing golf mid-week has more than doubled since 2019. People used to go before or after work, or on the weekends, but now the mid-day, mid-week golf game is becoming more common. The same is probably true for things like gyms, tennis courts, retail hairdressers, ski resorts, and anything else that consumers used to pack into the weekends.
• The organization. More and more, firms are outsourcing or offshoring their information technology, human resources, and finance to access talent, save costs, and free up space. There has been a big increase in part-time employees, independent contractors, and outsourcing. “After seeing how well it worked with remote work at the beginning of the pandemic, companies may not see a need to have employees in the country,” Bloom said.

Interested in hearing more about the future of work? Stanford Continuing Studies will feature Bloom as he discusses “The Future of and Impact of Working from Home” on May 1 as part of the Stanford Monday University web seminar series .

Bloom is also co-director of the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research .

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20 work-from-home survey questions to ask your team

Types of work-from-home survey questions, cultural work-from-home survey questions, logistical work-from-home survey questions, technological work-from-home survey questions, productivity work-from-home survey questions.

Working from home is becoming more commonplace in many industries, including tech, finance, consulting, and even healthcare. However, having employees dispersed in multiple locations presents employers with unique challenges.

“There are people joining companies where they never meet the team in person,” says Miriam Groom, founder and CEO of Mindful Career , a career counseling firm. “This can make it difficult for them to feel integrated into the team. We have actually seen people bounce back to their old employer because they didn’t feel a part of the new team.” 

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Create a free work-from-home survey with Jotform.

In order to make sure organizations are aware of how their employees are doing working from home, it’s important to ask work-from-home survey questions on a regular basis to get employee feedback on cultural, logistical, technological, and productivity matters.

The importance of work-from-home surveys

For many organizations and employees, the work-from-home environment is a major change from the office environment, and change can be difficult to adjust to. In order to make sure the transition from office work to remote work is smooth, it’s vital to get feedback from employees on a range of matters — from whether they have the technical setup required to do their job to whether they feel lonely and isolated during the workday.

“The in-person working experience prior to the pandemic literally kept teams together,” says Don Martelli, president and partner at The Belfort Group , an integrated digital marketing and public relations agency. “In a remote or even hybrid experience, some team members can feel separated from the company. Conducting regular surveys gives the company critical information around staffing issues, potential benefit changes, perks, and workflow challenges that should be addressed or ideas to make the virtual working environment better.”

Without getting this type of feedback from employees and acting on the information, organizations may start to see a drop in employee performance and satisfaction — along with higher turnover. However, if organizations can keep a finger on the pulse of employee sentiment, they can adapt more quickly to ensure employees have whatever they need to thrive in their new work arrangement.

“Work-from-home surveys are a great retention tool,” says Groom. “Things change and priorities change over time.” For example, employees may value work-life balance over salary or bonuses. Having a clear idea of what matters to employees can help organizations create more attractive compensation plans and retain their employees longer.

Work-from-home survey questions to ask your employees

“The types of questions employers should ask may vary based on the type of company, the products or services it provides, the size of the staff, and more,” says Martelli. “While quarterly surveys will create a cadenced feedback loop, it’s also important to do smaller one-on-one check-ins with your team so specific issues, challenges, and ideas can be discussed in depth.”

“Organizations can shape the questions in each survey based on the time of year it is,” says Groom. “April may be a more stressful time for accounting firms, and winter may result in seasonal affective disorder, for example.”

It’s also important to get the length of the survey just right in order to get employees to fill it out. “Don’t make it more than 30 questions,” says Groom. “Be clear at the very beginning of the survey how many questions there are and how much time it will take the employees to fill it out.”

An organization’s culture, including its values and accepted behaviors, can be harder to communicate when a team operates remotely — unless the company takes an active approach to ensure its culture remains vibrant. Groom notes that the majority of the questions she has seen in work-from-home surveys are in this category.

Be sure to stay in tune with your employees’ experience of the company culture by asking about areas like mental health, social engagement, satisfaction, and inclusion. Here are some questions to ask:

• Do you feel lonely while working from home?
• Are you able to make personal connections with colleagues and managers in this work environment?
• Are you happy with the amount of times you interact with your colleagues on a daily basis?
• Do you feel supported in all aspects of your job?
• Is there anything you miss about the office that you can’t have at home?

Working remotely presents many logistical challenges that you don’t usually encounter in office environments. For example, in an office, an employee can walk over to a colleague’s desk and have a quick chat about a project, but in a remote environment, the same discussion might require scheduling a time to chat. Ask questions like these to learn more about how employees feel about the logistical aspects of working from home:

• Can you reach your manager when you need to during the workday?
• Do you have difficulty connecting with your colleagues during the workday?
• How do you feel about the number of meetings currently scheduled in your workday?
• Are you aware of all your project deadlines?
• Are your daily objectives clear?

The technological aspects of working from home are critical — without a fast internet connection and the right software and hardware, team members can watch their productivity grind to a halt. When discussing these aspects in the context of a survey, it’s important to get input from the IT team at your organization — and to have them ensure employees are aware of security policies. Ask these technology questions:

• Do you feel satisfied with your remote work tools, such as VPN, laptop, and mobile phone?
• In the past week, how much time have you spent troubleshooting technical issues?
• Are you aware of the latest software security policies at our workplace?
• Which necessary tools are you missing at home that you have access to in the office?
• Have you purchased any additional tools to support your work-from-home productivity?

Productivity is an area that worries many employers when they’re making the move to the work-from-home model. When addressing productivity, it’s important to focus on employee outcomes instead of the amount of time employees once spent in the office. Ask these questions to gather employee feedback in this area:

• Are you as productive at home as you were in the office?
• Do you have the productivity tools you need to do your job effectively?
• What is your biggest distraction while working from home?
• How can your team support you to ensure you remain focused during the workday?
• Do you feel you have a good work-life balance?

Final words of advice

Groom notes that some employees are hesitant to fill out work-from-home surveys because they fear backlash to any negative answers.

“You have to make sure people actually do the survey because companies need this valuable data,” she notes. “Offer positive reinforcement, such as a reward, for completing the survey. Make sure employees know they won’t be penalized for being honest.”

It can take a year to two years for organizations to see trends in their survey responses, so it’s important to collect the data in order to gain valuable insights from it. “In the end, making promises to your team is easy,” advises Martelli. “Delivering on them can be hard and costly at times. However, investing in your team is never a bad decision.”

You can make the process easier by creating work-from-home surveys with Jotform and polling your employees on a regular basis. Jotform is intuitive and easy to use, and it comes with thousands of business templates you can customize for your organization.

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About a third of U.S. workers who can work from home now do so all the time

Roughly three years after the COVID-19 pandemic upended U.S. workplaces, about a third (35%) of workers with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home all of the time, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. This is down from 43% in January 2022 and 55% in October 2020 – but up from only 7% before the pandemic.

While the share working from home all the time has fallen off somewhat as the pandemic has gone on, many workers have settled into hybrid work. The new survey finds that 41% of those with jobs that can be done remotely are working a hybrid schedule – that is, working from home some days and from the office, workplace or job site other days. This is up from 35% in January 2022.

Among hybrid workers who are not self-employed, most (63%) say their employer requires them to work in person a certain number of days per week or month. About six-in-ten hybrid workers (59%) say they work from home three or more days in a typical week, while 41% say they do so two days or fewer.

Related: How Americans View Their Jobs

Many hybrid workers would prefer to spend more time working from home than they currently do. About a third (34%) of those who are currently working from home most of the time say, if they had the choice, they’d like to work from home all the time. And among those who are working from home some of the time, half say they’d like to do so all (18%) or most (32%) of the time.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to study how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the workplace and specifically how workers with jobs that can be done from home have adapted their work schedules. To do this, we surveyed 5,775 U.S. adults who are working part time or full time and who have only one job or who have more than one job but consider one of them to be their primary job. All the workers who took part are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Address-based sampling ensures that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and the survey’s methodology .

The majority of U.S. workers overall (61%) do not have jobs that can be done from home. Workers with lower incomes and those without a four-year college degree are more likely to fall into this category. Among those who do have teleworkable jobs, Hispanic adults and those without a college degree are among the most likely to say they rarely or never work from home.

When looking at all employed adults ages 18 and older in the United States, Pew Research Center estimates that about 14% – or roughly 22 million people – are currently working from home all the time.

The advantages and disadvantages of working from home

Workers who are not self-employed and who are teleworking at least some of the time see one clear advantage – and relatively few downsides – to working from home. By far the biggest perceived upside to working from home is the balance it provides: 71% of those who work from home all, most or some of the time say doing so helps them balance their work and personal lives. That includes 52% who say it helps them a lot with this.

About one-in-ten (12%) of those who are at least occasionally working from home say it hurts their ability to strike the right work-life balance, and 17% say it neither helps nor hurts. There is no significant gender difference in these views. However, parents with children younger than 18 are somewhat more likely than workers without children in that age range to say working from home is helpful in this regard (76% vs. 69%).

A majority of those who are working from home at least some of the time (56%) say this arrangement helps them get their work done and meet deadlines. Only 7% say working from home hurts their ability to do these things, and 37% say it neither helps nor hurts.

There are other aspects of work – some of them related to career advancement – where the impact of working from home seems minimal:

• When asked how working from home affects whether they are given important assignments, 77% of those who are at least sometimes working from home say it neither helps nor hurts, while 14% say it helps and 9% say it hurts.
• When it comes to their chances of getting ahead at work, 63% of teleworkers say working from home neither helps or hurts, while 18% say it helps and 19% say it hurts.
• A narrow majority of teleworkers (54%) say working from home neither helps nor hurts with opportunities to be mentored at work. Among those who do see an impact, it’s perceived to be more negative than positive: 36% say working from home hurts opportunities to be mentored and 10% say it helps.

One aspect of work that many remote workers say working from home makes more challenging is connecting with co-workers: 53% of those who work from home at least some of the time say working from home hurts their ability to feel connected with co-workers, while 37% say it neither helps nor hurts. Only 10% say it helps them feel connected.

In spite of this, those who work from home all the time or occasionally are no less satisfied with their relationship with co-workers than those who never work from home. Roughly two-thirds of workers – whether they are working exclusively from home, follow a hybrid schedule or don’t work from home at all – say they are extremely or very satisfied with these relationships. In addition, among those with teleworkable jobs, employed adults who work from home all the time are about as likely as hybrid workers to say they have at least one close friend at work.

Feeling connected with co-workers is one area where many workers who rarely or never work from home see an advantage in their setup. About four-in-ten of these workers (41%) say the fact that they rarely or never work from home helps in how connected they feel to their co-workers. A similar share (42%) say it neither helps nor hurts, and 17% say it hurts.

At the same time, those who rarely or never work from home are less likely than teleworkers to say their current arrangement helps them achieve work-life balance. A third of these workers say the fact that they rarely or never work from home hurts their ability to balance their work and personal lives, while 40% say it neither helps nor hurts and 27% say it helps.

When it comes to other aspects of work, many of those who rarely or never work from home say their arrangement is neither helpful nor hurtful. This is true when it comes to opportunities to be mentored (53% say this), their ability to get work done and meet deadlines (57%), their chances of getting ahead in their job (68%) and whether they are given important assignments (74%).

Most adults with teleworkable jobs who work from home at least some of the time (71%) say their manager or supervisor trusts them a great deal to get their work done when they’re doing so. Those who work from home all the time are the most likely to feel trusted: 79% of these workers say their manager trusts them a great deal, compared with 64% of hybrid workers.

Hybrid workers feel about as trusted when they’re not working from home: 68% say their manager or supervisor trusts them a great deal to get their work done when they’re not teleworking.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and the survey’s methodology .

• Business & Workplace
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Kim Parker is director of social trends research at Pew Research Center .

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Half of latinas say hispanic women’s situation has improved in the past decade and expect more gains, a majority of latinas feel pressure to support their families or to succeed at work, a look at small businesses in the u.s., majorities of adults see decline of union membership as bad for the u.s. and working people, most popular.

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Copyright 2024 Pew Research Center

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Research Article

Learning from work-from-home issues during the COVID-19 pandemic: Balance speaks louder than words

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Social Sciences, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Department of Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

• Amanda M. Y. Chu, 
• Thomas W. C. Chan, 
• Mike K. P. So

• Published: January 13, 2022
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969
• Reader Comments

During the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, many employees have switched to working from home. 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. 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. 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 collected a total of 500 valid responses and analyzed the results with structural equation modelling. We found that among the three stress relievers, work-life balance was the only significant construct that affected psychological well-being. Stress when working from home promoted non-work-related activities during working hours, whereas happiness improved productivity. Interestingly, non-work-related activities had no significant effect on productivity. 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.

Citation: Chu AMY, Chan TWC, So MKP (2022) Learning from work-from-home issues during the COVID-19 pandemic: Balance speaks louder than words. PLoS ONE 17(1): e0261969. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969

Editor: Mohammad Hossein Ebrahimi, Shahrood University of Medical Sciences, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

Received: June 1, 2021; Accepted: December 14, 2021; Published: January 13, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Chu et al. 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.

Data 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. Data requests will need to be submitted to Dr. Amanda Chu, Principal Investigator ( [email protected] ) for access to sensitive data.

Funding: 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). The funding recipient was MKPS. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Covid-19 leads to working from home.

Before the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, most companies had not adopted the work-from-home (or working from home, WFH) approach. Employees needed to go to their offices on every working day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals have been and are continuing to be advised to maintain social distancing to minimize the chance of infection [ 1 ]. To control the crisis, some countries and cities even need to institute lockdown measures to restrict the activities of their citizens [ 2 ]. However, under social distancing and lockdown policies, many employees are not able to go to their offices as usual. To maintain business operations, a majority of companies have responded improvisationally by introducing new WFH arrangements, although most of them have had little experience with such arrangements [ 3 , 4 ]. Because WFH can reduce infection rates and is accompanied by the low economic costs of confinement [ 5 ], it should be a suitable measure for facing the COVID-19 challenge. However, not everyone is happy with working from home or is able to carry it out [ 6 ].

Consequences of working from home

The WFH arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on employees’ psychological well-being and, by extension, on their work performance. Because many employees have been forced to make WFH arrangements as a result of social distancing or lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, their WFH experiences may differ from those of employees in earlier studies, who were voluntarily working from home for a variety of reasons [ 4 , 7 , 8 ].

Indeed, the forced home confinement during lockdowns to control COVID-19 might affect individuals’ psychological well-being, including increasing their chances of disturbed sleep and insomnia because of the stressful situation and lack of positive stimuli [ 9 ]. Previous studies have confirmed the association between lockdown and negative psychological outcomes [ 10 ], such as higher stress levels [ 11 ]. However, the impact of WFH on workers’ psychological well-beings is not yet known. Being forced to engage in WFH but also unprepared for it may cause added stress on employees. On the positive side, remote employees have a high control of their working schedule and are able to work flexibly, which may have a positive impact on their job satisfaction [ 7 ]. They can adjust their working time so that they can fulfill other demands in their life, including family matters. A study [ 12 ] revealed that job flexibility could reduce work-to-home conflicts (conflicts caused by work issues interrupting home issues), and those reduced conflicts may help employees lower the distress of not fulfilling their family responsibilities.

