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Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?

Data from the pandemic can guide organizations struggling to reimagine the new office..

• By Rebecca Stropoli
• August 18, 2021
• CBR - Economics
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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t your typical office worker. He was No. 3 on the 2020 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $125 billion, give or take. But there’s at least one thing Zuckerberg has in common with many other workers: he seems to like working from home. In an internal memo, which made its way to the Wall Street Journal , as Facebook announced plans to offer increased flexibility to employees, Zuckerberg explained that he would work remotely for at least half the year.

“Working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” Zuckerberg wrote. He has also said that he expects about half of Facebook’s employees to be fully remote within the next decade.

The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage in many countries, and variants are complicating the picture, but in some parts of the world, including the United States, people are desperate for life to return to normal—everywhere but the office. After more than a year at home, some employees are keen to return to their workplaces and colleagues. Many others are less eager to do so, even quitting their jobs to avoid going back. Somewhere between their bedrooms and kitchens, they have established new models of work-life balance they are loath to give up.

This has left some companies trying to recreate their work policies, determining how best to handle a workforce that in many cases is demanding more flexibility. Some, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, are leaning into remote work. Others, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are reverting to the tried-and-true office environment, calling everyone back in. Goldman’s CEO David Solomon, in February, called working from home an “aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.” And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said of exclusively remote work: “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”

This pivotal feature of pandemic life has accelerated a long-running debate: What do employers and employees lose and gain through remote work? In which setting—the office or the home—are employees more productive? Some research indicates that working from home can boost productivity and that companies offering more flexibility will be best positioned for success. But this giant, forced experiment has only just begun.

An accelerated debate

A persistent sticking point in this debate has been productivity. Back in 2001, a group of researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, led by Robert E. Kraut , wrote that “collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than collaboration when members of a work group are collocated.” Two decades later, this statement remains part of today’s discussion.

However, well before Zoom, which came on the scene in 2011, or even Skype, which launched in 2003, the researchers acknowledged some of the potential benefits of remote work, allowing that “dependence on physical proximity imposes substantial costs as well, and may undercut successful collaboration.” For one, they noted, email, answering machines, and computer bulletin boards could help eliminate the inconvenience of organizing in-person meetings with multiple people at the same time.

Two decades later, remote-work technology is far more developed. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that, even in pre-pandemic 2019, more than 26 million Americans—approximately 16 percent of the total US workforce—worked remotely on an average day. The Pew Research Center put that pre-pandemic number at 20 percent, and in December 2020 reported that 71 percent of workers whose responsibilities allowed them to work from home were doing so all or most of the time.

The sentiment toward and effectiveness of remote work depend on the industry involved. It makes sense that executives working in and promoting social media are comfortable connecting with others online, while those in industries in which deals are typically closed with handshakes in a conference room, or over drinks at dinner, don’t necessarily feel the same. But data indicate that preferences and productivity are shaped by factors beyond a person’s line of work.

The productivity paradigm

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom  was bullish on work-from-home trends. His 2015 study, for one—with James Liang , John Roberts , and Zhichun Jenny Ying , all then at Stanford—finds a 13 percent increase in productivity among remotely working call-center employees at a Chinese travel agency.

But in the early days of the pandemic, Bloom was less optimistic about remote work. “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” Bloom told a Stanford publication in March 2020. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”

To test that thesis, Jose Maria Barrero  of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Bloom, and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis  launched a monthly survey of US workers in May 2020, tracking more than 30,000 workers aged 20–64 who earned at least $20,000 per year in 2019.

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price.

The survey measured the incidence of working from home as the pandemic continued, focusing on how a more permanent shift to remote work might affect not only productivity but also overall employee well-being. It also examined factors including how work from home would affect spending and revenues in major urban centers. In addition to the survey, the researchers drew on informal conversations with dozens of US business executives. They are publishing the results of the survey and related research at wfhresearch.com .

In an analysis of the data collected through March 2021, they find that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14 percent who said they got less done. On average, respondents’ productivity at home was 7 percent higher than they expected. Forty percent of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office, and only 15 percent said the opposite was true. The researchers argue that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, and they calculate that these working arrangements will increase overall worker productivity in the US by 5 percent as compared with the pre-pandemic economy.

“Working from home under the pandemic has been far more productive than I or pretty much anyone else predicted,” Bloom says.

No commute, and fewer hours worked

Some workers arguing in favor of flexibility might say they’re more efficient at home away from chatty colleagues and the other distractions of an office, and that may be true. But above all, the increased productivity comes from saving transit time, an effect overlooked by standard productivity calculations. “Three-quarters or more of the productivity gains that we find are coming from a reduction in commuting time,” Davis says. Eliminate commuting as a factor, and the researchers project only a 1 percent productivity boost in the postpandemic work-from-home environment, as compared with before.

It makes sense that standard statistics miss the impact of commutes, Davis explains. Ordinarily, commuting time generally doesn’t shift significantly in the aggregate. But much like rare power outages in Manhattan have made it possible for New Yorkers to suddenly see the nighttime stars, the dramatic work-from-home shift that occurred during the pandemic made it possible to recognize the impact traveling to and from an office had on productivity.

Before the pandemic, US workers were commuting an average of 54 minutes daily, according to Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. In the aggregate, the researchers say, the pandemic-induced shift to remote work meant 62.5 million fewer commuting hours per workday.

People who worked from home spent an average of 35 percent of saved commuting time on their jobs, the researchers find. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs.

Infographic: People want working from home to stick after the pandemic subsides

With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barrero  of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom , and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis . The researchers launched a survey of US workers, starting in May 2020 and continuing in waves for more than a year since, to capture a range of information including workers’ attitudes about their new remote arrangements.

Read more >>

Aside from commuting less, remote workers may also be sleeping more efficiently, another phenomenon that could feed into productivity. On days they worked remotely, people rose about 30 minutes later than on-site workers did, according to pre-pandemic research by Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia  of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and SUNY Empire’s Victoria Vernon . Both groups worked the same number of hours and slept about the same amount each night, so it’s most likely that “working from home permits a more comfortable personal sleep schedule,” says Vernon. “Teleworkers who spend less time commuting may be happier and less tired, and therefore more productive,” write the researchers, who analyzed BLS data from 2017 to 2018.

While remote employees gained back commuting time during the pandemic, they also worked fewer hours, note Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. Hours on the job averaged about 32 per week, compared with 36 pre-pandemic, although the work time stretched past traditional office hours. “Respondents may devote a few more minutes in the morning to chores and childcare, while still devoting about a third of their old commuting time slot to their primary job. At the end of the day, they might end somewhat early and turn on the TV. They might interrupt TV time to respond to a late afternoon or early evening work request,” the researchers explain.

This interpretation, they write, is consistent with media reports that employees worked longer hours from home during the pandemic but with the added flexibility to interrupt the working day. Yet, according to the survey, this does not have a negative overall effect on productivity, contradicting one outdated stereotype of a remote worker eating bonbons, watching TV, and getting no work done.

Remote-work technology goes mainstream

The widespread implementation of remote-working technology, a defining feature of the pandemic, is another important factor for productivity. This technology will boost work-from-home productivity by 46 percent by the end of the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic situation, according to a model developed by Rutgers’s Morris A. Davis , University of North Carolina’s Andra C. Ghent , and University of Wisconsin’s Jesse M. Gregory . “While many home-office technologies have been around for a while, the technologies become much more useful after widespread adoption,” the researchers note.

There are significant costs to leaving the office, Rutgers’s Davis says, pointing to the loss of face-to-face interaction, among other things. “Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always,” he said on a June episode of the Freakonomics podcast.

One reason, he says , has to do with the function of cities as business centers. “Cities exist because, we think, the crowding of employment makes everyone more productive,” he explains. “This idea also applies to firms: a firm puts all workers on the same floor of a building, or all in the same suite rather than spread throughout a building, for reasons of efficiency. It is easier to communicate and share ideas with office mates, which leads to more productive outcomes.” While some employees are more productive at home, that’s not the case overall, according to the model, which after calibration “implies that the average high-skill worker is less productive at home than at the office, even postpandemic,” he says.

How remote work could change city centers

What will happen to urban business districts and the cities in which they are located in the age of increasing remote work?

About three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to need less office space in the future, according to a May 2021 poll. In Manhattan, the overall office vacancy rate was at a multidecade high of 16 percent in the first quarter of 2021, according to real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.

And yet Davis, Ghent, and Gregory’s model projects that after the pandemic winds down, highly skilled, college-educated workers will spend 30 percent of their time working from home, as opposed to 10 percent in prior times. While physical proximity may be superior, working from home is far more productive than it used to be. Had the pandemic hit in 1990, it would not have produced this rise in relative productivity, per the researchers’ model, because the technology available at the time was not sufficient to support remote work.

A June article in the MIT Technology Review by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT postdoctoral scholar Georgios Petropoulos corroborates this view. Citing the 5.4 percent increase in US labor productivity in the first quarter of 2021, as reported by the BLS, the researchers attribute at least some of this to the rise of work-from-home technologies. The pandemic, they write, has “compressed a decade’s worth of digital innovation in areas like remote work into less than a year.” The biggest productivity impact of the pandemic will be realized in the longer run, as the work-from-home trend continues, they argue.

Lost ideas, longer hours?

Not all the research supports the idea that remote work increases productivity and decreases the number of hours workers spend on the job. Chicago Booth’s Michael Gibbs  and University of Essex’s Friederike Mengel  and Christoph Siemroth  find contradictory evidence from a study of 10,000 high-skilled workers at a large Asian IT-services company.

The researchers used personnel and analytics data from before and during the coronavirus work-from-home period. The company provided a rich data set for these 10,000 employees, who moved to 100 percent work from home in March 2020 and began returning to the office in late October.