Previous research has also suggested that positive psychological well-being is important for maintaining productivity in the workplace [ 13 ] although relatively little research has been done to study negative psychological well-being on employees’ job performance, especially during the WFH period. In addition, giving employees autonomy at home, along with controlling their boundaries, such as whether they conduct non-work-related activities during working hours, may be a great concern for employers [ 14 ]. According to the stress mindset theory, stress can be either enhance or debilitate one’s productivity [ 15 ] and growing evidence has shown that mindset shapes one’s stress response [ 16 ]. If employees hold the mindset that stress is debilitating, they will tend to focus on negative information from stressors, and that in turn will reinforce their negative beliefs and cause them to take action to avoid the stressors. In contrast, if employees hold the mindset that stress is enhancing, they will focus on positive information about stressors and will face their stresses and cope well with them [ 17 ]. By applying the stress mindset theory, we believe that when employees face stress, some can cope with it and maintain their focus on their work tasks while others may move on to other tasks to avoid the stress, instead of focusing on their work tasks. Those other tasks could be non-work-related activities, such as playing sports, shopping, and handling family matters. However, little empirical research has been conducted in these areas because they involve sensitive questions, such as whether the respondent is feeling stressed, and whether the respondent is conducting non-work-related activities during working hours [ 18 ]. Respondents are less willing to provide honest responses when they are asked such sensitive questions directly, and that dishonesty leads to response bias [ 19 ]. Therefore, we adopted the modified randomized response technique (RRT) to collect data on stress and non-work-related activities during working hours.

This research sought to investigate how the WFH environment affects individuals’ psychological well-being, and in turn how WFH impacts their work productivity and the frequency with which they conduct non-work-related activities during working hours when they are working from home.

Materials and methods

Methodology, participants..

A purposeful sample of 500 full-time employees in Hong Kong who experienced WFH for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic was recruited online. The survey took place in early September 2020, which was near the end of the second period of growth in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hong Kong [ 20 ]. Table 1 shows a summary of the respondents’ demographic data. Such a diversity of participants reduces potential bias caused by the influence of socioeconomic backgrounds.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.t001

Survey design.

We identified our target respondents through personal networks and referrals, and then contacted them via emails and informed them of the study’s rationale. After confirming that the individuals were indeed our target respondents, we invited them to complete our self-administrated online questionnaire. All respondents were informed of the following in the first page of the online questionnaire: (1) the researcher’s name, affiliation, and contact details; (2) the topic and the aim of the study; and (3) the assurance that information about participation was anonymous and would be gathered on a voluntary basis. We obtained the respondents’ consent by asking them to click a button on the screen before starting the questionnaire. The study was conducted according to the prevailing guidelines on ethics in research, and it was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The Education University of Hong Kong (reference number 2019-2020-0104).

Sensitive questions and confidentiality.

To ensure full confidentiality of the participants’ responses, we made the survey anonymous, and applied the RRT for the sensitive questions about stress and non-work-related activities during working hours. We followed the guidance of Chong et al. (2019) and Chu et al. (2020) [ 18 , 21 ] by implementing the RRT and constructing a covariance matrix for the responses. For details of the RRT procedure and application of RRT, readers may refer to Chong et al. (2019) and Chu et al. (2020) [ 18 , 21 ].

To ensure that the respondents understood the purpose of using the RRT to further protect their privacy and clearly understood how to answer the RRT questions, we also included a brief introduction to the RRT procedures before we asked the RRT questions.

All items in the survey were measured on a seven-point Likert scale. Unless otherwise specified, we provided seven options for each item, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), and we asked each respondent to pick the option that best described the situation.

Constructs and items

To build the research model, we constructed our survey questions on the basis of seven constructs, with each construct consisting of two to three items. A complete list of items is available in the S1 Table .

Company support.

Communication with colleagues and access to technical support are important for enabling a smooth transition to WFH [ 22 ]. Following the work of Sull et al. (2020) [ 22 ], we developed three items to measure company support. A high score indicated strong support from the company for employees who were working from home.

Supervisor trust.

When employees work from home, they have little opportunity to meet with their supervisors [ 23 ]. In the absence of supervisors and employees working face-to-face, supervisors’ trust in their subordinates is an important contribution to successful WFH [ 24 ]. We used three items to measure supervisor trust, with a high score indicating a high level of supervisors’ trust in their employees during WFH.

Work-life balance.

A favorable environment and a healthy balance between working time and personal time could be an advantageous result of WFH [ 25 ]. With reference to Chaiprasit and Santidhirakul (2011) [ 26 ], we developed three items to measure work-life balance during WFH, with a high score indicating a good work-life balance.

On the basis of the existing literature, we developed three items to measure employees’ level of stress: sleep quality [ 27 ], loss of energy [ 28 ], and depressed mood [ 29 ]. A high score indicated a high level of stress during WFH.

For the current study, we modified the three items relating to happiness that were developed by Chaiprasit and Santidhirakul (2011) [ 26 ]. The original items were in a five-point Likert scale, but we converted them into a seven-point Likert scale for measurement consistency in our study. A high score indicated a high level of happiness during WFH.

Non-work-related activities.

During WFH, family issues and entertainment activities can distract employees from their work [ 30 ]. Following Ford et al. (2020) and Javed et al. (2019) [ 31 , 32 ], we developed two items referring to these two possible distractions to measure the respondents’ non-work-related activities and we used a seven-point scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (very many times), to quantify the respondents’ engagement in non-work-related activities [ 33 ]. A high score indicated a high frequency of conducting non-work-related activities during working hours when working from home.

Work productivity.

We adopted the top three factors from the Endicott Work Productivity Scale [ 34 ] as items for measuring work productivity. The items were originally in a five-point scale, ranging from 1 (“never”) to 5 (“almost always”), but we modified the wording to adapt the scale to our context on WFH and our seven-point Likert scale approach. A high score indicated a high level of perceived productivity during WFH.

Research model and hypotheses

Wfh environment and psychological well-being..

Employees have had no choice but to work from home when their companies or government policies have required it in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. For WFH to be successful, company support is necessary in three areas. First, some employees have insufficient equipment for WFH, and some may lack sufficient knowledge of the use of telecommunication technology [ 35 ]. Companies need to support their employees by providing them with the necessary equipment [ 36 ] and training them in the use of new technology [ 37 ]. Second, to avoid any impact of WFH on employees’ home time, companies have to set clear guidelines for distinguishing between work time and home time [ 38 ]. Third, companies have to decide when to start WFH and when to resume the normal working mode, and then they have to give their employees sufficient notice about the need to switch modes. We expected that company support during WFH would enhance job happiness [ 39 ] and would moderate the stresses from work and family. Therefore, we developed the following hypotheses:

• Hypothesis 1a : Company support will negatively affect employees’ stress when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Hypothesis 1b : Company support will positively affect employees’ happiness when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we have already noted, employers and employees do not see each other face-to-face in the WFH working environment. Thus, on one hand, employees have to show their employers that they are self-disciplined in completing their tasks on time and maintaining the expected quality of work [ 40 ] and, on the other hand, employers have to trust their employees that they have already tried their best in working on their assigned tasks [ 41 ]. In fact, some previous literature has mentioned that trust is the most critical factor in making WFH a success [ 42 ]. Therefore, we expected that supervisors’ trust in their subordinates would be important in maintaining employees’ happiness and reducing their stress on work [ 43 ]. Correspondingly, we developed the following hypotheses:

• Hypothesis 2a : Supervisor trust will be negatively related to employees’ stress level when the employees are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Hypothesis 2b : Supervisor trust will be positively related to employees’ happiness when the employees are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A previous study of managers and fitness trainers discovered that loss of work-life balance could potentially boost the level of work-related stress because the workers spent extra time on work and did not have sufficient time for other life matters [ 44 ]. The association between a poor work-life balance and perceived job stress, which is caused by conflict between one’s job and other life activities, was further confirmed in a previous study on Australian academics [ 45 ]. The researchers explained that difficulty in maintaining work-life balance caused employees to feel additional stress. Moreover, research by Haar et al. (2014) [ 46 ] revealed that work-life balance was negatively related to depression across seven cultures in Asia, Europe, and Oceania, whereas work-life balance was positively associated with job and life satisfaction. Another study on healthcare employees also discovered a positive relationship between work-life balance and job satisfaction [ 47 ]. In addition, Fisher (2003) [ 44 ] found that having a good work-life balance could minimize the interference between employees’ work life and their personal life, thus allowing them to maintain their job engagement and family involvement at the same time, and fostering greater happiness in their work. Thus, we formulated the following two hypotheses:

• Hypothesis 3a : Work-life balance will be negatively related to employees’ stress level when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Hypothesis 3b : Work-life balance will be positively related to employees’ level of happiness when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Psychological well-being, non-work-related activities, and productivity.

Previous studies have revealed the causal relationship that increased stress leads to a reduction in employees’ productivity [ 48 – 50 ]. Indeed, chronic stress can have several negative effects on employees, including insomnia, concentration difficulty, and increased risk of depression, all of which are likely to reduce productivity.

Some employees may choose to conduct non-work-related activities (e.g., non-work-related computing) while at work [ 33 ]. In our context, non-work-related activities are not referring to necessary activities such as going to the washroom or having a short break. We are considering situations in which an employee chooses to conduct non-work-related activities during work hours even if he or she could do those activities later. The reasons for conducting non-work-related activities during work hours are varied. Some studies have suggested that non-work-related activities can be caused by resistance and lack of management [ 51 , 52 ]. If an employee has a negative impression of the company or of management, that worker will have a low level of working engagement. In other words, a stressful working environment or management style can generate negative feelings in employees, and those negative feelings may motivate them to do something unrelated to their work during work hours. Accordingly, we formulated Hypotheses 4a and 4b as follows:

• Hypothesis 4a : Employees’ stress level will be negatively related to their work productivity when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Hypothesis 4b : Employees’ stress level will be positively related to employees’ participation in non-work-related activities during working hours when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In contrast, happiness can have a positive impact on employees’ productivity. Under a classic piece rate setting, happier individuals have greater productivity than less happy individuals do, no matter whether the happiness derives from long-term or short-term events [ 53 ]. If employees think that they can achieve happiness by performing better at work, they will work harder for that reinforcement [ 54 ]. Therefore, the following hypothesis was also included:

• Hypothesis 5 : Employees’ happiness will be positively related to their work productivity when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moreover, employees may have difficulty in concentrating on their work when they are working from home because of the lack of an organizational climate and in response to interruptions from family members [ 55 ]. In particular, employees who have children need to shoulder extra child care duties because of school closures [ 56 , 57 ]. At the same time, a feeling of insecurity because of rising numbers of COVID-19 cases also can distract employees [ 10 ], perhaps promoting them to conduct non-work-related activities during working hours at home to drive themselves out from the feeling of insecurity. Two major types of non-work-related activities are (1) activities fulfilling some demand in one’s life, such as caring for children, doing housework, or other activities that the person cannot escape when working from home; and (2) entertainment activities, such as playing video games and sports during working hours [ 31 , 32 ]. Some previous research has suggested that conducting non-work-related activities at work, such as using the Internet for personal purposes in the workplace, can affect job performance [ 52 , 58 ]. Hence, the final hypothesis we postulated was as follows:

• Hypothesis 6 : Employees’ participation in non-work-related activities during working hours will be negatively related to their work productivity when they are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Statistical analysis

We tested our hypotheses using structural equation modeling (SEM) in AMOS statistical software. The main purpose of using SEM in our analysis was to test the hypotheses about the constructs that we determined from the observed items we collected from the respondents [ 59 ].

To ensure that our model had a consistent construction, we analyzed the convergent validity and discriminant validity of the constructs by considering their Cronbach’s alpha values, average variance extracted (AVE) values, and square root of AVE values, on the respective constructs and the item loadings. Cronbach’s alpha measures the internal consistency of constructs [ 60 ]. The average variance extracted provides the average of variation explained by a construct [ 61 ].

Moreover, we assessed the model fit using (1) absolute fit indexes, including the goodness-of-fit index (GFI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), and (2) incremental fit indexes, including the comparative fit index (CFI) and the normed fit index (NFI) [ 62 ].

After confirming that the model was consistent and had a good fit, we examined the model by SEM. We then calculated the significance of each path using a two-tailed t -test to test the cause and effect relationships among the constructs.

Model consistency

We list the summary statistics, including the mean and standard deviation of each item, the item loadings, and the Cronbach’s alpha of each construct in Table 2 . The correlations between constructs, average variances extracted (AVEs), and the square roots of the AVEs are listed in Table 3 . The Cronbach’s alpha of each construct was above the benchmark value of acceptable reliability 0.7 [ 63 ], thus suggesting a good internal consistency of each construct. In order to ensure that each item represented its construct, each item needed to have a loading larger than 0.4 [ 64 , 65 ]. All of the item loadings in our research exceeded 0.4, and the AVE value for each construct was larger than 0.5 (except one, which was 0.5), thus demonstrating that the items satisfied the requirements for convergent validity [ 66 , 67 ]. In addition, the square root of the AVE of each construct was larger than its correlations with all of the other constructs [ 67 ] meaning that the discriminant validity was at an acceptable level.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.t002

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.t003

Model goodness of fit

The cut-off criteria of a good model fit are: RMSEA < 0.06, and GFI, CFI, and NFI ≥ 0.9 [ 68 – 71 ]. In this case, the study’s model demonstrated a satisfactory fit (RMSEA = 0.061; CFI = 0.947; GFI = 0.919; NFI = 0.922).

Testing of hypotheses

We report the standardized path coefficients and the significance of each of the hypotheses in Fig 1 . Based on a significance level of 5%, four hypotheses were significant and six were not significant.

N.S. represents not significant. *** indicates a p -value less than 0.01. The numbers to the right of the hypotheses’ numbers are the standardized path coefficients.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.g001

The research findings supported Hypotheses H3a, H3b, H4b, and H5. Hypothesis H3a was supported ( β = -0.222, p < 0.001), indicating that work-life balance was negatively related to the employees’ stress level when those employees were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypothesis H3b was also supported ( β = 0.750, p < 0.001), indicating that employees’ work-life balance was positively related to their happiness when those employees were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypothesis H4b was supported ( β = 0.626, p < 0.001), indicating that employees’ stress level was positively related to the employees’ participation in non-work-related activities during working hours when those employees were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypothesis H5 was supported ( β = 0.418, p < 0.001), indicating that employees’ happiness had a positive effect in promoting their work productivity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many employees who were accustomed to working in the office and did not have previous WFH experience to do their work from home during part of the pandemic, because of social distancing or lockdown policies. In this research, we sought to investigate the effects that switching to WFH in response to the COVID-19 pandemic had on employees’ psychological well-being and, by extension, on their work productivity. We applied the stress mindset theory to study the relationships between three stress relievers (company support, supervisor trust, and work-life balance) on the positive and negative sides of employees’ psychological well-being (happiness versus stress), which in turn affected their job performance (productivity and non-work-related activities during working hours) when they were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, among the three stress relievers we studied, work-life balance is the only reliever that have influenced on the employees’ psychological well-being. At the same time, this reliever has a positive effect on one’s psychological well-being by promoting happiness and relieving stress. Our research findings also suggest that when employees feel happy in their WFH arrangements, their work productivity increases. Surprisingly, when the employees encountered stress in their WFH arrangements, they still maintained their work productivity, but at the same time, they participate more in non-work-related activities to relieve their stress. The good news is that their non-work-related activities did not affect their work productivity. Our study takes the lead in developing a research model that shapes the relationship between employees’ WFH environment and their psychological well-being and performance in relation to sudden and forced WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a methodological contribution, our study adopted the modified randomized response technique to ask the sensitive questions involved in the study, including queries about the employees’ negative psychological well-being status and their engagement in non-work-related activities. We provided extra protection to their privacy by using this survey method, so as to encourage them to provide truthful responses when answering such sensitive questions. Management may wish to consider adopting the same methodology in an effort to collect honest responses when sensitive questions are involved in the workplace.

Regarding the effect of stress relievers on psychological well-being, we found that having a healthy work-life balance promotes happiness and also relieves stress. However, WFH does not imply an improvement in work-life balance, especially when the employees do not have a suitable environment to work. Employees should have a private workspace, which allows access to a strong and stable Internet connection, and has sufficient equipment to carry out their work at home. If employees encounter difficulties when they are working from home, management should provide the employees with flexible arrangements and alternative approaches to work. For example, if an employee does not have a comfortable environment to work, management may arrange a private space or room in the office for the employees given that a proper social distance is maintained.

As is the case in other fast-paced metropolises, Hong Kong has long followed the standard practice of employees working in a formal office environment and offering them no flexible working options [ 72 ]. During the pandemic, when the employees are allow to work from home, some companies have also set strict rules, such as requiring staff to stay at home during working hours or to answer calls from supervisors within three tones. However, a blurred boundary between work space and home space can make it difficult for employees to set a clear line of separation between their work and their home life [ 73 ]. Under a work-life balance working approach, it is assumed that employees can reserve enough time to handle non-work-related life issues and activities while managing their work tasks. Although some previous studies have suggested that non-work-related activities in the workplace affect work productivity [ 52 , 58 ], our research findings did not support that argument in regard to WFH. In other words, performing non-work-related activities during work hours at home does not necessarily appear to impact work productivity. In fact, when employees are feeling burned-out, they could relieve stress via such non-work-related activities and hence maintain their work engagement. For example, at the time when use of the Internet was just emerging in the workplace, Internet recreation in the workplace was found to make employees more creative [ 74 ] and help employees to become accustomed to the new and advanced systems [ 75 ].

Therefore, management may wish to offer their employees a flexible working hour to help the employees to meet their needs when they are working from home [ 57 ]. Management could also encourage employees to set boundaries, as long as the committed working hours per week are achieved, thereby enabling them to secure the balance between their work and home life. Feeling happy, satisfied, and enthusiastic when working from home can help workers maintain a high level of productivity [ 76 ].

Limitations and future research

The present study had certain limitations. First, the significance of the research findings is dependent on the reliability of self-reports. To minimize bias, in this study we attempted to collect the most representative responses, including through application of the RRT for sensitive questions and through use of an anonymous, web-based survey, as well as through the choice of highly diverse participants. A pretest and pilot test were also conducted before the actual survey, to ensure the quality of the study. Second, this study was based on 500 employees in Hong Kong, a group that certainly cannot represent the worldwide population. In addition, the working and living environments in Hong Kong may be significantly different from those in other regions or countries. Additionally research among more heterogeneous samples will be needed to test the research model.

Conclusions

Although managers are trying their best to maintain their employees’ work productivity at the same level as that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also important for them to maintain a good balance for their employees between work and life and provide flexibility in their working time and arrangements. Our research findings suggest that a healthy balance between work and home life makes employees feel happier, and in turn has a significant effect on them maintaining a good level of work productivity when they are required to switch to WFH. Meanwhile, an imbalance between work and life would have a negative impact on employees’ psychological well-being, spurring them to carry out non-work-related activities during working hours. Interestingly, those non-work-related activities apparently do not influence WFH employees’ work productivity. We conclude that balance is the key to successful implementation of sudden and forced WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic and achieving a smooth transition from working at the office to working from home.

Supporting information

S1 table. list of all items and measures..

Suffixes with–S and–U indicate that the items are sensitive questions and are paired with unrelated questions.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261969.s001

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• Published: 15 July 2023

Family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity: do work engagement and self-efficacy mediate?

• Seng-Su Tsang 1 ,
• Zhih-Lin Liu 1 &
• Thi Vinh Tran Nguyen 1 , 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  419 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Business and management

The shift towards remote work has been expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic, and COVID-19 has increased the need to understand the factors affecting remote work productivity such as family–work conflict, work engagement, and self-efficacy. However, the previous research may not comprehensively capture the intricacies associated with remote work amidst the pandemic. This study proposes a model to explore the relationship between family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity based on role conflict and resource drain theories as well as the family–work-conflict literature. The quantitative approach was used. A questionnaire was distributed using a convenience sampling technique and a response rate of 90.1% (1177 respondents) was achieved. After data cleaning, 785 valid cases were analysed. SPSS 22 and AMOS 20 were used to test the descriptive statistics, reliability, and validity, and the proposed hypotheses were evaluated using Process Macro (Model 5). The findings found that family–work-conflict negatively affected work engagement, self-efficacy, and work-from-home productivity. The negative effect of family–work-conflict on work-from-home productivity was stronger for employees with more work-from-home days than those with fewer. The partial mediation of work engagement and self-efficacy was established. This study contributes to the understanding of remote work productivity during the pandemic, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprise employees. It highlights the regulatory role of working hours when working from home and examines the mediation of self-efficacy in the association between family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity. This study also confirms the gender differences in work-from-home productivity which has been previously inconsistent in the literature. Managerially, the research has practical implications for employers, managers, and the government. Employers should adopt family-friendly policies and offer training programmes to enhance work-from-home productivity. Employers need to pay extra attention to their female employees’ work and family responsibilities and guarantee positive working outcomes through online surveys and two-way communication strategies. Professional training and work-from-home skill development programmes should be provided to boost employee confidence and self-efficacy. Governments and employers should also consider implementing regulations on the duration of working-from-home to avoid negative impacts on work efficiency and family–work conflict.

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Introduction.

This study investigated the association between family–work conflict (FWC) and work-from-home productivity (WFHP) among Taiwanese work-from-home employees in the COVID-19 context. Although Taiwan is recognised as having one of the most successful pandemic response models in Asia and worldwide, the country experienced a COVID-19 outbreak during the time of the study, with more than 14,634 cases recorded as of June 2021. This was considered to be the first wave of COVID-19 in Taiwan. Many preventive measures were implemented during this period including mandatory social distancing, which included a requirement to work from home for many employees. Taiwanese companies and schools adapted to remote work and learning, respectively, and working from home became a key means of social distancing.

Various enterprises worldwide, especially leading companies in developed countries, had long considered the work-from-home (WFH) model as one of the new forms of work, even before COVID-19 appeared (Vyas and Butakhieo, 2021 ). Academics have been interested in the topic of WFH and have undertaken associated studies (Bloom et al., 2014 ; Crosbie and Moore, 2004 ; Dockery and Bawa, 2014 ; Nakrošienė et al., 2019 ). WFH has been a work option for both employers and employees for some time (Rupietta and Beckmann, 2018 ). However, with the COVID-19 outbreak, WFH became mandatory in some countries (Bonacini et al., 2021 ; Wong et al., 2020 ; Yabe et al., 2020 ), attracting the attention of many scholars around the world (Davies, 2021 ). The present research on WFH focuses not only on policy aspects but also on the quantitative aspects that explore the effects of WFH on human psychology (Galanti et al., 2021 ; Song and Gao, 2020 ), job satisfaction, work engagement (WE) (Ahmadi et al., 2022 ; Irawanto et al., 2021 ; Purwanto et al., 2020 ), and work-life balance (WLB) (Putri and Amran, 2021 ).

Other studies have investigated employee performance and WFHP (Afrianty et al. 2022 ; Farooq and Sultana, 2021 ; Feng and Savani, 2020 ; Morikawa, 2022 ; Ramos and Prasetyo, 2020 ; Sutarto et al., 2021 ). Feng and Savani ( 2020 ), for example, examined the gender gaps in WFH outcomes under pandemic conditions. The authors found that the pandemic generated a gender gap in perceived WFHP. The authors argued that women were expected to dedicate more time to the family when both parents worked from home during the day and schools were closed. On the other hand, Morikawa’s ( 2022 ) research on WFH in Japan during the pandemic revealed that WFHP reached ~60–70% of normal workplace productivity. The study also found that productivity was lower for people and businesses who had begun practicing WFH only after the pandemic had spread. The potential impact of the pandemic on working from home (WFH) and productivity was further investigated by Farooq and Sultana ( 2021 ). They found a negative association between WFH and productivity, including a moderating effect of gender on the relationship. Sutarto et al. ( 2021 ) explored the association between employee mental health and productivity during the crisis to ascertain whether the relationship differed depending on select socio-demographic characteristics. The authors found a negative correlation between the WFH employees’ psychological wellbeing and productivity. Further, gender, age, education level, job experience, marital status, and number of children were found to have no association with productivity. In contrast, the issue of working hours has been shown to be negatively related to productivity (Collewet and Sauermann, 2017 ). Nonetheless, based on our literature review, it appears that only a few works have assessed the effect of working hours on WFH productivity within the COVID-19 context.

Although various studies have focused on WFH in the COVID-19 period, as discussed above, and even though many have explored WFHP and the mediating effect of WE, no works have explored the mediating effect of self-efficacy (SE) in terms of predicting WFHP, especially when family–work conflict (FWC) is treated as an antecedent. In terms of the effect that demographic variables have when predicting WFH performance, the productivity effect remains inconsistent. Hanaysha ( 2016 ) suggested broadening the sample to different industry employees in WE and productivity studies to generalise the findings. Additionally, based on our literature review, few studies to date relate to WFHP in Taiwan during the pandemic period, especially for the employees of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). During the first wave of the pandemic, the Taiwanese Government applied strict social distancing policies, including WFH (Cheng et al., 2020 ). This study is therefore pioneering in exploring WFHP in Taiwan during the pandemic period.

Consequent to these research gaps, the differences present in the findings in the literature, and answering the call of Hanaysha ( 2016 ), the present study is based on role conflict and resource drain theories, the FWC literature, and previous empirical studies. It proposes a multiple mediator model to predict the WFHP of employees in Taiwan’s SMEs during the COVID-19 level 3 alert. The primary purpose of this research is to expand on what is currently known about the effects of FWC on WFHP by investigating the mediating effects of WE and SE to determine their effect mechanism. The secondary purpose of the research is to investigate whether the element of working hours moderates the effects of FWC on WFHP to address the research gap in the existing literature concerning the role of working hours in work-from-home productivity, and the below research questions (RQs) which served as a roadmap for the current study:

RQ1: How does Family–Work Conflict affect Work-from-Home Productivity, and what is the mechanism behind their effect?

RQ2: How do working hours moderate the negative association between Family–Work Conflict and Work-from-Home Productivity?

The remainder of the paper is organised as follows: the section “Literature review” provides a comprehensive review of the pertinent literature, including the theoretical background, contextual literature, and core literature, and also presents the research model and hypotheses. Section “Methodology” outlines the research methodology and details the data collection process, while the section “Findings” presents the findings of the study. Finally, the section “Discussion” presents the discussion, conclusions, and comments on the significance and limitations of this research.

Literature review

Working from home: from a flexible working method to a mandatory requirement in the covid-19 era.

WFH refers to the practice of working from home (away from the main office) on one or more days per week (Hill et al., 2003 ). WFH offers employees a multitude of advantages such as flexibility and autonomy, balancing work, performing non-work activities, saving on commuting time, and the additional conveniences of WFH (Afrianty et al., 2022 ; O’Hara, 2014 ). The concept of WFH, first advanced in the 1970s as telework, is the option to perform work at different locations based on technological assistance (van Meel, 2011 ). WFH is a flexible working method for employees that many enterprises and organisations have used for some time (Farooq and Sultana, 2021 ). It has long been linked to workplace programmes that promote WLB and has been frequently used by large corporations in many Western countries to support WLB (Mestre, 1998 ). From a human resource management (HRM) perspective, the positive influence of WFH on employee work attitudes, behaviour, and performance is widely recognised (Crosbie and Moore, 2004 ).

With the COVID-19 outbreaks, WFH has been implemented in 213 countries and territories worldwide (Mukhtar, 2020 ). The ongoing pandemic has brought about significant changes in the way that people work and, in some cases, whether they work at all. A considerable number of individuals have chosen to stay in their homes, either to protect themselves from the disease or due to government-imposed shelter-in-place orders (Farooq and Sultana, 2021 ). Furthermore, many governments have strictly applied social distancing policies, limited mass gatherings, reduced the number of workers in offices, promoted WFH, and applied information technology media to work online (Brodeur et al., 2021 ). Following the implementation of social distancing policies, numerous companies worldwide are still planning to reduce the number of employees working in traditional office settings, thereby enabling and promoting remote work opportunities for their workforce (Xiao et al., 2021 ). As a result, the pandemic has prompted governments and organisations to reconsider their perspectives on WFH and its effectiveness (Farooq and Sultana, 2021 ), with WFH becoming a mandatory government requirement during the pandemic period (Vyas and Butakhieo, 2021 ; Waizenegger et al., 2020 ).

Work from home during the COVID-19 Level 3 Alert in Taiwan

As with other countries and territories worldwide, Taiwan is not immune to the impacts of the pandemic (Lei and Klopack, 2020 ). Although considered one of the more successful countries in fighting the disease (Chien et al., 2020 ; Shokoohi et al., 2020 ) with only 1244 cases recorded up to May 2021, Taiwan faced the first wave of the pandemic with 14,634 cases as reported in June 27 (Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, 2022 ). Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic is a level 3 alert. Prevention solutions are being strictly applied, social distancing is required, and WFH is being promoted by the government and businesses (Kuo, 2021 ; Tan et al., 2021 ).

Theoretical background and hypothesis development

Theoretical foundation, role conflict theory.

Kahn et al. ( 1964 ) proposed the Role Conflict Theory, wherein role conflicts address the “simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures, such that compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other” (Kahn et al., 1964 ). FWC is rooted in role conflict theory and posits that individuals possess a limited pool of resources, such as time and energy, which must be allocated among various roles. Consequently, conflicts arising from multiple roles can lead to stress and subsequently diminish employee engagement, efficiency, and productivity (Foy et al., 2019 ; Garg, 2015 ; Wang et al., 2022 ).

Resource drain theory

Resource Drain Theory states that individuals are unable to match the expectations of an additional domain because they must make compromises when distributing their time and energy across two domains (Rothbard and Edwards, 2003 ). According to this theory, the conflict between family and work roles arises frequently due to the finite resources that individuals have, such as energy and time, which must be allocated between the demands of their personal lives and any professional responsibilities (Bozoğlu Batı and Armutlulu, 2020 ). Investing resources in one domain increases the likelihood of not being able to meet the expectations of the other domain. This notion is based on the understanding that work and family are interconnected and intertwined, rather than being separate and distinct entities (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985 ; Windeler et al., 2017 ). Role conflict theory and resource drain theory constitute the theoretical background underpinning the present study.

Hypothesis development

Family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity.

Work and family, formerly examined as two independent systems, have been investigated as one system more recently, referred to as the work–family system (Tsang et al., 2023 ). Working parents can suffer from stress due to the intersection between the family and work domains which manifests as a sense of FWC. This is when the demands or expectations of one role are incompatible with the demands or expectations of another role, and conflicts arise (Ren and Foster, 2011 ). The more time and energy individuals allocate to one role, the less time and energy they have available for the other role. Insufficient time and energy to fulfill the demands of both family and job responsibilities are therefore key factors contributing to FWC (Marks, 1977 ). In the setting of FWC, various studies have identified two distinct types of role conflict: work interfering with family duties, known as work–family conflict (WFC), and family interfering with work responsibilities, known as FWC (Gutek et al., 1991 ). For research purposes, this research explores FWC as a separate factor. Meanwhile, productivity is commonly defined as the measure of output or quantity of production that results from performance behaviours along with external contextual factors and opportunities (Farooq and Sultana, 2021 ). In the current study, it refers to the employees’ perceived work productivity during the practice of WFH.