Total hours worked during that time increased by approximately 30 percent, including an 18 percent rise in working beyond normal business hours, the researchers find. At the same time, however, average output—as measured by the company through setting work goals and tracking progress toward them—declined slightly. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings also increased, while uninterrupted work hours shrank. Additionally, employees spent less time networking and had fewer one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, find the researchers, adding that the increase in hours worked and the decline in productivity were more significant for employees with children at home. Weighing output against hours worked, the researchers conclude that productivity decreased by about 20 percent. They estimate that, even after accounting for the loss of commuting time, employees worked about a third of an hour per day more than they did at the office. “Of course, that time was spent in productive work instead of sitting in traffic, which is beneficial,” they acknowledge.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules.

Overall, though, do workers with more flexibility work fewer hours (as Barrero, Bloom, and Davis find) or more (as at the Asian IT-services company)? It could take more data to answer this question. “I suspect that a high fraction of employees of all types, across the globe, value the flexibility, lack of a commute, and other aspects of work from home. This might bias survey respondents toward giving more positive answers to questions about their productivity,” says Gibbs.

The findings of his research do not entirely contradict those of Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, however. For one, Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth acknowledge that their study doesn’t necessarily reflect the remote-work model as it might look in postpandemic times, when employees are relieved of the weight of a massive global crisis. “While the average effect of working from home on productivity is negative in our study, this does not rule out that a ‘targeted working from home’ regime might be desirable,” they write.

Additionally, the research data are derived from a single company and may not be representative of the wider economy, although Gibbs notes that the IT company is one that should be able to optimize remote work. Most employees worked on company laptops, “and IT-related industries and occupations are usually at the top of lists of those areas most likely to be able to do WFH effectively.” Thus, he says, the findings may represent a cautionary note that remote work has costs and complexities worth addressing.

As he, Mengel, and Siemroth write, some predictions of work-from-home success may be overly optimistic, “perhaps because professionals engage in many tasks that require collaboration, communication, and innovation, which are more difficult to achieve with virtual, scheduled interactions.”

Attracting top talent

The focus on IT employees’ productivity, however, excludes issues such as worker morale and retention, Booth’s Davis notes. More generally, “the producer has to attract workers . . . and if workers really want to commute less, and they can save time on their end, and employers can figure out some way to accommodate that, they’re going to have more success with workers at a given wage cost.”

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price. The data from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis reveal that some workers are willing to take a sizable pay cut in exchange for the opportunity to work remotely two or three days a week. This may give threats from CEOs such as Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman—who said at the company’s US Financials, Payments & CRE conference in June, “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York”—a bit less bite. Meanwhile, Duke PhD student John W. Barry , Cornell’s Murillo Campello , Duke’s John R. Graham , and Chicago Booth’s Yueran Ma  find that companies offering flexibility are the ones most poised to grow.

Working policies may be shaped by employees’ preferences. Some workers still prefer working from the office; others prefer to stay working remotely; many would opt for a hybrid model, with some days in the office and some at home (as Amazon and other companies have introduced). As countries emerge from the pandemic and employers recalibrate, companies could bring back some employees and allow others to work from home. This should ultimately boost productivity, Booth’s Davis says.

Or they could allow some to work from far-flung locales. Harvard’s Prithwiraj Choudhury  has long focused his research on working not just from home but “from anywhere.” This goes beyond the idea of employees working from their living room in the same city in which their company is located—instead, if they want to live across the country, or even in another country, they can do so without any concern about being near headquarters.

Does remote work promote equity?

At many companies, the future will involve remote work and more flexibility than before. That could be good for reducing the earnings gap between men and women—but only to a point.

“In my mind, there’s no question that it has to be a plus, on net,” says Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. Before the pandemic, many women deemphasized their careers when they started families, she says.

Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi  and Northeastern University’s Barbara Larson  analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was a 4.4 percent increase in work output when the examiners transitioned from a work-from-home regime to the work-from-anywhere regime.

“Work from anywhere offers workers geographic flexibility and can help workers relocate to their preferred locations,” Choudhury says. “Workers could gain additional utility by relocating to a cheaper location, moving closer to family, or mitigating frictions around immigration or dual careers.”

He notes as well the potential advantages for companies that allow workers to be located anywhere across the globe. “In addition to benefits to workers and organizations, WFA might also help reverse talent flows from smaller towns to larger cities and from emerging markets,” he says. “This might lead to a more equitable distribution of talent across geographies.”

More data to come

It is still early to draw strong conclusions about the impact of remote work on productivity. People who were sent home to work because of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been more motivated than before to prove they were essential, says Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, a social psychologist. Additionally, there were fewer distractions from the outside because of the broad shutdowns. “The world helped them stay motivated,” she says, adding that looking at such an atypical year may not tell us as much about the future as performing the same experiment in a typical year would.

Before the pandemic, workers who already knew they performed better in a remote-working lifestyle self-selected into it, if allowed. During the pandemic, shutdowns forced remote work on millions. An experiment that allowed for random selection would likely be more telling. “The work-from-home experience seems to be more positive than what people believed, but we still don’t have great data,” Fishbach says.

Adding to the less optimistic view of a work-from-home future, Booth’s Austan D. Goolsbee says that some long-term trends may challenge remote work. Since the 1980s, as the largest companies have gained market power, corporate profits have risen dramatically while the share of profits going to workers has dropped to record lows. “This divergence between productivity and pay may very well come to pass regarding time,” he told graduating Booth students at their convocation ceremony. Companies may try to claw back time from those who are remote, he says, by expecting employees to work for longer hours or during their off hours.

And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. To this, Bloom offers a potential solution: instead of letting employees pick their own remote workdays, employers should ensure all workers take remote days together and come into the office on the same days. This, he says, could help alleviate the challenges of managing a hybrid team and level the playing field, whereas a looser model could potentially hurt employees who might be more likely to choose working from home (such as mothers with young children) while elevating those who might find it easier to come into the office every day (such as single men).

Gibbs concurs, noting that companies using a hybrid model will have to find ways to make sure employees who should interact will be on campus simultaneously. “Managers may specify that the entire team meets in person every Monday morning, for example,” he says. “R&D groups may need to make sure that researchers are on campus at the same time, to spur unplanned interactions that sometimes lead to new ideas and innovations.”

Sentiments vary by location, industry, and culture. Japanese workers are reportedly still mostly opting to go to the office, even as the government promotes remote work. Among European executives, a whopping 88 percent reportedly disagree with the idea that remote work is as or more productive than working at the office.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules. While only about 28 percent of US office workers were back onsite by June 2021, employees who had become used to more flexibility were demanding it remain. A May survey of 1,000 workers by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News finds that about half of millennial and Gen Z workers, and two-fifths of all workers, would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about work-from-home policies. And additional research from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis finds that four in 10 Americans who currently work from home at least one day a week would look for another job if their employers told them to come back to the office full time. Additionally, most employees would look favorably upon a new job that offered the same pay as their current job along with the option to work from home two to three days a week.

The shift to remote work affects a significant slice of the US workforce. A study by Chicago Booth’s Jonathan Dingel  and Brent Neiman  finds that while the majority of all jobs in the US require appearing in person, more than a third can potentially be performed entirely remotely. Of these jobs, the majority—including many in engineering, computing, law, and finance—pay more than those that cannot be done at home, such as food service, construction, and building-maintenance jobs.

Barrero, Bloom, and Davis project that, postpandemic, Americans overall will work approximately 20 percent of full workdays from home, four times the pre-pandemic level. This would make remote work less an aberration than a new norm. As the pandemic has demonstrated, many workers can be both productive and get dinner started between meetings.

Works Cited

• Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis,  “Why Working from Home Will Stick,”  Working paper, April 2021.
• ———,  “60 Million Fewer Commuting Hours per Day: How Americans Use Time Saved by Working from Home,” Working paper, September 2020.
• ———,  “Let Me Work From Home Or I Will Find Another Job,”  Working paper, July 2021.
• John W. Barry, Murillo Campello, John R. Graham, and Yueran Ma,  “Corporate Flexibility in a Time of Crisis,”  Working paper, February 2021.
• Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying,  “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,”   Quarterly Journal of Economics , October 2015.
• Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson,  “Work-from-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographic Flexibility,”   Strategic Management Journal , forthcoming.
• Morris A. Davis, Andra C. Ghent, and Jesse M. Gregory,  “The Work-at-Home Technology Boon and Its Consequences,”  Working paper, April 2021. 
• Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman,  “How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?”  White paper, June 2020.
• Allison Dunatchik, Kathleen Gerson, Jennifer Glass, Jerry A. Jacobs, and Haley Stritzel,  “Gender, Parenting, and the Rise of Remote Work during the Pandemic: Implications for Domestic Inequality in the United States,”   Gender & Society , March 2021.
• Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth,  “Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals,”  Working paper, May 2021.
• Robert E. Kraut, Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan, and Jane Siegel, “Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work,” in  Distributed Work , eds. Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
• Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Victoria Vernon,  “Telework and Time Use in the United States,”  Working paper, May 2020.

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• How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has – and Hasn’t – Changed the Way Americans Work

About half of new teleworkers say they have more flexibility now; majority who are working in person worry about virus exposure

Table of contents.

• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand how the work experiences of employed adults have changed amid the coronavirus outbreak. This analysis is based on 5,858 U.S. adults who are working part time or full time and who have only one job or have more than one job but consider one of them to be their primary job. The data was collected as a part of a larger survey conducted Oct. 13-19, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, 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 .

See here to read more about the questions used for this report and the report’s methodology .

References to workers or employed adults include those who are employed part time or full time and who have only one job or have more than one job but consider one of them to be their primary job.

References to White, Black and Asian adults include only those who are not Hispanic and identify as only one race. Hispanics are of any race.

References to college graduates or people with a college degree comprise those with a bachelor’s degree or more. “Some college” includes those with an associate degree and those who attended college but did not obtain a degree.