FWC has been explored to date in studies on employee satisfaction, engagement, performance, and productivity, including during the COVID-19 period (Graham et al., 2021 ; Karakose et al., 2021 ; Kulik and Ramon, 2022 ). Several studies have found that conflict between family and work had negative consequences on emotional health, physical well-being, and life satisfaction (Cohen and Liani, 2009 ; Schieman et al., 2003 ; Singh and Nayak, 2015 ). As a result, FWC can lower employee productivity and performance (Mohsin and Zahid, 2012 ). For example, an employee’s personal issues spilling into the workplace can cause the employee to waste time and lose focus on the job (Perry, 1982 ). Therefore, the person must rearrange their schedule to accommodate the competing demands of family and work (Barnett, 1994 ).

Another issue that arises is psychological interference which refers to the transfer of moods or emotional states generated in the work domain to the family domain (Hughes et al., 1992 ). At home, psychological interference has an impact on a worker’s mood and energy levels which can subsequently contribute to role conflicts, in turn negatively impacting the employee’s performance at work. Home-to-work spillover, according to Crouter ( 1984 ), is defined as the employee’s distressing objective demands and thoughts on family matters. Additionally, several prior research es have identified a significant negative association between FWC and work productivity (Anderson et al., 2002 ; Reina et al., 2017 ; Witt and Carlson, 2006 ). Based on this theorisation, it is hypothesised that:

H1: FWC has a significant negative effect on WFHP

Work engagement and self-efficacy as mediators

“ WE refers to employees emotional commitment to their company. Engagement is described as the ‘harnessing of the self of organisation members to their job roles; people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally in engagement during role performances” (Nguyen et al., 2021 , p. 205). Moreover, WE is recognised as a positive and fulfilling state of mind related to work. It is characterised by vigour, dedication, and absorption in one’s job or tasks (Nguyen et al., 2021 ; Schaufeli et al., 2002 ). Employees are considered to be engaged with their organisations when they put their all into their work (Nguyen et al., 2021 ). In this study, the definition was adapted to the WFH context. Previous research found that employees who work in a resourceful workplace were energised, enthusiastic, and immersed in their tasks (Bakker and Demerouti, 2014 ; Suan and Nasurdin, 2014 ). Stressful, conflictual, and demanding settings, on the other hand, can undermine employee WE (Coetzee and De Villiers, 2010 ). As a result, FWC is able to negatively affect WE. Therefore, it is hypothesised that:

H2: FWC has a significant negative effect on WE.

Additionally, WE is a critical motivational concept that leads to positive outcomes (C. Barnes and E. Collier, 2013 ), and research suggests that engaged employees contribute to positive organisational outcomes. Business leaders acknowledge that highly engaged employees can significantly enhance productivity and improve a firm’s performance, especially in rapidly evolving markets (Tsang et al., 2023 ). In simpler terms, engaged employees exhibit enthusiasm toward their work, feel a sense of happiness when working for their company, and demonstrate an eagerness to come to work each day (Hanaysha, 2016 ). Furthermore, engaged employees are critical to their organisations’ ability to maintain a competitive advantage and increase work productivity (Albrecht et al., 2015 ; Hanaysha, 2016 ; Takahashi et al., 2022 ). Studies also indicate that WE positively affect employee performance and productivity. Enhancing employee engagement is a positive way to improve work performance and productivity (Demerouti and Cropanzano, 2010 ; Geldenhuys et al., 2014 ). Aryee et al. ( 2016 ) and Şahin and Yozgat ( 2021 ) found that WE mediate the significant negative relationship between FWC and work performance. Based on the above discussion, we argue that in a WFH setting, employee engagement plays a mediating role in the negative effect of FWC on WFHP. Hence, it is hypothesised that:

H3: WE has a significant positive effect on WFHP.

H4: WE mediates the negative relationship between FWC and WFHP.

SE is a critical personal resource that mitigates the negative effects of job demands (Mihalca et al., 2021 ; Perrewé et al., 2002 ) because SE pertains to the individual’s beliefs in their own capabilities to meet the demands of a given situation and successfully perform specific tasks (Mihalca et al., 2021 ). In this study, SE is defined as occupational self-efficacy based on the self-efficacy energy concept of Rigotti et al. ( 2008 ), which describes the level of SE during WFH. As mentioned above, resource drain theory proposes that people who are heavily invested in one position will inevitably lack the resources required to fulfil their other responsibilities. People with FWC devote more time and attention to their family responsibilities, leaving them with fewer resources to meet their professional demands (Peng et al., 2010 ). Cohen and Kirchmeyer ( 1995 ) suggest that having inadequate resources available for work may jeopardise an employee’s ability to fulfil job tasks, lowering their sense of personal competence. Additionally, research findings indicate that trainees who experience more situational constraints, such as conflicting time demands, were less likely to believe that they could master the training materials successfully (Mathieu et al., 1993 ). Prior research also indicates a negative association between FWC and SE (Netemeyer et al., 1996 ; Peng et al., 2010 ). Therefore, the below hypothesis is stated:

H5: FWC has a negative effect on SE.

Previous studies have demonstrated that employees with high self-efficacy (SE) beliefs are more likely to possess confidence in their ability to effectively fulfil the job requirements, even in the presence of various job-related stressors (Nguyen et al., 2021 ; Stetz et al., 2006 ). Therefore, their productivity also tends to be relatively high. According to Walumbwa et al. ( 2005 ), a higher level of job self-efficacy is associated with more positive work attitudes. Additionally, employees with a high level of self-efficacy are more likely to enhance their work performance and productivity (Tabatabaei et al., 2013 ). Therefore, the below hypothesis is stated:

H6: SE has a significant positive effect on WFHP.

Furthermore, there are currently few studies investigating the mediation of SE in the association between FWC and WFHP, especially in the context of the pandemic. However, several studies found that there is a mediation due to SE in the association between FWC and job satisfaction (Peng et al., 2010 ) and between job performance and other input variables (Beltrán-Martín et al., 2017 ). As a result, we argue that SE is a mediator in the relationship between FWC and WFHP, and we hypothesise that:

H7: SE mediates the negative relationship between FWC and WFHP.

Working hours as a moderator between family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity

Collewet and Sauermann ( 2017 ) found that working hours negatively relate to productivity. Moreover, role conflict theory and resource drain theory maintain that people have limited resources, such as time and energy, to distribute across several responsibilities (Kahn et al., 1964 ). Based on this view, an increase in working hours can cause conflicts that affect productivity (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985 ). In the present study, working hours are measured by the number of assigned WFH days (WFHDs) per week per employee. Therefore, we hypothesise that:

H8: The negative relationship between FWC and WFHP is stronger for employees with more work-from-home days than for the employees with less work-from-home days.

Control variables

Some demographic variables, including gender, age, work experience, the work field, and a number of children, may significantly affect WFHP (Kattenbach et al., 2010 ; Schieman and Glavin, 2008 ; White et al., 2003 ). According to traditional views, work is the role of men while housework and family responsibilities are the duties of women (Gutek et al., 1981 ). This custom has survived despite changes in recent decades. Women continue to devote more time to their children, the household, and the family than men do (Peng et al., 2010 ). Taiwan is strongly influenced by Confucianism, so the view that housework is the duty of women is very evident (Takeuchi and Tsutsui, 2016 ). Therefore, the present study also examines whether WFHP varies between the different categories of these variables. The research model is drawn in Fig. 1 .

A framework for analysing the relationship between family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity, with work engagement and self-efficacy as mediators and work-from-home days (WFHDs) as moderators.

Methodology

Research design.

On the basis of the existing literature, the current study plans to tackle two research questions: ‘How does FWC affect WFHP and what is the mechanism behind the effect?’ and ‘How do working hours moderate the negative association between FWC and WFHP?’ To answer these two research questions, the present study adopted the form of descriptive research because the prior studies have demonstrated that descriptive research explores the relationships between the selected variables (de Vaus, 2001 ; Dulock, 1993 ). Based on two well-known theories, namely the role conflict and resource drain theories, we propose a multiple mediator model to investigate whether FWC has a negative effect on WFHP through the mediating role of WE and SE, as well as whether working hours play a moderating role in the negative association between FWC and WFHP. The research findings will have some theoretical and practical implications in the field.

Research approach

Based on the research design, our study adopted a quantitative approach. The primary data was collected based on a questionnaire survey and then processed using specialised statistical software, SPSS, and AMOS, to test the proposed hypotheses. We adopted the quantitative approach for the following reasons:

Firstly, quantitative research is a systematic and empirical approach that gathers and analyses data using statistical and numerical methods in order to test hypotheses and make generalisations about a population (Mohajan, 2020 ). Through the moderating roles of work engagement and self-efficacy, this method is good for studying complex relationships between the selected variables, such as the association between FWC and WFHP.

Secondly, using a quantitative approach in the current study allowed the authors to determine the strength and direction of the relationships between the variables (Choy, 2014 ; Nardi, 2018 ; Queirós et al., 2017 ) as well as to test the mediating effect of work engagement and self-efficacy on the relationship between family–work conflict and work from home productivity. This was achieved through statistical methods such as regression analysis and path analysis, which helped us identify the relationships between the variables and estimate their effects (Bazeley, 2004 ; Somekhe and Lewin, 2005 ).

Thirdly, a quantitative approach allowed the authors to gather data from a large sample of the population compared to the qualitative approach, which increased the external validity of the findings (Yilmaz, 2013 ).

A printed questionnaire was developed to have two sections. The first section measured the respondents’ basic information. The second section included subscales to measure four constructs, namely FWC, WE, SE, and WFHP.

The first section was comprised of seven questions. The first question, gender, was categorised as (1) female and (2) male. The second question asks for the participant’s age, with four levels (1) 18–30, (2) 31–40, (3) 41–50, and (4) more than 50. The third question, working experience, was divided into four categories, including (1) <2 years, (2) 2–5 years, (3) 6–10 years, and (4) more than 10 years. The fourth question, the working field, included five options, namely: (1) production management, (2) marketing, (3) administrative affairs, (4) financial accounting, and (5) other. The fifth question, the number of children, consisted of four categories including (1) no child, (2) 1 child (3) 2 children, and (4) more than 2 children. The sixth question asked the respondents for the number of WFH days they worked during the COVID–19 level 3 alert in 2021 with four options, specifically (1) <2 days, (2) 2–3 days, (3) 4–5 days, and (4) more than 5 days. The final question, a yes/no question, asked the respondents whether they WFH during the COVID-19 level 3 alert from May 2021 onward. The purpose of this question was to eliminate from our research sample respondents with the answer “no” to ensure that the research object, employees with WFH experiences during the COVID-19 period, was valid.

The second section comprised four subsections. The first subsection, FWC, included five items adapted from Netemeyer et al. ( 1996 ): “My home life interferes with my responsibilities at work, such as getting to work on time, accomplishing daily tasks, and working overtime”, for example. The second subsection was comprised of nine items adapted from Schaufeli et al. ( 2006 ) to assess WE. An example item is “When I work from home, I feel full of energy.” The third subsection, SE, consisted of six items adapted from Rigotti et al. ( 2008 ). An example item is “I can stay calm when I encounter difficulties at work because I can rely on my own abilities.” The final subsection, WFHP, included seven items adapted from Irawanto et al. ( 2021 ): for example, “I’m productive when I work from home.”

In this study, all of these constructs were self-reporting scales using a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5. The original Cronbach’s Alpha value for the constructs was >0.6 (Nunnally, 1978 ).

Instrument validity and reliability

The instrument’s validity and reliability were ensured. In the beginning, the constructs were chosen from prior studies. After that, they were adjusted for the current investigation. To collect data in Taiwan, the research team employed a multi-step process. Firstly, two high school English teachers translated the original English questionnaire into Chinese. Subsequently, two different English teachers performed a back-translation to ensure the validity of the instrument. Additionally, three professionals in the field of human resource management were invited to assess the suitability of the questions. To enhance face validity, five employees completed the survey and provided feedback for further improvements. A pilot test involving 50 participants was then conducted to ensure comprehensibility and ease of answering the questions. It’s important to note that these participants were excluded from the official survey. Prior to administering the official survey, Cronbach’s alpha value was pre-tested using the pilot test data. The item’s total correlation exceeded 0.3, and Cronbach’s alpha values for the four constructs in the pilot test surpassed the minimum acceptable value of 0.60 (Nunnally, 1978 ).

Sampling method

In the current study, we adopted a non-probability convenience sampling technique to recruit the research participants and select the sample size. Although probability sampling techniques are generally preferred in quantitative research due to their ability to ensure representativeness and to reduce the risk of bias in the sample (DeVellis and Thorpe, 2021 ), other researchers also argue that in some circumstances, non-probability sampling may be used when the population of interest is difficult to define or when the sample size is small and the research question is exploratory in nature (Creswell and Creswell, 2017 ).

In the present study, our population of interest was difficult to define. Moreover, our study was in the context of COVID-19, which can change rapidly within hours, so we, therefore, needed to obtain data quickly for the exploratory research questions. Moreover, other researchers have argued that despite its limitations, non-probability sampling can still provide valuable insights and serve as a starting point for future studies that utilise probability sampling (Creswell and Creswell, 2017 ). Therefore, we believe that it was the most appropriate method for our study given the specific circumstances and research questions.

Data collection and procedure

The questionnaire was developed specifically for the purpose of gathering data from WFH employees in Taiwan. Because it is impossible to know the total number of the target population, we calculated the minimum sample size using the formula proposed by Tabachnick and Fidell ( 1996 ) in addition to regression analysis: n  = 50 + 8 ∗ m (where m is the number of independent variables). Other researchers have similarly noted that larger sample sizes provide a more accurate representation of the characteristics of the populations that they are drawn from (Cronbach et al., 1972 ; Marcoulides and Heck, 1993 ). Therefore, the present study collected higher than the minimum sample size suggested. With the support of the Rotary International Group in Taiwan, a questionnaire was sent directly to 1307 employees of SMEs in Taipei (8 enterprises), New Taipei (7 enterprises), Taichung (7 enterprises), and Tainan (8 enterprises). The questionnaire was distributed between November 11 and December 29, 2021. Returned questionnaires numbered 1177, with a response rate of 90.1%. In order to increase the response rate, besides support from the Rotary International Group, we also gave the respondents gifts, such as medical masks or convenience store vouchers of 20 NTD.

Because of the purpose of the research, the research participants had to be employees who had WFH during the COVID-19 period. As a result, after collecting the data, we eliminated cases where there was no work-from-home status, cases where data was missing, and other outliers; 785 valid cases were used for the analysis. The participants’ information is shown in Table 1 .

Data analysis strategy

The SPSS v.22 programme was used to conduct the primary analysis and descriptive statistical analysis. To assess univariate normality, cases with z scores exceeding ±3.29 ( p  < 0.001) were identified as outliers, following the approach outlined by Tabachnick et al. ( 2007 ). In order to mitigate issues of multicollinearity, all variance inflation factors (VIFs) needed to be <5 (Hair et al., 2019 ), as recommended by Hair et al. ( 2019 ). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted using the AMOS v.20 software to examine the convergent and discriminant validity. Finally, the proposed hypotheses were tested using Process Macro (Model 5).

Common method variance and descriptive statistics

Common method variance (CMV) refers to the potential bias that arises when data for two or more variables are collected from the same source, leading to a correlation between the variables that may be misleadingly inflated (Podsakoff et al., 2003 ). This study collected data from the same source utilising self-reported data which could lead to common technique bias. Harman’s single-factor matrix was used to determine the CMV of all items. The results show that the factor with the highest variance was 30.42%, which is less than the threshold of 50% (Podsakoff et al., 2003 ). Hence, there was no CMV in the present study. All VIFs were <5 (Hair et al., 1995 ). Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of the study construct.