“Middle income” is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for panelists on the American Trends Panel. “Lower income” falls below that range; “upper income” falls above it. See the methodology for more details.

The abrupt closure of many offices and workplaces this past spring ushered in a new era of remote work for millions of employed Americans and may portend a significant shift in the way a large segment of the workforce operates in the future. Most workers who say their job responsibilities can mainly be done from home say that, before the pandemic, they rarely or never teleworked. Only one-in-five say they worked from home all or most of the time. Now, 71% of those workers are doing their job from home all or most of the time. And more than half say, given a choice, they would want to keep working from home even after the pandemic, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

While not seamless, the transition to telework has been relatively easy for many employed adults. 1 Among those who are currently working from home all or most of the time, about three-quarters or more say it has been easy to have the technology and equipment they need to do their job and to have an adequate workspace. Most also say it’s been easy for them to meet deadlines and complete projects on time, get their work done without interruptions, and feel motivated to do their work.

To be sure, not all employed adults have the option of working from home, even during a pandemic. In fact, a majority of workers say their job responsibilities cannot be done from home. There’s a clear class divide between workers who can and cannot telework . Fully 62% of workers with a bachelor’s degree or more education say their work can be done from home. This compares with only 23% of those without a four-year college degree. Similarly, while a majority of upper-income workers can do their work from home, most lower- and middle-income workers cannot. 2

Among those who are not currently teleworking all of the time, roughly eight-in-ten say they have at least some in-person interaction with other people at their workplace, with 52% saying they interact with others a lot . At least half of these workers say they’re concerned about being exposed to the coronavirus from the people they interact with at work or unknowingly exposing others. Even so, these workers are largely satisfied with the steps that have been taken at their workplace to protect them from exposure to the virus.

While the coronavirus has changed the way many workers do their job – whether in person or from home – it hasn’t significantly reshaped the culture of work for a majority of employed adults.

Among workers who are in the same job as they were before the coronavirus outbreak started, more than six-in-ten say they are as satisfied with their job now as they were before the pandemic and that there’s been no change in their productivity or job security. Even higher shares say they are just as likely now to know what their supervisor expects of them as they were before and that they have the same opportunities for advancement.

For workers who are working from home all or most of the time now but rarely or never did before the pandemic (and are in the same job they had pre-pandemic), there have been some clear upsides associated with the shift to telework. About half (49%) say they now have more flexibility to choose when they put in their hours. This is substantially higher than the share for teleworkers who were working from home all or most of the time before the pandemic, only 14% of whom say they have more flexibility now. In addition, 38% of new teleworkers say it’s easier now to balance work with family responsibilities (vs. 10% of teleworkers who worked from home before the coronavirus outbreak). On the downside, 65% of workers who are now teleworking all or most of the time but rarely or never did before the pandemic say they feel less connected to their coworkers now. Among more seasoned teleworkers, only 27% feel this way.

The nationally representative survey of 10,332 U.S. adults (including 5,858 employed adults who have only one job or have multiple jobs but consider one to be their primary) was conducted Oct. 13-19, 2020, using the Center’s American Trends Panel . 3 Among the other key findings:

A majority (64%) of those who are currently working from home all or most of the time say their workplace is currently closed or unavailable to them; 36% say they are choosing not to go to their workplace. 4 When asked how they would feel about returning to their workplace if it were to reopen in the month following the survey, 64% say they would feel uncomfortable returning, with 31% saying they would feel very uncomfortable. For those who are choosing to work from home even though their workplace is available to them, majorities cite a preference for working from home (60%) and concern over being exposed to the coronavirus (57%) as major reasons for this.

Younger teleworkers are more likely to say they’ve had a hard time feeling motivated to do their work since the coronavirus outbreak started. Most adults who are teleworking all or most of the time say it has been at least somewhat easy for them to feel motivated to do their work since the pandemic started. But there’s a distinct age gap: 42% of workers ages 18 to 49 say this has been difficult for them compared with only 20% of workers 50 and older. The youngest workers are among the most likely to say a lack of motivation has been an impediment for them: 53% of those ages 18 to 29 say it’s been difficult for them to feel motivated to do their work.

Parents who are teleworking are having a harder time getting their work done without interruptions. Half of parents with children younger than 18 who are working at home all or most of the time say it’s been difficult for them to be able to get their work done without interruptions since the coronavirus outbreak started. In contrast, only 20% of teleworkers who don’t have children under 18 say the same. Mothers and fathers are about equally likely to say this has been difficult for them.

Teleworkers are relying heavily on video conferencing services to keep in touch with co-workers, and there’s no evidence of widespread “Zoom fatigue.” Some 81% of employed adults who are working from home all or most of the time say they use video calling or online conferencing services like Zoom or Webex at least some of the time (59% use these often). And 57% use instant messaging platforms such as Slack or Google Chat (43% use these often). Among those who use video conferencing services often, 63% say they are fine with the amount of time they spend on video calls; 37% say they are worn out by it. In general, teleworkers view video conferencing and instant messaging platforms as a good substitute for in-person contact – 65% feel this way, while 35% say they are not a good substitute.

Among employed adults who are not working from home all of the time and are interacting in-person at least some with others at their workplace, concerns about coronavirus differ by gender, race and ethnicity. Women (60%) are more likely than men (48%) to be at least somewhat concerned about being exposed to the virus. And Black (70%) and Hispanic (67%) workers are more likely to be concerned than White workers (48%). In addition, Black and Hispanic workers are less likely than White workers to be very satisfied with the measures that their workplace has taken to protect them from being exposed to the coronavirus.

Employed adults with higher educational attainment and incomes are most likely to say their work can be done from home

About four-in-ten U.S. adults who are employed full time or part time (38%) say that, for the most part, the responsibilities of their job can be done from home; 62% say their job cannot be done from home. Workers with higher levels of income and educational attainment are the most likely to say the responsibilities of their job can be done from home.

About seven-in-ten employed adults with a postgraduate degree (68%) and 58% of those with a bachelor’s degree say the responsibilities of their job can mostly be done from home. In contrast, 83% of those with a high school diploma or less education and 71% of those with some college say that, for the most part, their job cannot be done from home. And while a majority of upper-income workers (56%) say they can mostly do their job from home, 63% of those with middle incomes and an even larger share of those with lower incomes (76%) say they cannot.

Asian adults are more likely than those from other racial or ethnic groups to say the responsibilities of their job can mostly be done from home: 57% of Asian American workers say this, compared with 39% of White workers, 37% of Black workers and 29% of Hispanic workers. Women (41%) are more likely than men (36%) to say they can do their job from home, but majorities of both say this is not the case.

Workers’ ability to do their job from home varies considerably by industry. 5  For example, majorities in the information and technology sector (84%); banking, finance, accounting, real estate or insurance (84%); education (59%); and professional, scientific and technical services (59%) say their job can mostly be done from home. Among those in government, public administration or the military, 46% say their job can be done from home and 54% say it cannot.

In turn, about three-quarters or more of those employed in retail, trade, or transportation (84%); manufacturing, mining, construction, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (78%); and hospitality, service, arts, entertainment and recreation (77%) say that, for the most part, the responsibilities of their job can’t be done from home. Two-thirds of those in the health care and social assistance sector say the same.

About seven-in-ten workers who say their jobs can mostly be done from home say they are teleworking all or most of the time

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, a majority of employed adults who say that the responsibilities of their job can be mostly done from home (55%) say they are currently working from home all of the time. Another 16% say they are doing so most of the time, while 12% say they are teleworking some of the time and 17% are rarely or never working from home.

This marks a significant shift for most of these workers, a majority of whom (62%) say that they rarely or never worked from home before the start of the coronavirus outbreak. Just one-in-five say they worked from home all (12%) or most (7%) of the time before the coronavirus outbreak, while 18% worked from home some of the time.

Across demographic groups, most who say their job can be done from home say they are currently teleworking all or most of the time.

Still, those with higher levels of educational attainment and upper incomes are the most likely to say they are working from home all of the time. About six-in-ten workers with a bachelor’s degree or more education who say they are able to do their job from home (58%) say they are working from home all of the time, compared with 51% of those with less education. And while most of those with upper incomes (65%) say they are currently working from home all of the time, 52% of those with middle incomes and 46% of those with lower incomes say the same.

Most employed adults who have a workplace and who are teleworking all or most of the time say their workplace isn’t available to them

Some 18% of employed adults who are currently teleworking all or most of the time say they don’t have a workplace outside of their home (half of this group is self-employed). Among those who do have a workplace, 64% say they are working from home because their workplace is currently closed or unavailable to them, while 36% say they choose not to work from their workplace.

Asked how they would feel about working at their workplace if it were to reopen in the month following the survey, 64% of those whose workplace is currently closed or unavailable to them say they would feel uncomfortable, with 31% saying they would feel very uncomfortable. Some 36% say they would feel at least somewhat comfortable working at their workplace if it were to reopen in the month following the survey. There are no significant differences across demographic groups.

Among teleworkers who are choosing not to work from their workplace, majorities say a preference for working from home (60%) and concerns about being exposed to the coronavirus (57%) are major reasons why they are currently working from home all or most of the time. Smaller shares cite restrictions on when they can have access to their workplace (14%) or relocation (either permanent or temporary) to an area away from where they work (9%) as major reasons why they are currently working from home.

About two-thirds of parents with children younger than 18 who are working from home all or most of the time and whose workplace is open (65%) point to child care responsibilities as a reason why they’re working from home; 45% say this is a major reason.

The shift to remote work has been easy for many workers; younger workers and parents more likely to have faced challenges

Overall, a majority (56%) of adults who are working from home all or most of the time say, since the coronavirus outbreak started, it has been very easy for them to have the technology and equipment they need to do their job. An additional 30% say this has been somewhat easy for them.