Measurement model evaluation

To evaluate the measurement model, a two-step analysis was conducted. Firstly, principal component analysis (PCA) was employed to assess the construct validity of the variables included in the study. A factor loading of 0.5 or higher (Hair et al., 1995 ) was used as the threshold to determine satisfactory construct validity. Additionally, an eigenvalue of at least 1 was considered, and the Varimax rotation method with Kaiser normalisation was applied during the analysis. The results of the PCA are presented in Table 3 with no items omitted.

After performing the PCA, we also checked the Cronbach’s alpha values of the main variables. The results indicate that all Cronbach’s alphas were higher than 0.8, thus exceeding the minimum permitted value of 0.60 (Nunnally, 1978 ). In the second step, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was utilised to evaluate the convergent and discriminant validity. Construct reliability was assessed by examining the composite reliability (CR) values with a threshold of 0.70 commonly considered acceptable (Bagozzi and Yi, 1988 ). All factor loadings were higher than 0.6, and all were significant (Hair et al., 2010 ). All average variance extracted (AVE) estimations exceeded 0.50, indicating convergent validity (Hair et al., 2010 ) (see Table 4 ).

Table 5 further demonstrates that the CFA measurement model (fit indices: CMIN/df < 3, RMSEA < 0.05, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > 0.90, Incremental Fit Index (IFI) > 0.90) implies a good level of fitness. Table 6 shows that all correlations between each pair of constructs were less than the square root of the AVE, indicating that the discriminant validity was sufficient.

Hypothesis testing

Preacher and Hayes’s ( 2004 ) mediation analysis, i.e. PROCESS Macro (model 5), was employed to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that FWC was negatively related to WFHP ( β  = −0.26, p  < 0.001), supporting H1. This finding is in accordance with the previous findings demonstrating the effect of FWC on WFHP (Anderson et al., 2002 ; Reina et al., 2017 ; Witt and Carlson, 2006 ). FWC negatively influenced WE ( β  = −0.30, p  < 0.001), supporting H2. Although this relationship has been identified in previous studies (Bakker and Demerouti, 2014 ; Suan and Nasurdin, 2014 ), our results confirm the negative relationship between FWC and WE in the context of COVID-19. Furthermore, WE was positively related to WFHP ( β  = 0.11, p  < 0.01), supporting H3. This finding is in line with the previous studies (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008 ; Markos and Sridevi, 2010 ). Additionally, the PROCESS (model 5) showed that WE mediated the relationship between FWC and WFHP ( β  = −0.03 , LLCI = −0.0634 , ULCI = −0.0063), supporting H4. This study has explored the mediator of WE in relation to the association between FWC and WFHP (Aryee et al., 2016 ; Şahin and Yozgat, 2021 ), and this mediating role was also evident in the COVID-19 context. On the other hand, FWC was negatively associated with SE ( β  = −0.25, p  < 0.001), confirming H5 and the previous findings (Netemeyer et al., 1996 ; Peng et al., 2010 ). SE positively affects WFHP ( β  = 0.37, p  < 0.001), supporting H6. This result echoes the previous findings (Tabatabaei et al., 2013 ). In addition, SE mediated the association between FWC and WFHP ( β  = −0.09, LLCI = −0.1242 , ULCI = −0.0621), confirming H7. This is one of the notable findings of our study. As a result, these research findings indicate that FWC negatively affects WFHP and that this effect’s mechanism includes both direct and indirect effects through the partial mediation roles of WE and SE. The findings solve the first research question.

The results of the PROCESS also indicate that the interaction between FWC and WFHDs ( β  = −0.07, SE  = 0.02, t  = −2.87, p  < 0.01, LLCI = −0.1150, ULCI = −0.0216) negatively affected WFHP. The slope test indicated that the negative effect of FWC on WFHP was stronger for employees with more work-from-home days than for those with less, supporting H8. The findings show the role of WFHDs in the negative relationship between FWC and WFHP. According to the research findings, the negative relationship between FWC and WFHP will reduce when the employees are assigned fewer WFHDs. The moderating role of WFHDs can be attributed to the employees’ limited resources, such as time and energy, that they need to distribute across several responsibilities (Kahn et al., 1964 ). As a result, an increase in working hours may result in conflicts that reduce productivity (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985 ). We examined the conditional effect of FWC on WFHP at three values of WFHDs: at the mean value ( β  = −0.28, p  < 0.001), at 1 SD below ( β  = −0.14, p  < 0.01), and at 1 SD above the mean ( β  = −0.35, p  < 0.001). The interaction plot is depicted in Fig. 2 .

WFHDs strengthen the negative relationship between FWC and WFHP. Note: Work-from-home days: WFHDs, family–work conflict: FWC, work-from-home productivity: WFHP.

The effect of the control variables, such as gender, age, work experience, working field, and the number of children, on WFHP, was investigated to determine whether there were any significant differences between the levels of the control variables. The ANOVA results indicated that there were no significant differences between the levels of work experience, working field, and number of children in relation to WFHP. In contrast, there were significant differences between males ( M  = 3.60, SE = 0.03) and females ( M  = 3.37, SE = 0.04) in relation to WFHP ( F (1, 783) = 20.478, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.03). This difference can be attributed to the strong influence of Confucianism in Taiwan which results in many believing that housework is the duty of women (Takeuchi and Tsutsui, 2016 ). Therefore, the WFHP among women was lower than that among men. Table 7 presents the ANOVA table, and Fig. 3 presents the study’s model for the results.

Work engagement and self-efficacy mediate the relationship between family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity. Work-from-home days (WFHDs) strengthen the negative relationship between family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity. Note: *** p  < 0.001, ** p  < 0.01, coefficients for indirect effects are in parentheses.

This study has proposed a new model to investigate the association between FWC and WFHP in Taiwan during the COVID-19 period. All proposed hypotheses in the research were found to be supported. The findings indicate that FWC negatively affects WE, SE, and WFHP because, according to role conflict theory and resource drain theory, people have a limited number of resources (in terms of time and energy) to allocate to various roles. Consequently, conflicting roles can cause stress and reduce employee engagement, efficiency, and productivity (Foy et al., 2019 ; Garg, 2015 ; Wang et al., 2022 ). Moreover, resource drain theory indicates that investing resources in one function raises the likelihood of not being able to fulfil the expectations of the other. Therefore, employees with FWC may exhibit reduced productivity. These findings echo the prior studies (Anderson et al., 2002 ; Bakker and Demerouti, 2014 ; Coetzee and De Villiers, 2010 ; Suan and Nasurdin, 2014 ; Mohsin and Zahid, 2012 ; Peng et al., 2010 ; Reina et al., 2017 ).

The results show that when WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic, employees could encounter conflicts with their family responsibilities which influenced their productivity, SE and WE (Graham et al., 2021 ; Karakose et al., 2021 ; Kulik and Ramon, 2022 ; Peng et al., 2010 ). In contrast, when these conflicts were controlled, SE, WE, and productivity were enhanced (Schieman et al., 2003 ). Furthermore, our study found that WE was an antecedent of WFHP, in that WE positively affects WFHP. This can be attributed to employees with a higher level of WE being enthusiastic about their work and happy to work every day (Hanaysha, 2016 ). Engaged employees are thus critical to increased work productivity in their organisations (Albrecht et al., 2015 ; Hanaysha, 2016 ; Takahashi et al., 2022 ). These findings echo the previous findings that work productivity and work performance are influenced by WE (Demerouti and Cropanzano, 2010 ; Geldenhuys et al., 2014 ). Similarly, the positive association between SE and WFHP was confirmed in our study. Various studies on HRM determined that a higher level of SE will increase a positive work attitude, performance, and productivity (Lim and Loo, 2003 ; Tabatabaei et al., 2013 ; Walumbwa et al., 2005 ), and our research confirms the relationship in the WFH context under COVID-19 conditions.

Our findings explored the partial mediation of WE in the relationship between FWC and WFHP. WE has been identified as a mediator between FWC and work performance or productivity (Aryee et al., 2016 ; Şahin and Yozgat, 2021 ). One of the interesting results of our research was the partial mediation of SE in the negative association between FWC and WFHP. As discussed in the literature review, there is currently little research assessing the mediation of SE in the link between FWC and WFHP, particularly in light of the current pandemic situation. Limited studies have discovered that SE plays a mediating function in the relationship between FWC and job satisfaction (Peng et al., 2010 ) or that there is a mediation function due to SE in the association between job performance and other input factors (Beltrán-Martín et al., 2017 ; Walumbwa and Hartnell, 2011 ). This is a striking finding in our research, specifically how SE mediates the negative association between FWC and WFHP, especially in the COVID-19 context.

Although not yet noted in studies on WFH in the pandemic context, our research has established the moderating role of working hours. The present study indicates that during the COVID-19 situation in Taiwan, an increase in FWC caused a decrease in WFHP and that this negative relationship was stronger for employees with more work-from-home days than for those with less. This is in line with the role conflict theory and resource drain theory perspectives (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985 ), and previous HRM studies (Collewet and Sauermann, 2017 ; Kattenbach et al., 2010 ). Further, WFHP was found to be higher for Taiwanese male employees than for females. This echoes the prior research on HRM (Bezabih et al., 2016 ; Sandström and Hällsten, 2008 ). However, although Taiwanese society is modernising, the responsibility of taking care of the family still belongs to women (Takeuchi and Tsutsui, 2016 ). This is one of the main causes of the differences in the results.

In conclusion, our findings have determined that WE and SE partially mediate the negative association between FWC and WFHP. The findings provide evidence for the importance of psychological factors when it comes to explaining the impact of family–work conflict on WFHP during the pandemic. Specifically, employees with higher levels of WE and SE are less likely to experience negative effects on their productivity as a result of FWC. One of our new findings, which has filled in the research gaps in the existing literature, is the partial mediating role of SE in the association between FWC and WFHP.

Additionally, the findings show that working hours moderate the association between FWC and WFHP, with the negative effects of FWC being stronger for employees who spend more time working from home. These findings are important for organisations and employees as they navigate the challenges of WFH arrangements in light of the pandemic.

Theoretical implications

Firstly, our study is one of the pioneers in terms of proposing a predictive model for WFHP among small and medium-sized enterprise employees in Taiwan during the COVID-19 period. We propose that our research adds to the knowledge base on remote work and remote worker productivity during the pandemic. Furthermore, the research results are notable because they show how family and work problems affect the productivity of workers who have had to switch to full-time WFH.

Secondly, our research answered Hanaysha’s ( 2016 ) call to focus on a larger sample of SME employees, a factor that is often neglected in previous studies on WFH, especially in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. This research fills in a gap in the literature on the regulatory role of working hours in the context of WFH, especially in terms of the association between FWC and WFHP during the pandemic, by showing that working hours are different when it comes to the relationship between FWC and WFHP. Although prior research has reported inconsistent results concerning whether WFHP differs between men and women, our study demonstrates that WFHP does vary between men and women, adding to the body of evidence for a gender difference in WFHP.

Thirdly, an important extension of our study can be found in the inclusion of SE in the predictive model of WFHP for workers in Taiwan during the pandemic. Our study adds to the body of knowledge about the mediation of SE in the negative association between FWC and WFHP that has largely been overlooked in previous research.

Managerial implications

Our findings provide some practical implications for managers, the government, and management.

Firstly, FWC was found to be one of the determinants of the decrease in WFHP. This implies that the harmonious resolution of family and work conflicts will contribute to improving the employees’ working productivity in the process of WFH. Therefore, it is necessary for Taiwanese SMEs to transfer family-friendly human resource management practices and related policies from Western contexts to Taiwan. Moreover, employers who consider their employees to be a competitive resource may consider implementing family-friendly policies to help their employees balance work and family tasks. Our results show that employers and managers should pay extra attention to how women employees balance their work and family responsibilities.

Secondly, the current study provides evidence that WE improve employee productivity significantly, even in an emergency situation like COVID-19. Therefore, companies should place a high value on employee engagement and monitor their progress on a regular basis to ensure positive working outcomes. To do so, we strongly recommend employers undertake frequent online surveys during WFH to gain a thorough understanding of their employees’ levels of job engagement and FWC. As a result of such actions, employers will be able to establish appropriate methods for addressing emergent difficulties more quickly. Employers should use an online two-way communication strategy with their employees throughout the WFH time to allow employees to communicate their thoughts on their employment, challenges, and any concerns that may impair their productivity. If such attention were paid to employees, they would be more interested in and motivated by their work.

Thirdly, SE was found to be a mediator in the negative association between FWC and WFHP. Hence, employers should recognise their employees’ SE and provide support to improve it during their WFH time. Schunk et al. ( 2012 ) indicated that verbal persuasion and vicarious modelling are two sources of SE that employers can focus on. Offering professional training and WFH skills development programmes can greatly boost employee confidence and SE (verbal persuasion) and by assigning mentors and team leaders who exhibit highly self-efficacious behaviours during the WFH period (vicarious modelling). Companies can also provide employees with continual encouragement and emotional support by setting up communication channels to hear their voices during WFH time. In addition, companies can prioritise SE in their recruitment process by conducting staff selection interviews and requiring candidates to complete SE tests. This will assist businesses in attracting strong-SE employees.

Finally, although WFH is considered to be an effective solution in the context of the pandemic, our study reported a stronger negative relationship between FWC and WFHP in employees with an excessive WFH duration. It may therefore be advisable for governments and employers to consider implementing specific regulations on how long each person should work from home in a week. The duration should not be too long to avoid affecting work efficiency or an increase in FWC.

Limitations and suggestions for further study

There were several limitations in the research. Firstly, we adopted a non-probability convenience sampling technique, which limits the generalisability of our findings. We recommend that future studies employ a random sampling technique. Secondly, the cross-sectional design was a limitation because while it allowed us to trace the links between the investigated constructs, it did not allow us to determine whether there were any causal links between the variables. In addition, future studies should also test the moderating role of some of the demographic variables such as gender and number of children. This study only examined employees in Taiwan, and future research can include samples from more than one country to enable researchers to compare and contrast the results in light of the differences in national contexts and levels of socioeconomic development.

Data availability

The datasets generated or analysed during the current study are available in the Dataverse repository: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SL0ZQD or upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.

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Tsang, SS., Liu, ZL. & Nguyen, T.V.T. Family–work conflict and work-from-home productivity: do work engagement and self-efficacy mediate?. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 419 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01929-y

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Does working from home damage productivity? Just look at the data.

T o put a spin on a favorite British saying: I’ve been asked about productivity and working from home more times than I’ve had hot dinners. So it’s time to review all the evidence and serve up one big answer to the question: Does working from home work? 

In a nutshell, that answer is “yes.” But it’s important to understand why. And this is where the data come in.  

The numbers paint a picture of small, positive productivity gains for hybrid work. The savings in commuting time more than offset the losses in connectivity from fewer office days. In contrast, the impact of fully remote working on productivity is typically mildly negative. Fully remote workers can struggle with mentoring, innovation and culture building. However, it appears this can be reversed with good management. Running remote teams is hard but done well can deliver strong performance.  

But this is about more than just worker output. Firms care about profits — not productivity.  

Working from home massively reduces overhead. It drives down recruitment and retention costs, as employees value working from home. Fully remote companies also slash office costs, and cut wages bills by enabling national or global hiring. Indeed, the widespread adoption of working from home has been a triumph of capitalism. Higher profits have led millions of firms to adopt this, generating the five-fold increase in home working many of us now enjoy.  

Looking at micro economic studies on working from home productivity, the classic is “ The Stanford Study ” I helped oversee in 2010-2012. We randomized 250 employees in a large multinational firm into those who would work from home and those who would report to the office. The expectation, of course, was that home-based employees would goof-off, sleeping or watching TV rather than working.  

So, we were shocked to find a massive 13 percent increase in productivity.  

The productivity boost came from two sources. First, remote employees worked 9 percent more in minutes per day. They were rarely late to work, spent less time gossiping and chatting with colleagues, and took shorter lunch breaks and fewer sick days. Remote employees also had 4 percent more output per minute. They told us it’s quieter at home. The office was so noisy many of them struggled to concentrate.  

Other pre-pandemic studies found similar results. For example, Raj Choudhary found US Patent officers gained 4 percent productivity from greater remote flexibility.  

More recently, a spate of studies has studied the impact of firms moving to fully remote during the pandemic. Papers by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington and by Michael Gibbs and co-authors find large and negative impacts on productivity. Most recently David Atkin and co-authors randomized data entry workers between office and home locations, finding a striking 18 percent drop to productivity from home working.  

These recent studies highlight major productivity costs from remote working. But they also reflect the importance of good management. Firms that adopted home working at speed in the pandemic often lacked planning, organization and control processes. Remote teams were led by office-based and office-trained managers who provided little support or structure. Remote work is different from office work, and needs managers, software and hardware that can support it.  

Now for the macro data. Let’s start by celebrating the triumph of the post-2020 U.S. productivity acceleration. In the five years before the pandemic, U.S. labor productivity growth was 1.2 percent; since 2020, this picked up to 1.5 percent . Given the state of the world, that acceleration was miraculous.  

What could have caused this? Perhaps rising government expenditure and easy monetary policy? Possibly, but greater government activity traditionally is associated with lower, not higher, productivity growth. Perhaps an acceleration in technology and computerization? Possibly, but the pandemic did not witness any pickup in technological progress. Perhaps the five-fold surge in working from home post-pandemic. Maybe cutting billions of commuting hours, replacing millions of business trips with Zoom meetings, increasing the labor supply of Americans with disabilities or child-care commitments, and saving millions of square feet of office space increased productivity? It is honestly hard to say.  

But we can say just as working from home jumped five-fold, U.S. productivity growth accelerated, reversing decades of pre-pandemic decline . 

Perhaps the most persuasive data are from the markets. Economists believe firms strive to increase efficiency, profits and growth. Individual firms and managers do make mistakes. But, when millions of firms around the world are adopting hybrid and remote work, there has to be something there. I have spoken to many hundreds of managers and firms over the last three years and I repeatedly hear they use home working as a key part of their recruitment and retention strategy. Indeed, another recent experiment on 1600 employees found hybrid reduced employee quit rates by 35 percent. 

The work-from-home conversation needs to shift from big-name CEO anecdotes and stories to data and research. When it comes to making decisions impacting millions of employees and firms, we deserve better. The data and research show well-managed work from home can raise and maintain productivity, while cutting costs and raising profits.  

It keeps employees happy, reduces pollution by cutting billions of commuting miles, and supports millions of employees with care and disability challenges in work. Indeed, what is not to like? 

Nick Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University; a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; and co-director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

Even remote and hybrid work can burn you out. Here’s how to avoid it.

Our new era of work has led many to working harder and more often, carrying over bad habits from the height of the pandemic.

We’ve entered a new era of work: one in which rules have been bent and lines blurred. Many workers feel simultaneously less connected and more stressed by digital communication tools. The result is burnout, or feeling exhausted or cynical about your job.

Burnout doesn’t care if you work exclusively from the comfort of your home. It can happen if you have a light workload, if you like your colleagues, even if you’re passionate about what you do.

About 29 percent of workers say their job is stressful and 19 percent say it’s overwhelming all or most of the time, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center . Record stress levels recorded during the pandemic are yet to decline, according to a Gallup poll .

“What’s happening is there’s insurmountable workload and disconnection,” said Dan Pelton, a clinical psychologist who works in management consulting. “It’s creating a new sense of burnout.”

While some experts say that employers are largely responsible for making structural changes that reduce stress for employees, the burden often falls on the individual.

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Here are eight things you can do to help yourself this Mental Health Awareness Month. And if you feel like you can’t do it alone, find a qualified therapist who can help you virtually or in person.

Make a list of what you love and hate

Start with perspective. Make a list of what matters most in your life and see if it matches what you are actually prioritizing.

“What we usually find is family, freedom or relaxation is the top value, and work three or four,” Pelton said. So you should ask yourself: “Are you living according to your values?”

Throughout the day, pay attention to what stresses you out, said Bridget Berkland, employee well-being manager and certified health and wellness coach at the Mayo Clinic. Is it back-to-back meetings? After-hour communications? That can help you understand how to remedy the situation, Pelton said.

“Acknowledge it but don’t stay engaged with it,” said Lorenzo Norris, chief wellness officer for George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, suggesting that you don’t dwell on negative feelings. “That will just bring you down.”

Move your body; rest your body

You can improve your brain health, functions and mood by taking care of your body, Norris said. Find 10 minutes to power-nap (yes, even in the office), make sure you’re eating well and staying hydrated, and consider a walking desk or morning workout. If you’re too busy for fitness, turn your meetings into Aaron Sorkin-style walk-and-talks. While those efforts may not solve the core issues causing burnout, they can help you think more clearly and feel better.

“Just 30 minutes of exercise can improve your mood for four to six hours,” he said.

Cut down on boredom at work

It seems counterintuitive, but sometimes doing more can help with burnout. Just make sure it’s the right kind of work — and work you’re good at. This might mean unofficially crafting your job differently to boost enjoyment and fulfillment, said Michael Leiter, who co-wrote the book “The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs.”

Do an audit of the things that give you the most satisfaction and the things that make you feel most exhausted or cynical. Then start dialing up the tasks you can sink your teeth into.

“You have to get beyond being responsive to immediately what comes at you,” he said.

Try to make meaningful tasks close to 20 percent of your day to create an intrinsic reward system, Norris suggests. That might mean having a conversation with your boss to make adjustments and figuring out how the team can better share the workload, Pelton said.

Stop working every 25 minutes

Remembering to stop and take a break can be hard, but it’s critical to reduce burnout.

Set a timer to remind yourself to get away, Leiter said. It might even help to work in focused 25-minute intervals with five-minute breaks in between — a method called the Pomodoro Technique , said Pelton. Another method is looking 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, which can help mitigate eyestrain and exhaustion. Apps such as StandUp can help you build in regular breaks.

Integrate energizing activities into these pauses. Think about the things you enjoy, such as music, meditation, socializing, dancing or just getting some fresh air, Berkland said. A mindfulness activity Pelton suggests is stepping outside for 10 minutes and paying attention to your senses — what you see, hear, etc. This forces your brain to stay in the present vs. being depressed about the past or anxious about the future, he said. If you need help, try the Calm app .

Make your own break room. Claim a quiet space in your home or office and fill it with plants and activities such as coloring books for midday escapes.

Bring back the chitchat

Turn your colleagues into work friends with the power of chatting, light gossip and happy hours. They can be an important source of support when it comes to your mental health.

Consider “what social support you need for your well-being,” Berkland said.

Not sure where to start? Set goals such as having in-person or virtual coffees each week with a certain number of colleagues. Fit small talk into the beginning of meetings. Ask about people’s weekends, families or what shows they’re bingeing. You might even consider get-to-know-you games, said Pelton. For example, have everyone take a picture outside the window closest to them, whether that’s a remote location or at the office, and at the next team meeting, colleagues could spend the first 15 minutes guessing which picture belongs to which person. Then there’s the ultimate friend-maker: bringing pastries or other food to share.

Embrace ‘Do Not Disturb’

Default notification settings can lead to you getting pinged by work round-the-clock. To filter out the noise, turn on focus or work mode settings on iPhones and Android devices, and set time limits for each work app. You can close your email and toggle your Slack or Teams notifications when you need to focus. Or block off times on your calendar when you want to be heads-down.

The pandemic blurred the lines between work and home life, and many of us have yet to reestablish that boundary. But boundaries will help control your stress. Include your working hours in away messages and email signatures.

“Structure when you’re working and not working,” Leiter said. “Be firm on that.”

In addition to adjusting your notifications, have a discussion with your boss or team to establish norms so that workers can take breaks or log off guilt-free, Berkland said.

Take your vacation (and sick) leave

Take your time off — that’s what it’s there for. Go through your calendar and pick some days now, even if they’re far in advance. It can be a two-week excursion, a three-day weekend or a mental health day. Take your sick days, too. Just because you can type from bed doesn’t mean you should.

Remember, you’re doing great

Don’t be hard on yourself. No one is 100 percent happy with their job all the time. Putting unnecessary pressure on yourself can aggravate the issue and make it harder to pull out of a spiral.

“Don’t expect to do the impossible,” Norris said. “Sometimes the best you can do is get up and show up, and that’s okay.”

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Answering 'what is your ideal work environment' in a job interview.

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Employers ask about your ideal work environment to assess fit.

Predicting what you'll be asked in a job interview is challenging. One common question that may leave you stumped if caught off guard is, “What is your ideal work environment?” Another version of this question is, "What type of work environment do you prefer?" Obviously, there is no perfect workplace. But preparing an answer to this question in advance will accomplish two things. First, it will force you to dig deep to identify what’s important to you. Best of all, articulating your vision in a clear and succinct way that aligns with the company’s values will also leave a lasting impression on your future employer.

Your ideal work environment refers to the type of workplace where you will be the most productive and satisfied. Employers ask this question for several reasons. One is to assess cultural fit. They want to know that your desires match what they have to offer. Why? Employees who fit well within an organization are more likely to feel motivated and engaged, resulting in higher productivity. It also gives the hiring manager insight into your personality—something more difficult to glean from a résumé.

Finding an ideal culture match matters just as much to you, the job seeker, as to the employer. So much so that a Glassdoor survey polling over 5,000 respondents from the U.S., U.K., France and Germany found that 73% said they wouldn’t even apply to a company unless its values align with their own. The next time you prepare for an interview, follow these steps to respond to the question, “What is your ideal work environment?”

Reflect on past experiences

The first step is to define your preferences. Look back on past work experiences to identify the environments in which you thrived. Remember, it’s about more than just describing the physical location. Think about factors such as:

• Flexibility
• Work-life balance
• Opportunities for growth
• Collaboration vs. working independently
• Structured vs. ambiguous environments

Then, make a list and prioritize these attributes. Are there any elements on which you could be flexible? Also, note any characteristics you consider deal breakers.

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Some employers ask about your ideal work environment to ensure you researched the company. Check the job description for keywords like creative, fast-paced or team-oriented. To learn more about the company culture , review the corporate website. Pay special attention to the mission statement and careers section. Also, look at social media channels to get a glimpse into the organization’s priorities. Another idea is to create a Google alert to stay on top of breaking news or announcements. Finally, talk to current employees. By scheduling informational interviews, you can get an insider perspective on what it’s like to work there.

Prepare your response

In a job interview, you always want to appear energetic and enthusiastic about the role. So, when you respond, frame your answer in a positive light. For example, instead of describing how you hated working for your micromanaging boss who tracked your every move, focus on the fact that you’re a self-starter who thrives on flexibility. Highlight what is most important to you and connect it to the organization you’re interviewing with. To make your response more compelling, use real-life examples. By using a storytelling approach, your interview will be engaging and memorable.

Example answers

Here are a few sample responses to this increasingly common interview question:

You enjoy a team-based environment

My ideal work environment is one where I can express my creativity while using my problem-solving skills to overcome obstacles. I enjoy collaborating with team members on challenging assignments. Working in a rewarding environment is also important to me. That’s why I was impressed that you recently created a program to recognize employees who go above and beyond. I find that I’m most productive and motivated when I’m part of a team that celebrates each other’s wins.

You prefer a balance between group and independent projects

I prefer working both in a group setting and independently at times. When I researched your company, I learned that many employees collaborate on projects and also focus on their own responsibilities. I’ve found that this balance is what makes me thrive as an advertising executive. While I enjoy brainstorming sessions, I also like spending time alone to strategize and focus on my day-to-day responsibilities.

You thrive in a remote setting

My ideal work environment centers around working for an organization that empowers its employees. When I read that you are a global company that prioritizes a sense of belonging, I was excited. I am most energized and productive when I am given the flexibility to work remotely for fast-paced, high-growth companies. Given that you promote transparency, work-life balance and asynchronous work, I can make an immediate contribution in this role.

Job interviews are a two-way conversation. If you determine that the company culture and your expectations don’t align, that’s okay. The role may not be a good fit. However, if there is overlap, you can decide whether some preferences are worth compromising. Most importantly, be authentic. It will make you a more attractive candidate and increase the likelihood of finding a job opportunity that is the best fit for you.

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Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Balazs Aczel

1 Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Marton Kovacs

2 Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Tanja van der Lippe

3 Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Barnabas Szaszi

Associated data.

All research materials, the collected raw and processed anonymous data, just as well the code for data management and statistical analyses are publicly shared on the OSF page of the project: OSF: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary for most professionals. Whether working from home is the key or impediment to academics’ efficiency and work-life balance became a daunting question for both scientists and their employers. The recent pandemic brought into focus the merits and challenges of working from home on a level of personal experience. Using a convenient sampling, we surveyed 704 academics while working from home and found that the pandemic lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers but around a quarter of them were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on the gathered personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that in the future they would be similarly or more efficient than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data. Taking well-being also into account, 66% of them would find it ideal to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown. These results draw attention to how working from home is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to learn more about its influencer factors and coping tactics in order to optimize its arrangements.

Introduction

Fleeing from the Great Plague that reached Cambridge in 1665, Newton retreated to his countryside home where he continued working for the next year and a half. During this time, he developed his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation—fundamentally changing the path of science for centuries. Newton himself described this period as the most productive time of his life [ 1 ]. Is working from home indeed the key to efficiency for scientists also in modern times? A solution for working without disturbance by colleagues and being able to manage a work-life balance? What personal and professional factors influence the relation between productivity and working from home? These are the main questions that the present paper aims to tackle. The Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to analyze the implications of working from home in great detail.

Working away from the traditional office is increasingly an option in today’s world. The phenomenon has been studied under numerous, partially overlapping terms, such as telecommuting, telework, virtual office, remote work, location independent working, home office. In this paper, we will use ‘working from home’ (WFH), a term that typically covers working from any location other than the dedicated area provided by the employer.

The practice of WFH and its effect on job efficiency and well-being are reasonably well explored outside of academia [ 2 , 3 ]. Internet access and the increase of personal IT infrastructure made WFH a growing trend throughout the last decades [ 4 ]. In 2015, over 12% of EU workers [ 5 ] and near one-quarter of US employees [ 6 ] worked at least partly from home. A recent survey conducted among 27,500 millennials and Gen Z-s indicated that their majority would like to work remotely more frequently [ 7 ]. The literature suggests that people working from home need flexibility for different reasons. Home-working is a typical solution for those who need to look after dependent children [ 8 ] but many employees just seek a better work-life balance [ 7 ] and the comfort of an alternative work environment [ 9 ].

Non-academic areas report work-efficiency benefits for WFH but they also show some downsides of this arrangement. A good example is the broad-scale experiment in which call center employees were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for nine months [ 10 ]. A 13% work performance increase was found in the working from home group. These workers also reported improved work satisfaction. Still, after the experiment, 50% of them preferred to go back to the office mainly because of feeling isolated at home.