Those who worked from home before the coronavirus outbreak may have an advantage in this regard. About two-thirds (64%) of workers who worked from home at least some of the time before the pandemic and are doing so all or most of the time now say it’s been very easy for them to have the technology and equipment they need to do their job. This compares with 50% of current teleworkers who rarely or never worked from home prior to the outbreak.

Having an adequate workspace at home has also been easy for most teleworkers – 47% of those who are now working from home all or most of the time say this has been very easy, and 31% say it’s been somewhat easy. Here again, those who worked from home prior to the pandemic may have an edge over those who are newer to teleworking. While roughly half (51%) of those who worked from home at least some of the time before the coronavirus outbreak say it’s been very easy for them to have an adequate workspace, a smaller share (42%) of those who didn’t work from home prior to the outbreak say the same.

When it comes to their ability to meet deadlines and complete projects on time, most teleworkers say this has been easy for them, with 43% saying this has been very easy and 37% saying it’s been somewhat easy.

Those working from home are finding it somewhat less easy to get their work done without interruptions and to feel motivated to do their work. While a majority say it has been very or somewhat easy for them to be able to get their work done without interruptions, roughly a third say this has been somewhat (24%) or very (8%) difficult.

Similarly, while more than six-in-ten teleworkers say it has been very or somewhat easy for them to feel motivated to do their work, more than three-in-ten say this has been difficult for them (29% somewhat difficult, 7% very difficult).

Barriers to productivity vary by age, parental status

There is a significant age gap in the extent to which workers are facing challenges in their virtual work lives. Among those working from home all or most of the time, those younger than 50 are significantly more likely than older workers to say it’s been difficult for them to be able to get their work done without interruptions (38% for workers ages 18 to 49 vs. 18% for workers 50 and older) and feel motivated to do their work (42% vs. 20%). The youngest workers are among those most likely to say a lack of motivation has been an impediment for them: 53% of those ages 18 to 29 say it’s been difficult for them to feel motivated since the pandemic began.

The age gap is less pronounced but still significant when it comes to having an adequate workspace and meeting deadlines and completing projects on time. In each case, workers younger than 50 are more likely than their older counterparts to say this has been difficult for them. These age gaps persist after controlling for parental status. Even among adults who do not have children, those younger than 50 are facing more difficulty in some aspects of their work.

With widespread school and daycare closures, many working parents have their children at home as they’ve transitioned to remote work. Half of teleworking parents with children younger than 18 say, since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, it’s been difficult for them to be able to get their work done without interruptions. 6  A far smaller share of those who do not have minor children (20%) say the same. This difference persists across genders, with both mothers and fathers more likely than their counterparts without children to say this has been difficult for them. Mothers and fathers are about equally likely to say this has been difficult for them.

Among teleworkers, parents are somewhat more likely than adults without minor children to say it’s been difficult for them to have an adequate workspace – 28% vs. 19%. In addition, parents are more likely than non-parents to say it’s been difficult for them to meet deadlines and complete projects on time while working at home. Similarly, parents are somewhat more likely than non-parents to say it’s been difficult for them to have the technology and equipment they need to do their job.

Teleworkers are taking advantage of online tools and platforms to keep in touch with co-workers, and most see them as a good substitute

For many who are working from home, online communication tools have become a vital part of the workday. Roughly eight-in-ten adults who are working from home all or most of the time (81%) say they use video calling or online conferencing services like Zoom or WebEx to keep in touch with co-workers, with 59% saying they often use these types of services. Some 57% say they use instant messaging platforms such as Slack or Google Chat at least sometimes (43% use these often).

While large majorities of workers across age groups say they use video calling or online conferencing at least some of the time, workers ages 65 and older are the least likely to say they do this often.

There’s a significant socioeconomic divide in the use of these types of services. Among four-year college graduates who are working from home all or most of the time, 64% say they often use video calling or online conferencing. In contrast, 48% of teleworkers without a four-year college degree say they do this often. Similarly, 69% of upper-income workers often use these types of services, compared with 56% of middle-income workers and 41% of lower-income workers.

Workers who play a supervisory role in their organization (70%) are more likely than those who don’t (55%) to say they often use video calling or online conferencing. Across industries, those working in education and information technology are among the most likely to say they often use video conferencing.

When it comes to instant messaging platforms such as Slack or Google Chat, usage patterns are somewhat different. Again, age matters: 49% of teleworkers younger than 50 say they use these types of platforms often compared with 30% of those 50 and older. But there is no gap along educational lines, and the income gap is more modest. Workers who are employed in the information technology industry are more likely than those in most other industries to rely on these platforms.

Among all who are working from home, those who do so all of the time (47%) are much more likely than those who work from home most of the time (28%) to say they use these platforms often.

Most see online tools as a good substitute for in-person contact

Most teleworkers (65%) who at least sometimes use remote technologies such as video conferencing or instant messaging say these online tools are a good substitute for in-person contact, while 35% say they are not a good substitute. Views on this differ by gender, with women (70%) more likely than men (60%) to view these tools as a good substitute. There is also a difference by education: 70% of teleworkers without a bachelor’s degree see these online tools as a good substitute for in-person contact, compared with 62% of those with a four-year college degree.

While these technologies have helped companies and organizations operate effectively during the pandemic, there has been widespread concern that video calls in particular are taking a toll on workers . Among teleworkers who say they use video calling or online conferencing services often, most (63%) say they are fine with the amount of time they spend on these platforms; 37% say they are worn out by it.

Younger teleworkers (ages 18 to 49) who use these platforms often are more likely than their older counterparts to say they feel worn out by the amount of time they spend on video calls (40% vs. 31%). Feeling worn out is also more prevalent among those with a bachelor’s degree or higher (41%) than among those with less education (27%). In addition, supervisors who use these platforms often are more likely than those who don’t supervise others (but also use video platforms often) to say they feel worn out by the amount of time they spend on these types of calls (47% vs. 33%).

Looking ahead, a majority of those who say their job can be done from home say they’d like to telework all or most of the time post-pandemic

More than half of employed adults who say that their job responsibilities can mostly be done from home (54%) say that, if they had a choice, they’d want to work from home all or most of the time when the coronavirus outbreak is over. A third say they’d want to work from home some of the time, while just 11% say they’d want to do this rarely or never. Some 46% of those who rarely or never teleworked before the coronavirus outbreak say they’d want to work from home all or most of the time when the pandemic is over.

Men and women who can do their work from home are about equally likely to say they’d want to work from home all or most of the time after the pandemic, but women are more likely than men to say they’d want to work from home all of the time (31% vs. 23%). This is the case whether they have minor children or not. In fact, the shares of workers with and without children younger than 18 who say they would want to work from home all of the time when the outbreak is over are nearly identical.

Similar shares across age, income and racial and ethnic groups say they’d want to work from home all or most of the time after the coronavirus outbreak is over if they had a choice. Among employed adults with some college or less education who say they can do their job from home, 60% say they would want to work from home all or most of the time post-pandemic, compared with half of those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

For those workers who are spending time at their workplace and interacting with others, at least half are concerned about being exposed to – or spreading – the coronavirus

Most employed adults don’t have the option of working from home, and some of those who do are still spending some time in the office or at their workplace. For many of these workers, the pandemic has brought a new concern about their health. Among those who are not working exclusively from home and who have at least some in-person interactions with other people at their workplace, a majority say they are at least somewhat concerned about being exposed to the coronavirus at work (21% say they are very concerned). About half are concerned that they might unknowingly spread the virus to the people they interact with at work (19% are very concerned).

Women (60%) are more likely than men (48%), and workers younger than 50 (56%) are more likely than older workers (50%), to be at least somewhat concerned about being exposed to the virus. And Black (70%) and Hispanic (67%) workers are more concerned about this than White workers (48%). These patterns are similar when it comes to potentially passing the virus along to others at work. In addition, lower-income workers (61%) express a higher level of concern than those with upper incomes (48%) about being exposed to the virus (similar shares across income groups are concerned about spreading the virus to others).

Most workers are satisfied with the steps that have been taken in their workplace to keep them safe from COVID-19

Among those who either cannot do their work from home or can but are not working from home all of the time, about eight-in-ten say they are very (39%) or somewhat (42%) satisfied with the measures that have been put in place to protect them from being exposed to the coronavirus. About one-in-five say they are not too (13%) or not at all (6%) satisfied.

White workers who are spending some time at their workplace are more satisfied than Black or Hispanic workers with the steps that have been taken to ensure their safety: 45% of White workers, compared with 31% of Black and 29% of Hispanic workers, say they are very satisfied. Workers ages 50 and older are also more likely than their younger counterparts to be very satisfied (50% vs. 34%). There is an income gap as well: Lower-income workers (33%) are significantly less likely than middle-income (39%) and upper-income (49%) workers to say they are very satisfied with the measures put in place where they work.

About a quarter of workers say they are less satisfied with their job than they were before the coronavirus outbreak

While the coronavirus outbreak has changed how Americans work in some ways, from increased telework to health concerns among those who can’t or choose not to work from home, majorities of workers say they have seen little change in various aspects of their work lives compared with before the outbreak. For example, about three-quarters of those who are in the same job as before the outbreak started say they have about the same opportunities for advancement (76%) and that there has been no change in how easy or hard it is to know what their supervisor expects of them (77%). About seven-in-ten say they have about as much job security (70%) and flexibility to choose when they put in their hours (68%) as they did pre-pandemic. 7  Still, some workers have noted a change in the way things are going for them at work.

Overall, about a quarter (23%) of workers who are in the same job say they are less satisfied with their job compared with before the coronavirus outbreak, while 13% say they are now more satisfied. When asked about specific aspects of their job, a third say they feel less connected to their co-workers, 26% say it’s harder for them to balance their work and family responsibilities, about one-in-five say they have less job security and fewer opportunities for advancement (19% each), and 16% say it’s harder to know what their supervisor expects of them. On each of these, smaller shares note an improvement in the way things are going compared with before the coronavirus outbreak. In turn, a higher share say they now have more flexibility to choose when they put in their hours (19%) than say they have less flexibility (13%).

Assessments of how some elements of work life have changed compared with before the coronavirus outbreak vary by work arrangements. Among employed adults who have not changed jobs since the pandemic began, four-in-ten of those who are working from home all or most of the time say they have more flexibility to choose when they put in their work hours than they did before the coronavirus outbreak. That compares with 21% of those who can do their job from home but are doing so only some of the time, rarely, or never, and an even smaller share (9%) of those whose work can’t be done from home who say they have more flexibility. Workers who are working from home all or most of the time are also more likely than other workers to say that it’s now easier for them to balance work and family responsibilities and that they are more satisfied with their job than before the coronavirus outbreak.

At the same time, workers who haven’t changed jobs and are working from home all or most of the time (57%) are more likely to say they feel less connected to their coworkers than those who can do their job from home but are doing so less often or not at all (40%) and those whose job can’t be done from home (21%). They are also more likely to say they have fewer opportunities for advancement than they did before: 23% of those who are working from home all or most of the time say this, compared with 18% of those who can do their job from home but are not doing so all or most of the time and 17% of those who can’t do their job from home.

When it comes to the number of hours workers are putting in, a third of those who are working from home all or most of the time say they are working more hours than they did before the coronavirus outbreak. Smaller shares of those who can do their job from home but aren’t doing so all or most of the time (23%), and those who can’t do their job from home (21%), say they’re working more hours. Workers whose job can’t be done from home are the most likely to say they are now working fewer hours (20% vs. 13% of those who can do their job from home but are doing so some of the time or less often and 14% of those who are working from home all or most of the time).

These assessments also vary to some extent across demographic groups, largely mirroring demographic divides in work arrangements. For example, those in upper-income families and those with a bachelor’s degree or more education – groups that are among the most likely to be working from home all or most of the time – are more likely than those with middle or lower incomes and those without a bachelor’s degree to say they have more flexibility to choose their hours and that they feel less connected to their co-workers.

Still, even when accounting for the fact that work arrangements vary widely across demographic groups, some differences remain. Among workers who are in the same job as before the pandemic and who are currently working from home all or most of the time, those with at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely than those with some college or less education to say they now have more flexibility to choose when they put in their hours (46% vs. 28%, respectively) and that they feel less connected to their co-workers (62% vs. 45%). And these differences also persist when looking at workers with and without a bachelor’s degree who say that, for the most part, the responsibilities of their job can’t be done from home.

Among working parents with children younger than 18 who are in the same job as before the coronavirus outbreak started, a third say it’s now harder for them to balance work and family responsibilities; 22% of those who do not have minor children say the same. Mothers (39%) are more likely than fathers (28%) to say it’s harder for them to balance work and family responsibilities compared with before the coronavirus outbreak.

• The analysis in this report is based on U.S. adults who are employed part time or full time and who say they have only one job or who have more than one job but consider one of them to be their primary job. These two groups constitute 97% of all workers. ↩
• Family incomes are based on 2019 earnings and adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and for household sizes. Middle income is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for all panelists on the American Trends Panel . Lower income falls below that range; upper income falls above it. ↩
• For more details, see the Methodology section of the report. ↩
• Employed adults who are working from home all or most of the time who do not have a workplace outside of their home (18% of all who are working from home) are excluded from this analysis. Half of these workers are self-employed. ↩
• For more details on industry definitions, see the Methodology section of the report. ↩
• “Parents” include those with a child younger than 18 who may or may not be living in their household. ↩
• More than eight-in-ten employed adults (86%) say they are in the same job as before the coronavirus outbreak, while 10% have changed jobs, and 4% say they were not employed before the coronavirus outbreak. ↩

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Working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Impact on office worker productivity and work experience

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• 2 USC Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• 3 Chan Division of Occupational Science andOccupational Therapy, University of Southern California, LosAngeles, CA, USA.
• PMID: 34420999
• DOI: 10.3233/WOR-210301

Background: With the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations embraced Work From Home (WFH). An important component of transitioning to WFH is the effect on workers, particularly related to their productivity and work experience.

Objectives: The objective of this study is to examine how worker-, workspace-, and work-related factors affected productivity and time spent at a workstation on a typical WFH day during the pandemic.

Methods: An online questionnaire was designed and administered to collect the necessary information. Data from 988 respondents were included in the analyses.

Results: Overall perception of productivity level among workers did not change relative to their in-office productivity before the pandemic. Female, older, and high-income workers were likely to report increased productivity. Productivity was positively influenced by better mental and physical health statuses, having a teenager, increased communication with coworkers and having a dedicated room for work. Number of hours spent at a workstation increased by approximately 1.5 hours during a typical WFH day. Longer hours were reported by individuals who had school age children, owned an office desk or an adjustable chair, and had adjusted their work hours.

Conclusion: The findings highlight key factors for employers and employees to consider for improving the WFH experience.

Keywords: Remote work; office work; socioeconomic impact; work hours; workspace; workstation.

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June 23, 2020

75% of US workers can’t work exclusively from home, face greater risks during pandemic

Jobs in which computer work is not important but interacting with the public is were 18.9% of the workforce, or 27.4 million workers, with a median income of $32,000. Pixabay

About three-quarters of U.S. workers, or 108 million people, are in jobs that cannot be done from home during a pandemic, putting these workers at increased risk of exposure to disease. This majority of workers are also at higher risk for other job disruptions such as layoffs, furloughs or hours reductions, a University of Washington study shows.

Such job disruptions can cause stress, anxiety and other mental health outcomes that could persist even as the United States reopens its economic and social life, said author Marissa Baker , an assistant professor in the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences.

These workers also represent some of the lowest paid workers in the U.S. workforce, Baker emphasized.

The remaining 25% of U.S. workers, or 35.6 million people, are in jobs that can be done at home. These jobs are typically in highly-paid occupational sectors such as finance, administration, computer, engineering and technology. Even as the economy begins to reopen, these workers will continue to be better shielded from exposure to the virus, reduced hours, furloughs or joblessness and have an increased ability to care for a child at home — further growing the disparity between the top quarter of the workforce and the rest, the study found.

“This pandemic has really exacerbated existing vulnerabilities in American society, with workers most affected by the pandemic and stay-at-home orders being significantly lower paid and now also at increased risk for mental health outcomes associated with job insecurity and displacement, in addition to increased risk of exposure to COVID-19 if they keep going to work,” said Baker.

“The most privileged workers will have a job that can be done at home, reducing their risk of exposure, and enabling them to continue to work even as office buildings were closed. Unfortunately, only a quarter of the U.S. workforce falls into this category. The fact that these are some of the highest paid workers in the U.S. is no surprise,” Baker added.

In the study, published June 18 in the American Journal of Public Health, Baker examined 2018 Bureau of Labor Statistics data characterizing the importance of interacting with the public and the importance of  using a computer at work to understand which workers could work from home during a pandemic event, and which workers would experience work disruptions due to COVID-19.

Using these two characteristics of work and how important they are in different types of jobs, Baker’s analysis determined four main groups of occupations:

• Work that relies on the use of computers but not as much on interaction with the public — jobs in business and finance, software development, architecture, engineering and the sciences, for instance — made up 25% of the workforce or 35.6 million workers. These workers had a median income of nearly $63,000.
• Work that relies on both interaction with the public and computer use — such as positions in management, healthcare, policing and education, most classified as essential during the pandemic — comprised 36.4% of the workforce or 52.7 million workers. These workers had a median income of roughly $57,000.
• Jobs in which interaction with the public and computer use are not important — construction, maintenance, production, farming or forestry — are 20.1% of the workforce or 29 million workers who make a median wage of $40,000.
• Lastly, jobs in which computer work is not important but interacting with the public is — retail, food and beauty services, protective services and delivery of goods — were 18.9% of the workforce, or 27.4 million workers, with a median income of $32,000.

“The workers for whom computer use is not important at work but interactions with the public is are some of the lowest paid workers,” Baker said. “And during this pandemic, they face compounding risks of exposure to COVID-19, job loss and adverse mental health outcomes associated with job loss.”

As the economy reopens, some workers who have been unable to work at home but did continue to go to work during the pandemic — such as some healthcare workers, security guards or bus drivers — may now face layoffs as organizations adjust to reduced demand and economic pressures force layoffs, Baker explains. On the upside, workers in construction, manufacturing, production or freight transport who may have been laid off or furloughed during the pandemic will likely be some of the first industries to rebound and hire workers back.

However, the 18.9% of workers in occupations such as retail or food services, many of whom were laid off during the pandemic, may not have a job to go back to, further extending their job displacement and increasing adverse health effects associated with job loss. Those who are able to go back to work face a higher risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus still active in populations across the country.

Given the relationship between job insecurity or job displacement and mental health outcomes including stress, depression or anxiety, there could be a large burden of mental health outcomes among these workers.

“These results underscore the important role that work plays in public health. Workplace policies and practices enacted during a pandemic event or other public health emergency should aim to establish and maintain secure employment and living wages for all workers and consider both physical and mental health outcomes, even after the emergency subsides,” Baker said.

Baker’s research was supported by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health under Federal Training Grant T42OH008433.

For more information, contact Baker at [email protected] or  (206) 616-4709.

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How to combat loneliness and stay connected when working from home

Millions of Americans are still working remotely post-pandemic, and while there are obvious advantages it can also be very isolating.

The COVID-19 pandemic shook up the traditional workplace.

A recent Upwork study found that in the next year, more than 36 million Americans will be working from home, an 87% increase from pre-pandemic levels.

Loneliness and social isolation: What to know and how to help promote social connection

"All of my jobs post-grad have been fully remote," 26-year-old Shea Corwin said.

It's all 27-year-old Erica Smith has ever known.

"That's where I started my career as well, just doing remote work," Smith said.