Home-working has several straightforward positive aspects, such as not having to commute, easier management of household responsibilities [ 11 ] and family demands [ 12 ], along with increased autonomy over time use [ 13 , 14 ], and fewer interruptions [ 15 , 16 ]. Personal comfort is often listed as an advantage of the home environment [e.g., 15 ], though setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands [ 17 ]. People working from home consistently report greater job motivation and satisfaction [ 4 , 11 , 18 , 19 ] which is probably due to the greater work-related control and work-life flexibility [ 20 ]. A longitudinal nationally representative sample of 30,000 households in the UK revealed that homeworking is positively related with leisure time satisfaction [ 21 ], suggesting that people working from home can allocate more time for leisure activities.

Often-mentioned negative aspects of WFH include being disconnected from co-workers, experiencing isolation due to the physical and social distance to team members [ 22 , 23 ]. Also, home-working employees reported more difficulties with switching off and they worked beyond their formal working hours [ 4 ]. Working from home is especially difficult for those with small children [ 24 ], but intrusion from other family members, neighbours, and friends were also found to be major challenges of WFH [e.g., 17 ]. Moreover, being away from the office may also create a lack of visibility and increases teleworkers’ fear that being out of sight limits opportunities for promotion, rewards, and positive performance reviews [ 25 ].

Importantly, increased freedom imposes higher demands on workers to control not just the environment, but themselves too. WFH comes with the need to develop work-life boundary control tactics [ 26 ] and to be skilled at self-discipline, self-motivation, and good time management [ 27 ]. Increased flexibility can easily lead to multitasking and work-family role blurring [ 28 ]. Table 1 provides non-comprehensive lists of mostly positive and mostly negative consequences of WFH, based on the literature reviewed here.

Compared to the private sector, our knowledge is scarce about how academics experience working from home. Researchers in higher education institutes work in very similar arrangements. Typically, they are expected to personally attend their workplace, if not for teaching or supervision, then for meetings or to confer with colleagues. In the remaining worktime, they work in their lab or, if allowed, they may choose to do some of their tasks remotely. Along with the benefits on productivity when working from home, academics have already experienced some of its drawbacks at the start of the popularity of personal computers. As Snizek observed in the ‘80s, “(f)aculty who work long hours at home using their microcomputers indicate feelings of isolation and often lament the loss of collegial feedback and reinforcement” [page 622, 29 ].

Until now, the academics whose WFH experience had been given attention were mostly those participating in online distance education [e.g., 30 , 31 ]. They experienced increased autonomy, flexibility in workday schedule, the elimination of unwanted distractions [ 32 ], along with high levels of work productivity and satisfaction [ 33 ], but they also observed inadequate communication and the lack of opportunities for skill development [ 34 ]. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to study the WFH experience of a greater spectrum of academics, since at one point most of them had to do all their work from home.

We have only fragmented knowledge about the moderators of WFH success. We know that control over time is limited by the domestic tasks one has while working from home. The view that women’s work is more influenced by family obligations than men’s is consistently shown in the literature [e.g., 35 – 37 ]. Sullivan and Lewis [ 38 ] argued that women who work from home are able to fulfil their domestic role better and manage their family duties more to their satisfaction, but that comes at the expense of higher perceived work–family conflict [see also 39 ]. Not surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, female scientists suffered a greater disruption than men in their academic productivity and time spent on research, most likely due to demands of childcare [ 40 , 41 ].

In summary, until recently, the effect of WFH on academics’ life and productivity received limited attention. However, during the recent pandemic lockdown, scientists, on an unprecedented scale, had to find solutions to continue their research from home. The situation unavoidably brought into focus the merits and challenges of WFH on a level of personal experience. Institutions were compelled to support WFH arrangements by adequate regulations, services, and infrastructure. Some researchers and institutions might have found benefits in the new arrangements and may wish to continue WFH in some form; for others WFH brought disproportionately larger challenges. The present study aims to facilitate the systematic exploration and support of researchers’ efficiency and work-life balance when working from home.

Materials and methods

Our study procedure and analysis plan were preregistered at https://osf.io/jg5bz (all deviations from the plan are listed in S1 File ). The survey included questions on research work efficiency, work-life balance, demographics, professional and personal background information. The study protocol has been approved by the Institutional Review Board from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary (approval number: 2020/131). The Transparency Report of the study, the complete text of the questionnaire items and the instructions are shared at our OSF repository: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

As the objective of this study was to gain insight about researchers’ experience of WFH, we aimed to increase the size and diversity of our sample rather than ascertaining the representativeness of our sample. Therefore, we distributed our online survey link among researchers in professional newsletters, university mailing lists, on social media, and by sending group-emails to authors (additional details about sampling are in S1 File ). As a result of the nature of our sampling strategy, it is not known how many researchers have seen our participation request. Additionally, we did not collect the country of residence of the respondents. Responses analyzed in this study were collected between 2020-04-24 and 2020-07-13. Overall, 858 individuals started the survey and 154 were excluded because they did not continue the survey beyond the first question. As a result, 704 respondents were included in the analysis.

We sent the questionnaire individually to each of the respondents through the Qualtrics Mailer service. Written informed consent and access to the preregistration of the research was provided to every respondent before starting the survey. Then, respondents who agreed to participate in the study could fill out the questionnaire. To encourage participation, we offered that upon completion they can enter a lottery to win a 100 USD voucher.

This is a general description of the survey items. The full survey with the display logic and exact phrasing of the items is transported from Qualtrics and uploaded to the projects’ OSF page: https://osf.io/8ze2g/ .

Efficiency of research work

The respondents were asked to compare the efficiency of their research work during the lockdown to their work before the lockdown. They were also asked to use their present and previous experience to indicate whether working more from home in the future would change the efficiency of their research work compared to the time before the lockdown. For both questions, they could choose among three options: “less efficient”; “more efficient”, and “similarly efficient”.

Comparing working from home to working in the office

Participants were asked to compare working from home to working from the office. For this question they could indicate their preference on a 7-point dimension (1: At home; 7: In the office), along 15 efficiency or well-being related aspects of research work (e.g., working on the manuscript, maintaining work-life balance). These aspects were collected in a pilot study conducted with 55 researchers who were asked to indicate in free text responses the areas in which their work benefits/suffers when working from home. More details of the pilot study are provided in S1 File .

Actual and ideal time spent working from home

To study the actual and ideal time spent working from home, researcher were asked to indicate on a 0–100% scale (1) what percentage of their work time they spent working from home before the pandemic and (2) how much would be ideal for them working from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance.

Feasibility of working more from home

With simple Yes/No options, we asked the respondents to indicate whether they think that working more from home would be feasible considering all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and the given circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance).

Background information

Background questions were asked by providing preset lists concerning their academic position (e.g., full professor), area of research (e.g., social sciences), type of workplace (e.g., purely research institute), gender, age group, living situation (e.g., single-parent with non-adult child(ren)), and the age and the number of their children.

The respondents were also asked to select one of the offered options to indicate: whether or not they worked more from home during the coronavirus lockdown than before; whether it is possible for them to collect data remotely; whether they have education duties at work; if their research requires intensive team-work; whether their home office is fully equipped; whether their partner was also working from home during the pandemic; how far their office is from home; whether they had to do home-schooling during the pandemic; whether there was someone else looking after their child(ren) during their work from home in lockdown. When the question did not apply to them, they could select the ‘NA’ option as well.

Data preprocessing and analyses

All the data preprocessing and analyses were conducted in R [ 42 ], with the use of the tidyverse packages [ 43 ]. Before the analysis of the survey responses, we read all the free-text comments to ascertain that they do not contain personal information and they are in line with the respondent’s answers. We found that for 5 items the respondents’ comments contradicted their survey choices (e.g., whether they have children), therefore, we excluded the responses of the corresponding items from further analyses (see S1 File ). Following the preregistration, we only conducted descriptive statistics of the survey results.

The summary of the key demographic information of the 704 complete responses is presented in Table 2 . A full summary of all the collected background information of the respondents are available in S1 File .

The results showed that 94% (n = 662) of the surveyed researchers worked more from home during the COVID-19 lockdown compared to the time before. Of these researchers, 47% found that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 23% found it more efficient, and 30% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Within this database, we also explored the effect of the lockdown on the efficiency of people living with children (n = 290). Here, we found that 58% of them experienced that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 20% found it more efficient, and 22% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Of those researchers who live with children, we found that 71% of the 21 single parents and 57% of the 269 partnered parents found working less efficient when working from home compared to the time before the lockdown.

When asking about how working more from home would affect the efficiency of their research after the lockdown, of those who have not already been working from home full time (n = 684), 29% assumed that it could make their research, in general, less efficient, 29% said that it would be more efficient, and 41% assumed no difference compared to the time before the lockdown ( Fig 1 ).

Focusing on the efficiency of the subgroup of people who live with children (n = 295), we found that for 32% their research work would be less efficient, for 30% it would be no different, and for 38% it would be more efficient to work from home after the lockdown, compared to the time before the lockdown.

When comparing working from home to working in the office in general, people found that they can better achieve certain aspects of the research in one place than the other. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data ( Fig 2 ).

The bars represent response averages of the given aspects.

We also asked the researchers how much of their work time they spent working from home in the past, and how much it would be ideal for them to work from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and well-being. Fig 3 shows the distribution of percentages of time working from home in the past and in an ideal future. Comparing these values for each researcher, we found that 66% of them want to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown, whereas 16% of them want to work less from home, and 18% of them want to spend the same percentage of their work time at home in the future as before. (These latter calculations were not preregistered).

Taken all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and provided circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance), of researchers who would like to work more from home in the future (n = 461), 86% think that it would be possible to do so. Even among those who have teaching duties at work (n = 376), 84% think that more working from home would be ideal and possible.

Researchers’ work and life have radically changed in recent times. The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology and the continuous access to the internet disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary. Where, when, and how we work depends more and more on our own arrangements. The recent pandemic only highlighted an already existing task: researchers’ worklife has to be redefined. The key challenge in a new work-life model is to find strategies to balance the demands of work and personal life. As a first step, the present paper explored how working from home affects researchers’ efficiency and well-being.

Our results showed that while the pandemic-related lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers (47%), around a quarter (23%) of them experienced that they were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that after the lockdown they would be similarly (41%) or more efficient (29%) than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. The remaining 30% thought that after the lockdown their work efficiency would decrease if they worked from home, which is noticeably lower than the 47% who claimed the same for the lockdown period. From these values we speculate that some of the obstacles of their work efficiency were specific to the pandemic lockdown. Such obstacles could have been the need to learn new methods to teach online [ 44 ] or the trouble adapting to the new lifestyle [ 45 ]. Furthermore, we found that working from the office and working from home support different aspects of research. Not surprisingly, activities that involve colleagues or team members are better bound to the office, but tasks that need focused attention, such as working on the manuscript or analyzing the data are better achieved from home.

A central motivation of our study was to explore what proportion of their worktime researchers would find ideal to work from home, concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance. Two thirds of the researchers indicated that it would be better to work more from home in the future. It seemed that sharing work somewhat equally between the two venues is the most preferred arrangement. A great majority (86%) of those who would like to work more from home in the future, think that it would be possible to do so. As a conclusion, both the work and non-work life of researchers would take benefits should more WFH be allowed and neither workplace duties, nor their domestic circumstances are limits of such a change. That researchers have a preference to work more from home, might be due to the fact that they are more and more pressured by their work. Finishing manuscripts, and reading literature is easier to find time for when working from home.

A main message of the results of our present survey is that although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency during the lockdown, the majority of them would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. It is important to stress, however, that working from home is not equally advantageous for researchers. Several external and personal factors must play a role in researchers’ work efficiency and work-life balance. In this analysis, we concentrated only on family status, but further dedicated studies will be required to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interaction of professional, institutional, personal, and domestic factors in this matter. While our study could only initiate the exploration of academics’ WFH benefits and challenges, we can already discuss a few relevant aspects regarding the work-life interface.

Our data show that researchers who live with dependent children can exploit the advantages of working from home less than those who do not have childcare duties, irrespective of the pandemic lockdown. Looking after children is clearly a main source of people’s task overload and, as a result, work-family conflict [ 46 , 47 ]. As an implication, employers should pay special respect to employees’ childcare situations when defining work arrangements. It should be clear, however, that other caring responsibilities should also be respected such as looking after elderly or disabled relatives [ 48 ]. Furthermore, to avoid equating non-work life with family-life, a broader diversity of life circumstances, such as those who live alone, should be taken into consideration [ 49 ].

It seems likely that after the pandemic significantly more work will be supplied from home [ 50 ]. The more of the researchers’ work will be done from home in the future, the greater the challenge will grow to integrate their work and non-work life. The extensive research on work-life conflict, should help us examine the issue and to develop coping strategies applicable for academics’ life. The Boundary Theory [ 26 , 51 , 52 ] proved to be a useful framework to understand the work-home interface. According to this theory, individuals utilize different tactics to create and maintain an ideal level of work-home segmentation. These boundaries often serve as “mental fences” to simplify the environment into domains, such as work or home, to help us attend our roles, such as being an employee or a parent. These boundaries are more or less permeable, depending on how much the individual attending one role can be influenced by another role. Individuals differ in the degree to which they prefer and are able to segment their roles, but each boundary crossing requires a cognitive “leap” between these categories [ 53 ]. The source of conflict is the demands of the different roles and responsibilities competing for one’s physical and mental resources. Working from home can easily blur the boundary between work and non-work domains. The conflict caused by the intrusion of the home world to one’s work time, just as well the intrusion of work tasks to one’s personal life are definite sources of weakened ability to concentrate on one’s tasks [ 54 ], exhaustion [ 55 ], and negative job satisfaction [ 56 ].

What can researchers do to mitigate this challenge? Various tactics have been identified for controlling one’s borders between work and non-work. One can separate the two domains by temporal, physical, behavioral, and communicative segmentation [ 26 ]. Professionals often have preferences and self-developed tactics for boundary management. People who prefer tighter boundary management apply strong segmentation between work and home [ 57 , 58 ]. For instance, they don’t do domestic tasks in worktime (temporal segmentation), close their door when working from home (physical segmentation), don’t read work emails at weekends (behavioral segmentation), or negotiate strict boundary rules with family members (communicative segmentation). People on the other on one side of the segmentation-integration continuum, might not mind, or cannot avoid, ad-hoc boundary-crossings and integrate the two domains by letting private space and time be mixed with their work.

Researchers, just like other workers, need to develop new arrangements and skills to cope with the disintegration of the traditional work-life boundaries. To know how research and education institutes could best support this change would require a comprehensive exploration of the factors in researchers’ WFH life. There is probably no one-size-fits-all approach to promote employees’ efficiency and well-being. Life circumstances often limit how much control people can have over their work-life boundaries when working from home [ 59 ]. Our results strongly indicate that some can boost work efficiency and wellbeing when working from home, others need external solutions, such as the office, to provide boundaries between their life domains. Until we gain comprehensive insight about the topic, individuals are probably the best judges of their own situation and of what arrangements may be beneficial for them in different times [ 60 ]. The more autonomy the employers provide to researchers in distributing their work between the office and home (while not lowering their expectations), the more they let them optimize this arrangement to their circumstances.

Our study has several limitations: to investigate how factors such as research domain, seniority, or geographic location contribute to WFH efficiency and well-being would have needed a much greater sample. Moreover, the country of residence of the respondents was not collected in our survey and this factor could potentially alter the perception of WFH due to differing social and infrastructural factors. Whereas the world-wide lockdown has provided a general experience to WFH to academics, the special circumstances just as well biased their judgment of the arrangement. With this exploratory research, we could only scratch the surface of the topic, the reader can probably generate a number of testable hypotheses that would be relevant to the topic but we could not analyze in this exploration.