Corwin and Smith are colleagues at a text message marketing company. To foster teamwork, they often participate in what you might call a "virtual cubicle."

"We would have these working Zooms with like eight of us in Zoom. You're working through problems, working through your work for the day, but also just updating each other on our lives and day to day," Smith explained.

It's how Corwin and Smith forged a friendship. They enjoy the freedom and work-life balance, but sometimes feel disconnected.

"It definitely can be a bit lonely and isolating," Corwin said.

Psychiatrist Dr. Evita Limon-Rocha with Kaiser Permanente Riverside says feelings of loneliness impact women more in the workplace.

"We spend a lot of time working, and we need to feel fulfilled and happy and that we're kind of doing something meaningful," Limon-Rocha said.

A recent survey finds 80% of women in white-collar jobs say they feel socially isolated.

Many cite being overwhelmed and unsupported.

"We know that there's been an impact," Limon-Rocha said. "We know that there's been an increase in depression and anxiety."

Studies show building "workplace community" should be a shared by both employers and employees. It can be even more impactful for those who work remotely.

"The fundamental things you need for people to work together is for them to bond and to get along. We just got back from a company kickoff event in Vegas, and so that was life-changing," Smith said.

Limon-Rocha says people can help create connections using tools you already have - keep the camera on during meetings, participate in chats and try being as interactive as possible.

"If I want relationships with people at work, I have to sometimes push for that myself," Corwin said. "I mean, it worked with Erica. We're really good friends now. We hang out all the time, and we'll go work at a coffee shop together, but we'll also hang out in real life, too."

Whether in person or virtually, experts say initiating relationships can be daunting, but Smith says it's worth it when it works out.

"Say yes to the hangout after work, " Smith said. "It's really helped me to have friendships that will one day be at my wedding."

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As workers return to the office, residents are moving back to Chicago and other cities, driving up home prices

Ta Juana Tang, 45, bought a home in Frankfort, a southwestern suburb of Chicago, during the COVID-19 pandemic when she started working remotely.

But when in-person work started to return, Tang’s commute became too much. In April, she sold her Frankfort townhome and purchased a four-bedroom home in West Town.

“When you work in construction, I’m in the office at 7:00 (or) 7:15 a.m.,” said Tang, who owns a consulting firm that provides services to the real estate development industry. “It was a mental health move.”

Tang is not the only Illinoisian who was motivated to move back to the city from the suburbs as her remote work started to fade. Although fewer homes changed hands in Illinois during the first six months of this year compared with last year, many residents who found new houses they could afford moved. Median home sales prices in Illinois also reached record highs in June.

Selma Hepp, chief economist at the real estate data firm CoreLogic, said that while other real estate markets are seeing home price growth level off, Chicago and some other cities that were not popular locations to move to during the pandemic are catching up on home price appreciation now that people like Tang are returning to the office and, in turn, moving back to cities.

“Chicago is not one of those markets where we saw a lot of inventory so as a result of that, home prices continued to feel pressure because there were more buyers out there than sellers,” Hepp said.

Hepp said that this lack of inventory and affordability are still a challenge in the national real estate market, but particularly in Chicago and the rest of the Midwest. And people with limited incomes and a lack of intergenerational wealth to lean on are still getting shut out of the market, Hepp said.

In June, the median sales price of a home in the city limits was $379,925, up from $362,000 in May, according to data from Illinois Realtors, a trade association for real estate agents. The median sales price in June was $375,000 for the Chicago metro area, up from $360,000 in May, and $315,050 statewide, a record high for the state since Illinois Realtors began tracking the data in 2008. In May, the median sales price statewide was $300,000.

The national median existing-home sales price — which excludes new construction homes — reached a record high for the second month in a row of $426,900, the 12th straight month of year-over-year price increases, according to data from the National Association of Realtors.

Take a look at the map below to compare home values across the state. Search by ZIP code or hover over the map to see the average home value in that area.

In Chicago and statewide, the spring market, typically the hottest time of the year for real estate transactions, did see some of the usual month-over-month upward trends in home sales and inventory, according to Illinois Realtors.

Yet, the number of homes sold in Chicago was down 15% in June compared with the same time last year, and the total number of sales between January and June was 4.8% lower than the same period a year earlier.

And compared with last year, the Chicago market saw significant declines in inventory, according to Illinois Realtors. For the month of June, Zillow found inventory levels to be 52% lower in the Chicago metro area than prior to the pandemic.

National existing-home sales declined 5.4% month-to-month and year-over-year in June, with national inventory levels increasing 23.4% from one year earlier, according to National Association of Realtors data.

Jaclyn and Austin Waters, both in their early 30s, said they were lucky to find their home. They experienced the fast-paced, grab-what-you-can Chicago real estate market when they purchased their first home in April, a four-bedroom property in Norwood Park, from the family members of an older adult couple that had died.

They said that they had been preparing to buy a home for six to 12 months and had three hours to put in an offer on the eighth home they saw in their first weekend participating in open houses. The home had been on the market for 24 hours and received at least three other offers, they said. The couple won out with a bid $30,000 over the asking price for a purchase price of $480,000.

“I was definitely surprised to be in a bidding war,” said Jaclyn Waters, who works as an engineering project manager for a video game company. “I think I thought with the interest rates where they were, there might not be as many buyers on the market.”

The couple landed a 6.49% mortgage rate, and their monthly payments, which include property taxes and insurance, are around $3,500, they said. The couple opted for what they think could be their “forever home,” instead of looking for a starter home given the uncertainty around the future market, Jaclyn Waters said.

In June 2023, typical monthly 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage payments in the Chicago metro area for homebuyers who purchased with a 5% down payment and a 7% mortgage rate show a monthly payment of $2,931, requiring an annual income of $117,240, according to Zillow data. If a homebuyer makes a 20% down payment with a 7% mortgage rate, the monthly mortgage payment goes down to $2,352, requiring an annual income of $94,080, according to Zillow.

The data is based on Zillow’s June assumed purchase price for the Chicago metro area, which was $326,426, a 6% increase from last June’s $307,880.

Freddie Mac data shows the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage average starting to rise again in April from March, peaking for the second quarter in the first week of May at 7.22% before falling again to a high 6% in June.

The reason for the lack of inventory locally and nationally is that many sellers remained unenthusiastic about swapping the 2% to 3% mortgage rates they secured during the pandemic for ones more than double. Many buyers can afford less in the market due to the elevated rates.

Chicago home sales dropped more than 20% last year. Industry experts are optimistic for a better market in 2024.

Tang was prepared for the jump in her mortgage rate.

She had a 3.75% mortgage rate on the Frankfort home that she sold for $525,000 in April, and now has a 6.875% rate on the $1 million, four-bedroom home that she purchased in West Town.

Her monthly mortgage payments, which include property taxes and insurance, come out to around $7,200, she said.

The process of buying the West Town house, Tang’s fifth home purchase, took only a few weeks from start to finish. Tang said this time was different from her prior home searches because there was not a plethora of inventory on the market.

“The inventory on the market was pretty low, so much so that it’s like we were seeing so many units, and (they were) not what we are looking for and (we thought) we are just going to wait,” Tang said. “And then we found that unit, which was really perfect.”

Hepp, of CoreLogic, said she doesn’t anticipate the real estate market to shift this summer.

“I honestly don’t see things changing that much simply because mortgage rates are still elevated, and there is this anticipation in the air that mortgage rates will come down later in the year,” Hepp said.

Chicago Tribune’s Claire Malon contributed.

[email protected]

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An Olympics Scene Draws Scorn. Did It Really Parody ‘The Last Supper’?

Some church leaders and politicians have condemned the performance from the opening ceremony for mocking Christianity. Art historians are divided.

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By Yan Zhuang

A performance during the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony on Friday has drawn criticism from church leaders and conservative politicians for a perceived likeness to Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of a biblical scene in “The Last Supper,” with some calling it a “mockery” of Christianity.

The event’s planners and organizers have denied that the sequence was inspired by “The Last Supper,” or that it intended to mock or offend.

In the performance broadcast during the ceremony, a woman wearing a silver, halo-like headdress stood at the center of a long table, with drag queens posing on either side of her. Later, at the same table, a giant cloche lifted, revealing a man, nearly naked and painted blue, on a dinner plate surrounded by fruit. He broke into a song as, behind him, the drag queens danced.

The tableaux drew condemnation among people who saw the images as a parody of “The Last Supper,” the New Testament scene depicted in da Vinci’s painting by the same name. The French Bishops’ Conference, which represents the country’s Catholic bishops, said in a statement that the opening ceremony included “scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity,” and an influential American Catholic, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota, called it a “gross mockery.”

The performance at the opening ceremony, which took place on and along the Seine on Friday, also prompted a Mississippi-based telecommunications provider, C Spire, to announce that it would pull its advertisements from Olympics broadcasts. Speaker Mike Johnson described the scene as “shocking and insulting to Christian people.”

The opening ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, said at the Games’ daily news conference on Saturday that the event was not meant to “be subversive, or shock people, or mock people.” On Sunday, Anne Descamps, the Paris 2024 spokeswoman, said at the daily news conference, “If people have taken any offense, we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

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Work From Home During the COVID-19 Outbreak

The impact on employees’ remote work productivity, engagement, and stress.

Galanti, Teresa MPsyc; Guidetti, Gloria PhD; Mazzei, Elisabetta MPsyc; Zappalà, Salvatore PhD; Toscano, Ferdinando MPsyc

Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti (Ms Galanti, Dr Guidetti, Ms Mazzei); Department of Psychology, Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna, Bologna (Dr Zappalà, Mr Toscano), Italy; Department of Psychology and Human Capital Development, Financial University under the Government of Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia (Dr Zappalà).

Address correspondence to: Ferdinando Toscano, MPsyc, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Viale Europa, 115 – 47521, Cesena (FC), Italy ( [email protected] ).

Funding Sources: nothing to declare.

Conflict of Interest: nothing to declare.

Ethical Considerations & Disclosure: This research fully respects the Declaration of Helsinki. All ethical guidelines were followed. The Bioethics Committee of the University of Bologna formally approved this study.

Clinical significance: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused people to work from home, in most cases without any preparation. Our results help identify factors associated with employee well-being, charting ways to follow to make sure people at home can work without negatively impacting their health.

Objective: 

The COVID-19 pandemic made working from home (WFH) the new way of working. This study investigates the impact that family-work conflict, social isolation, distracting environment, job autonomy, and self-leadership have on employees’ productivity, work engagement, and stress experienced when WFH during the pandemic.

Methods: 

This cross-sectional study analyzed data collected through an online questionnaire completed by 209 employees WFH during the pandemic. The assumptions were tested using hierarchical linear regression.

Results: 

Employees’ family-work conflict and social isolation were negatively related, while self-leadership and autonomy were positively related, to WFH productivity and WFH engagement. Family-work conflict and social isolation were negatively related to WFH stress, which was not affected by autonomy and self-leadership.

Conclusion: 

Individual- and work-related aspects both hinder and facilitate WFH during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The COVID-19 outbreak has made working from home (WFH) the new way of working for millions of employees in the EU and around the world. Due to the pandemic, many workers and employers had to switch, quite suddenly, to remote work for the first time and without any preparation. Early estimates from Eurofound 1 suggested that due to the pandemic, approximately 50% of Europeans worked from home (at least partially) as compared with 12% prior to the emergency. Currently, these numbers are approximately the same, with many employees and organizations possibly opting for WFH even after the pandemic. 2

To contain the spread of the virus, Italy quickly adopted home confinement measures which, since the Spring of 2020, were renewed for several months and are still, as in some other European countries, ongoing also during Spring 2021.

As all organizational changes, WFH too has some advantages and disadvantages. 3 Usually, adopting this flexible way of working has been presented as a planned choice that requires a period of design, preparation, and adaptation to allow organizations to effectively support employees’ productivity and ensure them better work-life balance. 4–6 However, the COVID-19 outbreak has substantially forced most organizations to adopt this way of working, often without providing employees with the necessary skills required for remote work. 7–9 As previously mentioned, studies have reported both advantages and disadvantages related to remote work. 10 Its effects, therefore, have been quite explored. 6 On the other side, the need to examine how WFH, as a “new way of working,” 11,12 has affected the well-being and productivity of employees with no prior remote work experience and to identify specific work conditions affecting remote work during the COVID-19 crisis 9 is imperative.

To achieve these goals, the present study considered the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model 13,14 as a theoretical framework. The JD-R model is a well-established theoretical model in the field of occupational health psychology, which suggests that work conditions, categorized into job demands and job resources, affect employees’ wellbeing and performance. Job demands refer to the physical, psychological, or socio-organizational aspects of the work whose energy-depleting process induces people to experience energy loss and fatigue, leading to stress, burnout, and health impairment. On the contrary, job resources refer to the physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of the job that reduce job demands while stimulating work motivation, personal growth, and development. 15 In addition, personal resources have been introduced in the JD-R model defining them as “aspects of the self that are generally linked to resilience and refer to individuals’ sense of their ability to control and impact upon their environment successfully,” 16 thus stimulating optimal functioning and lessening stress.

According to the JD-R model, every occupation and work has its own specific job demands and job resources; hence, the present study considered some job demands, one job resource, and one personal resource to investigate how much they affect employees’ work engagement, job-related stress, and job performance.

The model we developed for this study considered some characteristics of remote work as job demands: the difficulty of adequately reconciling private and work commitments, 17 the decrease or lack of the social context that employees normally experience in the workplace and that is related to the perception of being more socially isolated, 18 and the difficulty of arranging a suitable workstation at home for carrying out their work activities. 19 One of the most prominent job resources when WFH is job autonomy. 5,20–22 Finally, we considered self-leadership, defined as a self-influence process to behave and perform by setting one's own goals and monitoring their fulfilment, 23 as a personal resource that may potentially contribute to efficient remote work.

The present study integrates research on remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic 8 highlighting some job demands and resources that may affect negative (work stress) and positive (work engagement and job productivity) outcomes of employees’ remote work. Furthermore, since the trend toward remote work is expected to increase even after the pandemic, this study may provide useful information on the individual- and work-related consequences of remote work during and after the pandemic.

Analyzing more in detail the above-mentioned variables, the difficulty of reconciling private and work commitments is often described in the literature as family-work conflict, which is a condition when employees’ participation in work duties is complicated by the involvement of family-related activities. 24 Family-work conflict is usually considered a sex-dependent phenomenon 25 because, in most cultures, the primary responsibility for caregiving and housework tasks 26 lies with women, who are more penalized than men in times of crisis. 27 However, COVID-19 has forced millions of people to stay home, breaking down the distinction between private and work life regardless of age or sex. Therefore, we argue that family-work conflict can be an issue that may potentially affect not only women but men alike when WFH. On the contrary, previous studies hypothesized that remote work can simultaneously reduce family-work conflict as well as amplify it, 4,6 nullifying the benefits of WFH. 28 Besides, the confinement that was imposed in the early period of the pandemic may also accentuate this conflict, with family commitments interfering with work commitments.

At home, the presence of partners and children (especially if still in their childhood) engaged in work and school activities, the disruption of child-care and education services observed during the pandemic, and having to contribute towards household chores greatly affected remote workers. 19 For example, employees have to regularly prepare meals three times a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for the whole family, assisting children to connect with their online distance teaching in the morning, assisting with their homework in the afternoon, and spending some quality time with them when their homework is completed. As a result, employees have to work with greater family-work conflict, which we believe negatively affects their job productivity and work engagement while impacting on stress related to the remote work pending completion, in line with the previous literature. 4,5

Workplace isolation is another important key feature of WFH during the pandemic. 18 Although previous research highlighted that social isolation is one of the main drawbacks of remote work, 29–32 its incidence has inevitably increased during this period. The pandemic has exposed people to social confinement and thus higher levels of loneliness, 8,33 which may correlate with declining work satisfaction and performance as well as stress enhancement. 4,18

Prior to COVID-19, studies found a negative correlation between time spent telecommuting and individual and team performance. 9 Furthermore, the amount of time spent teleworking and the extent of face-to-face interaction were found to moderate, respectively negatively and positively, the relationship between professional isolation and job performance. 34 In line with previous research, 35 the use of digital technologies to communicate may only partially mitigate the isolation experienced by workers in comparison to the social contacts that are usually experienced by individuals in their workplaces as well as in social life, such as attending the gym or meeting friends. Therefore, as the social confinement observed in this study was extended for many weeks, with no in-presence contact with colleagues, we believe that social isolation is a relevant job demand related to WFH in times of COVID-19. Drawing on this statement, we argue that social isolation is significantly and negatively associated with WFH outcomes concerning job productivity and engagement and positively associated with WFH stress-related levels.

Another peculiarity of WFH during the pandemic is that employees have to share their workspace with family members, such as the partner and/or school-age children engaged in distance-learning primarily. Therefore, it should be noted that WFH during the pandemic has brought about many difficulties in the Italian population as well as in other European countries where social confinement has been adopted for several weeks. The houses were often unsuitable to host more people engaged in study and work activities, 19 thus generating a distracting environment. A previous study conducted on teleworkers 36 highlighted that control on the work environment is positively related to job satisfaction, whereas distractions while working generates work environment dissatisfaction. Studies suggested that a positive full-time WFH experience is associated with the quality of the workspace, such as control on light and acoustic isolation 37 and a workspace that is sufficiently separated from the living space. 38 When this separation is not possible, working in a space with environmental distractions may represent an additional and relevant job demand. Specifically, we hypothesized that environmental distractions are negatively associated with productivity and engagement in remote work and positively with stress.

According to the JD-R model, 13,14 job and personal resources affect employees’ well-being and productivity. One of the most prominent job resources of remote work is job autonomy, 13,14 which is the extent of independence and discretion permitted while performing professional tasks. 39 Job autonomy positively associates with the number of hours performed remotely. Furthermore, it positively influences remote workers’ engagement, satisfaction, and performance but negatively affects their stress. 5,20–22 Job autonomy is a major job resource for employees and, in the right doses, it encourages profitable innovations at work. 40 We argue that the positive effects of job autonomy can be observed or even accentuated during the enforced WFH due to the pandemic. WFH was an unforeseen phenomenon necessitated by the outbreak of the pandemic, and many employees had to cope with this new situation and coordinate with colleagues and supervisors to manage the unprecedented autonomy associated with the remote work. For this reason and in line with the literature, 5,10 we posit that autonomy positively associates with productivity and engagement but negatively with stress experienced when WFH during the pandemic.

Finally, in our model, we included one personal resource that is particularly helpful in times of change as it enables employees to actively shape their own job practices and work environment. 41 Unfortunately, there is limited evidence on the effects of personal resources when WFH. Nonetheless, especially in unprecedented times such as this, it is important to investigate the role of work-related personal resources because, differently from personal traits (eg, personality), they can be trained. 11 In the present study, we considered self-leadership, measured in its facets of goal setting and self-observation because among the most salient aspects of WFH, as well as one the mutual consequence of the other (the observation of one's work helps to establish goals, and their achievement must in turn be monitored), as an important resource when WFH. Through self-leadership, individuals regulate and control their behavior, influencing and leading themselves using specific sets of behavioral and cognitive strategies. 42 Self-leading individuals efficaciously monitor their actual performance and the standard they set for themselves thus regulating their own motivation. In this vein, it has been evidenced how self-leadership behaviors facilitate higher psychological functioning, which in turn influences work engagement. 43,44 A recent study yielded promising results showing that goal-setting behaviors, a component of self-leadership behaviors, may sustain job satisfaction especially when WFH. 21 In light of this, the present study aims to extend the literature by considering self-leadership and evaluating its relationship with WFH engagement and productivity, as well as with stress levels. According to the JD-R model, 13,14 we assumed self-leadership as a personal resource for WFH that positively affects employees’ productivity and work engagement, and negatively affects stress.