Newton working in lockdown became the idealized image of the home-working scientist. Unquestionably, he was a genius, but his success probably needed a fortunate work-life boundary. Should he had noisy neighbours, or taunting domestic duties, he might have achieved much less while working from home. With this paper, we aim to draw attention to how WFH is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to be prepared for this change. We hope that personal experience or the topic’s relevance to the future of science will invite researchers to continue this work.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

We would like to thank Szonja Horvath, Matyas Sarudi, and Zsuzsa Szekely for their help with reviewing the free text responses.

Funding Statement

TVL's contribution is part of the research program Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps to Resilient Societies (SCOOP). She is grateful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) for their support in the context of its 2017 Gravitation Program (grant number 024.003.025).

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2021; 16(3): e0249127.

Decision Letter 0

PONE-D-20-30010

Dear Dr. Aczel,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung, D.S.W.

Academic Editor

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Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: PONE-D-20-30010

Title: Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Reviewer’s article summary: This manuscript provides results from a survey on work-life balance among academics who switched to remote work-from-home during the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe the article contributes insight on both the work-life balance among academics and how researchers have experienced their work during the pandemic, and will be of interest to the PloS One audience. Below, please see suggestions for improving the manuscript.

Abstract: Please include a brief statement about methodology, including sample size of the survey population, how the survey was conducted (convenience sample? Recruitment strategy?).

Introduction: The authors questions, “Is the relation between working from home and productivity influenced by personal and professional factors?” This question seems like a non-starter – how could working from home not be influenced by personal and professional factors? Advise revising this question to better focus your key arguments (i.e. what personal and professional factors most influence the productivity of working from home?).

“just as well increased autonomy over time use” – awkward sentence; please revise to clarify.

“physical and social distance to teal members” – do you mean team members?

Table 1 – please refer to the table in the text to guide the audience to this comparison of pros/cons in context of the introduction. It may also better position this manuscript within the literature to include more details from the studies that list these pros/cons (i.e. include the % of people who have reported each of the pros/cons within the table itself, and include a reference to the study where each % was derived).

Reference to Snizek in the 80’s – the benefit of including this quote is questionable; it would be more helpful to include more recent literature on this point since generational changes have perhaps changed this experience.

“just as well high levels of work productivity and satisfaction” – awkward sentence, please revise for clarity.

Materials and Methods: Please provide the study number for IRB approval.

The authors do include links to their study procedure, but it would be helpful for a more complete overview of the procedure within the manuscript so the audience can more easily ascertain the methodology employed. In comparison, the “Materials” section provides intricate detail that may not be necessary (in this reviewer’s opinion, it would be more efficient to simply list the types of questions asked—i.e. “Survey questions asked participants to report on changes that occurred in relation to research work efficiency, comparison of home to office work, amount of time spent…”(etc. or something of this nature)–with a link to the actual survey instrument).

There is no section or statement regarding data analysis. Please describe your analytical procedure (descriptive statistics, any regressions?) and software used for analysis.

Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. Please include data about the countries where respondents live, if available; if not available, please include a statement regarding residence in the Methods section (i.e. was the sample all within a single country?).

Figures – please include sample size (n = ) in the figure titles.

” From these values we can assume that some of the obstacles of their work were specific to the pandemic lockdown and not directly to working from home” – please explain and clarify.

“…seems to be a generally wanted and beneficial model of work” – this statement seems to ignore the result that nearly half of respondents reported being less efficient during the pandemic. Recommend revising this statement, and including a summary that the results indicate although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency, they would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. May also be useful to note that the implications of this require further investigation – what is it about this new work situation that people prefer? What amount of time did people previously spend in commute that they now can use for other tasks or personal interests? What other factors have changed that make the current situation more preferred?

#5 – incomplete reference

There are several references that are now quite old (1987, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009…) – Recommend reviewing these carefully to ensure that there is not more recent literature that would shed better light on the subject.

Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show % to increase clarity of results.

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool,  https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at  gro.solp@serugif . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Author response to Decision Letter 0

17 Feb 2021

Dear Dr. Johnson Cheung,

We are happy to submit a revised version of our manuscript to PLOS One.

We would like to thank you and the reviewer for their comments and suggestions.

Below, you can find the detailed responses to all comments in bold.

Balazs Aczel, on behalf of all co-authors

Reviewer #1

We have added these aspects to the Abstract.

We agree with the reviewer and changed that question as suggested.

Table 1 is referred to in the text, just above the table. After due consideration of this suggestion, we judged that three paragraphs about the pros/cons provide sufficient details on the given topic. We found no sound way to merge the empirical reports of the referred studies to provide overall percentages of people reporting each pros/cons.

The old Snizek reference serves as an indicator that academics have already experienced some of the drawbacks of working from home at the start of the popularity of personal computers. We have now extended our Introduction with more studies from the recent literature, especially with those conducted during the pandemic.

We have now placed the Procedure section before the Materials section. At the beginning of the Materials section, we provide a link to the original content of our Qualtrics survey. This file contains the wording of the items and the display logic of the questions. We would also prefer to keep the detailed description of the survey items in the manuscript as most of the items were developed by the authors for the study. Should the Editor prefer that, we could move the Materials section to the Supporting Information and leave just the link to the exact survey questions in the manuscript.

Now, we state in the Data preprocessing and Analyses section that we used the R statistical software for the analyses and that we report only descriptive statistical results in this study.

The table with the sample size and proportions for all the levels of all the survey items is provided in the Supplementary Materials. However, as the whole table is more than 4 pages long, we think that by including the table in the main text we would corrupt the readability of the manuscript.

Now, we state in the Sampling section that the country of residence of the respondents is not known.

The sample sizes are now included in the figure titles.

We would like to thank the reviewer for pointing out the vagueness of this section. We rephrased the sentence and added one more sentence to the section to clarify our point.

We have now updated this sentence incorporating the reviewer’s suggestion. The updated paragraph is on page 16.

We fixed the incomplete reference.

We agree that some of our references are from the ‘80s or ‘90s, yet they are still good sources of our claims (e.g., how researchers found working from home when personal computers started or that setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands). Nevertheless, we have added more recent studies to our references, especially from the relevant literature that has been published since our initial submission 5 months ago:

Johnson N, Veletsianos G, Seaman J. US Faculty and Administrators’ Experiences and Approaches in the Early Weeks of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Online Learn. 2020;24(2):6–21.

Barrero JM, Bloom N, Davis SJ. Why Working From Home Will Stick. Univ Chic Becker Friedman Inst Econ Work Pap. 2020;(2020–174).

Korbel JO, Stegle O. Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on life scientists. Genome Biol. 2020;21(113).

Ghaffarizadeh SA, Ghaffarizadeh SA, Behbahani AH, Mehdizadeh M, Olechowski A. Life and work of researchers trapped in the COVID-19 pandemic vicious cycle. bioRxiv. 2021;

Thank you for the recommendation. We have now modified this figure.

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

Decision Letter 1

23 Feb 2021

PONE-D-20-30010R1

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 09 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Reviewer #1:

Reviewer’s response to revisions: Overall, the authors have revised the manuscript to increase clarity and improve understanding of the contributions that this research provides regarding the future outlook for academics working from home. I have a few minor comments:

Limitations: This revised document brings to light the fact that 1) we do not know how the transition to working from home differs between countries since country was not a survey question (which could differ significantly given a number of social and technological/infrastructure factors), and 2) since the analysis only included descriptive statistics there is great potential in learning more from this dataset – and it is wonderful that the dataset will be publicly available. I do recommend adding a statement on limitations, both because it is a best practice, and because it shows that the authors have been thoughtful about the limits of their current analysis.

Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. I appreciate the authors’ response to this request, but suggest that as a standard practice a shortened version of the key demographics could be provided in a table within the text, and the remainder of the demographics table could be in the supplemental material (having these results within the table is standard in my field since it provides the background information necessary for academics to easily understand the full scope of the results). In response to the question of length, I would suggest that the paragraph that lists the % of respondents who were male/female, etc. could be shortened and simply refer to the table instead.

Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show % to increase clarity of results. The authors responded that this change was made in the revision, but I could not find the updated figure in the revised document.

Author response to Decision Letter 1

Overall, the authors have revised the manuscript to increase clarity and improve

understanding of the contributions that this research provides regarding the future outlook for

academics working from home. I have a few minor comments:

Limitations: This revised document brings to light the fact that 1) we do not know how the

transition to working from home differs between countries since country was not a survey

question (which could differ significantly given a number of social and

technological/infrastructure factors), and 2) since the analysis only included descriptive

statistics there is great potential in learning more from this dataset – and it is wonderful that

the dataset will be publicly available. I do recommend adding a statement on limitations, both

because it is a best practice, and because it shows that the authors have been thoughtful

about the limits of their current analysis.

We have now included a statement of limitations regarding the missing information

on country of residence and made it more clear in the limitations section that the

present study was only exploratory.

Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays

sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. I

appreciate the authors’ response to this request, but suggest that as a standard practice a

shortened version of the key demographics could be provided in a table within the text, and

the remainder of the demographics table could be in the supplemental material (having

these results within the table is standard in my field since it provides the background

information necessary for academics to easily understand the full scope of the results). In

response to the question of length, I would suggest that the paragraph that lists the % of

respondents who were male/female, etc. could be shortened and simply refer to the table

We have now included the key demographics as a table (Table 2) in the manuscript in

addition to the full summary of all the responses in the Supplementary information.

Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show

% to increase clarity of results. The authors responded that this change was made in the

revision, but I could not find the updated figure in the revised document.

We made sure that all the figures are updated and uploaded with this submission

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf

Decision Letter 2

12 Mar 2021

PONE-D-20-30010R2

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Acceptance letter

16 Mar 2021

Dear Dr. Aczel:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact gro.solp@sserpeno .

If we can help with anything else, please email us at gro.solp@enosolp .

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung

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• In the United States, youth use e-cigarettes, or vapes, more than any other tobacco product. 1
• No tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, teens, and young adults. 2
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• E-cigarette marketing, the availability of flavored products, social influences, and the effects of nicotine can influence youth to start or continue vaping. 3 4
• Most middle and high school students who vape want to quit. 5
• Many people have an important role in protecting youth from vaping including parents and caregivers, educators and school administrators, health care providers, and community partners.
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E-cigarette use among U.S. youth

In 2023, e-cigarettes were the most commonly used tobacco product among middle and high school students in the United States. In 2023: 6

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• 1.56 million (10.0%) high school students.
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Some groups of middle and high school students use e-cigarettes at a higher percentage than others. For example, in 2023: 6

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Many young people who vape also use other tobacco products, including cigarettes and cigars. 7 This is called dual use. In 2020: 8

• About one in three high school students (36.8%) who vaped also used other tobacco products.
• One in two middle school students (49.0%) who vaped also used other tobacco products.

E-cigarettes can also be used to deliver other substances, including cannabis. In 2016, nearly one in three (30.6%) of U.S. middle and high school students who had ever used an e-cigarette reported using marijuana in the device. 9

• Park-Lee E, Ren C, Cooper M, Cornelius M, Jamal A, Cullen KA. Tobacco product use among middle and high school students—United States, 2022 . MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2022;71:1429–1435.
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. E-cigarette Use Among Youth and Young Adults: A Report of the Surgeon General . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2016. Accessed Feb 14, 2024.
• Apelberg BJ, Corey CG, Hoffman AC, et al. Symptoms of tobacco dependence among middle and high school tobacco users: results from the 2012 National Youth Tobacco Survey . Am J Prev Med. 2014;47(Suppl 1):S4–14.
• Gentzke AS, Wang TW, Cornelius M, et al. Tobacco product use and associated factors among middle and high school students—National Youth Tobacco Survey, United States, 2021 . MMWR Surveill Summ. 2022;71(No. SS-5):1–29.
• Zhang L, Gentzke A, Trivers KF, VanFrank B. Tobacco cessation behaviors among U.S. middle and high school students, 2020 . J Adolesc Health. 2022;70(1):147–154.
• Birdsey J, Cornelius M, Jamal A, et al. Tobacco product use among U.S. middle and high school students—National Youth Tobacco Survey, 2023 . MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2023;72:1173–1182.
• Wang TW, Gentzke AS, Creamer MR, et al. Tobacco product use and associated factors among middle and high school students—United States, 2019 . MMWR Surveill Summ. 2019;68(No. SS-12):1–22.
• Wang TW, Gentzke AS, Neff LJ, et al. Characteristics of e-cigarette use behaviors among US youth, 2020 . JAMA Netw Open. 2021;4(6):e2111336.
• Trivers KF, Phillips E, Gentzke AS, Tynan MA, Neff LJ. Prevalence of cannabis use in electronic cigarettes among U.S. youth . JAMA Pediatr. 2018;172(11):1097–1099.

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Soybean gall midge shows up in two Kansas counties

The soybean midge gall can be devastating to fields, says K-State entomologist Anthony Zukoff. | Download photo

K-State entomologist explains the potential impact of pest in Kansas fields

At a glance: K-State entomologist Anthony Zukoff says the soybean gall midge can create significant plant and yield loss. The pest has recently been reported in two northern Kansas counties.

More information: Anthony Zukoff, 620-276-8286, [email protected]

Related: Soybean Gall Midge Alert Network

May 28, 2024

By Jacob Klaudt , K-State Research and Extension news service

MANHATTAN, Kan. – Soybean gall midge, a new pest to soybean production in the United States, has been found in two northeast Kansas counties.

Kansas State University entomologist Anthony Zukoff said the pest causes devastating damage to fields.

“After several years of Nebraska counties on the Kansas line having infestations, soybean gall midge finally showed up in northeast Kansas -- in Nemaha and Marshall counties -- last year,” Zukoff said.

The tiny flies lay their eggs in soybean fields and bring harm to plants by feeding on their stems, according to Zukoff.

“Their maggots consume tissue inside the stems of the plants, and this leads to severe lodging (plants falling over) and outright plant death.”

Lodging and plant death can give rise to fields having considerably poor yields at harvest.

“From the field edge, which is where the infestations typically start, to about 100 feet into the field you could have complete yield loss,” Zukoff said. “Beyond that, at about 300 to 400 feet you could look at about 20% yield loss.”

To detect soybean gall midge, Zukoff encourages producers to scout fields for wilting soybean plants.

“At the base of the plant, they might have a swollen, darkened stem. If you see symptoms like that (wilting, swelling and dark coloration), cut the plant down the middle and look for maggots inside the stem.”

He added: “If you do see some maggots, especially if they're bright orange, reach out to your local extension professionals because early detection for this pest is really important.”

Report a soybean gall midge appearance to professionals at local extension offices in Kansas or by contacting the K-State entomology department .

Soybean gall midge possess unique physical characteristics making them easily identifiable.

“Soybean gall midge are small, gnat-like flies that are just a couple millimeters long,” Zukoff said. “They have a bright orange-colored body. They have mottled wings, and their legs are striped. The maggots start out as a cream color and as they mature, become bright orange.”

Currently, there are no practical insecticide recommendations for treating a soybean gall midge infestation due to their recent emergence. Still, producers have other options available to them that can keep the pest from injuring soybeans.

“If you have a field that's been infested very heavily next to a field that you want to plant, you might consider not planting near those fields,” Zukoff said. “You can also rotate to a different crop for a growing season or two.”

Growers can also manage the pest by hilling soil near the plants. Zukoff said researchers in affected areas haven’t published anything official regarding management.

“There is some promising work looking at the cultural technique of hilling soil at the base of plants early in the season. This is preventing the adult from getting eggs laid in those stems because it's protected by soil. Research for that is ongoing and it might not be very practical for everybody,” he said.

Visit the Soybean Gall Midge Alert Network to stay up to date on the pest’s presence in Kansas.

• Updated: 5/28/24