Participants and Procedure

A study on the work-life quality of remote workers during COVID-19 was conducted using a self-report questionnaire administered online from May to July 2020, using the Qualtrics platform. At the time of data collection, all the participants were WFH full-time in Italian public and private organizations. Participation in the research was voluntary, anonymous, and without any reward. Prior to filling the questionnaire, the respondents signed informed consent. The research was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and all ethical guidelines on social research were followed. The study was approved by the Bioethics Committee of the University of Bologna.

The study included 209 employees (71.3% women and 28.7% men). The average age of the participants was 49.81 years (standard deviation 9.4, minimum 25, maximum 65). Approximately 70% of the respondents reported having at least one child, and 32% of them reported having children younger than 14 years old. Only 9.1% of the employees in the sample reported being involved in WFH prior to the COVID-19 emergency, suggesting that 91.9% of them were WFH for the first time.

The job demands related to WFH were measured using three different scales. The first scale was measuring family-work conflict, which consists of three items from the scale developed by Netemeyer et al, 45 describing the interference that family life has on work when WFH (eg, “Family stress interferes with my ability to perform work-related tasks”). Perceived social isolation was assessed using four items of the scale by Golden et al, 34 which measures a sense of isolation and lack of support experienced by workers (eg, “I miss face-to-face contact with colleagues”). Finally, the scale of the distracting working environment consists of three items developed by Lee and Brand, 36 which measures the level of distraction experienced during WFH (eg, “In my working area, I experience acoustic distractions”).

Job autonomy was assessed using four items developed by Morgeson and Humphrey. 39 These items measured both the possibilities of autonomy in scheduling work activities and taking work-related autonomous decisions (eg, “My job allows me to make my own decisions about how to schedule my work”).

Self-leadership was assessed using four items of the Revised Self-Leadership Questionnaire 23 measuring both the employees’ behaviors of setting job-related goals and self-observation of their work (eg, “When I work, I always keep my tasks in mind”).

Perceived WFH productivity was measured in a section of the questionnaire requiring to compare the current situation of WFH with that one of the traditional office, experienced in the past, through a single item, already used in a remote work context, 18 whose formulation is “When I work remotely, I am more productive.”

WFH engagement was measured using the three-item version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale 46 adapted to the WFH context (eg, “When I work from home, I feel full of energy”).

Finally, stress experienced during WFH was measured through the four items previously adopted by Weinert et al 47 aimed to measure workers’ perception of exhaustion and fatigue due to WFH (eg, “I feel exhausted from working from home”).

All the above measures were evaluated using a five-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Socio-demographic variables, such as age, sex, caring responsibility, and remote work experience were considered as control variables, as literature recognizes them as possible confounders in the relationships under study. 5,8,48 Specifically, sex (0 = M; 1 = F), caring responsibility (0 = not having children younger than 14 years old; 1 = having children older than 14 years old), and WFH experience (0 = no; 1 = yes) were coded as dummy variables. Furthermore, since this research was conducted during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, subjective perceptions and concerns regarding the COVID-19 may also have an impact on the experiences and well-being of the participants. 18 Therefore, fear of COVID-19 was used as a control variable and assessed using the seven items of the Italian version of the Fear of Covid-19 Scale. 49 For example, “I am very afraid of COVID-19.”

Data Analysis

Prior to data analysis, the validity and reliability of the scales were evaluated. In particular, the technique of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to assess the dimensionality of the scales. The reliability and convergent validity of the measures were then evaluated by computing composite reliability (CR) and average variance extracted (AVE) values, while the discriminant validity was assessed by calculating maximum shared variance (MSV) values.

Once established that all the measures in this study had reliability and validity values following the cut-offs usually adopted in research, 50 descriptive statistics and correlations among the major study variables were calculated. Finally, hierarchical multiple regressions evaluated which job demands and job resources influenced the three dependent variables of our study. In the three separated hierarchical regressions performed, one for each dependent variable, the stepwise method was used. In the first step, we included the control variables of sex, age, presence of children younger than 14 years old, WFH condition, and fear of COVID-19. In the second step, we added job demands, namely family-work conflict, social isolation, and distracting work environment. Finally, in the third step, we included the resources of job autonomy and self-leadership behaviors. All the data were analyzed using IBM AMOS and SPSS statistics version 26 (Armonk, NJ).

Test of Measurement Model

First, two CFAs were conducted to compare an eight-factor model, one for each construct of this study, with a model in which all the items were grouped into a single dimension. The eight-factor model showed a greater fit to data ( χ 2 = 503.54; df = 272; χ 2 /df = 1.85; comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.93; incremental fit index [IFI] = 0.93; root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = 0.06; and standardized root mean square residual [SRMR] = 0.06) compared with the model with a single factor grouping all the items ( χ 2 = 2147.77; df = 299; χ 2 /df = 7.18; CFI = 0.46; IFI = 0.46; RMSEA = 0.17; and SRMR = 0.16). The fit values of the eight-factor model were good, and each item loaded into its factor with saturation values greater than 0.40. With the only exception of job productivity, measured through a single item, we then calculated the values of composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE), and maximum shared variance (MSV) for each scale. CR values for each dimension were greater than 0.70, giving evidence of the reliability of the scales. All the AVE values were above the cut-off of 0.50, while each MSV was lower than AVEs, indicating that the study measures had both convergent and discriminant validity. Table 1 reports the results of these analyses.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations

Descriptive statistics, Cronbach α, and correlations among variables are shown in Table 2 . All the variables correlated in the expected direction. Job demands were found to be negatively associated with WFH job productivity and work engagement and positively related to WFH stress. The resources of job autonomy and self-leadership were positively related to work productivity and work engagement, but their relationships with stress, although negative, were not significant. Moreover, the two resources were not related to the three job demands.

Regression Analysis for WFH Employees’ Productivity, Work Engagement, and Stress

Table 3 shows the results of the multiple regression analyses. Following the steps described in the Method paragraph, the first regression tested WFH productivity as dependent variable. For what concerns control variables, although in step 2 the experience with WFH resulted to be significant, its influence in step 3 revealed to be no more significant while, at step 3, age ( β = –0.14; P < 0.05) and fear of COVID-19 ( β = 0.25; P < 0.01) resulted, respectively, to affect negatively and positively WFH productivity. In step 2, when job demands were entered, a significant increase in explained variance (ADjR 2 = 0.27; ΔR 2 = 0.24; P < 0.01), over and above the variance explained by control variables, was observed. At this step, both family-work conflict ( β = –0.29; P < 0.01) and social isolation ( β = –0.29; P < 0.01), were significantly and negatively associated to WFH productivity, whereas distracting work environment was not significantly associated to it ( β = –0.05; P > 0.05). In step 3, job autonomy and self-leadership showed a significant improvement in explained variance (ADjR 2 = 0.32; Δ R 2 = 0.05; P < 0.01). At this step, both the job demands of family-work conflict ( β = –0.29; P < 0.01) and social isolation ( β = –0.29; P < 0.01), were negatively related to WFH productivity, whereas both job autonomy ( β = 0.14; P < 0.05) and self-leadership ( β = 0.17; P < 0.01) were positively related to WFH productivity. Distracting work environment was not significantly associated with it ( β = –0.02; P > 0.05).

The second regression tested remote work engagement as a dependent variable. About the control variables, also in this case, in step 2, the experience with WFH resulted to be significant, while in step 3 its impact was no longer significant. Furthermore, in this case, fear of COVID-19 ( β = 0.19; P < 0.01) positively and significantly affected remote work engagement even after inserting variables at steps 2 and 3.

In step 2, when entering job demands, a significant increase in variance was observed (ADjR 2 = 0.37; ΔR 2 = 0.31; P < 0.01), over and above the variance explained by control variables in the first step. Specifically, step 2 of this regression shows that all the three job demands of family-work conflict ( β = –0.19; P < 0.01), social isolation ( β = –0.36; P < 0.01) and distracting work environment ( β = –0.18; P < 0.05) negatively affected work engagement. At step 3, both the resources of autonomy ( β = 0.19; P < 0.01) and self-leadership ( β = 0.23; P < 0.01) positively affected work engagement. All the three job demands of family-work conflict ( β = –0.19; P < 0.01), social isolation ( β = –0.36; P < 0.01) and distracting work environment ( β = –0.14; P < 0.05) were still negatively associated to work engagement, and an increase in the explained variance (ADjR 2 = 0.44; ΔR 2 = 0.10; P < 0.01) was observed.

Finally, our focus shifted to the impact of WFH on workers’ well-being. Using WFH stress as a dependent variable, the third hierarchical regression did not show any effect of the control variables on this outcome. At step 2, both family-work conflict ( β = 0.31; P < 0.01) and social isolation ( β = 0.48; P < 0.01), but not distracting work environment ( β = 0.05; P > 0.05), were positively related to stress showing a significant increase in explained variance (ADjR 2 = 0.44; ΔR 2 = 0.42; P < 0.01). At step 3, both family-work conflict ( β = 0.31; P < 0.01) and social isolation ( β = 0.48; P < 0.01), but not distracting work environment ( β = 0.05; P > 0.05), were positively associated with stress. On the contrary, neither autonomy nor self-leadership had a significant impact on WFH stress. Therefore, no significant increase in explained variance was observed (ADjR 2 = 0.44; ΔR 2 = 0.00; P > 0.05).

The present study examined employees’ well-being and productivity when WFH during the pandemic. We addressed this issue by using the JD-R model 13,14 as a framework and by investigating the effect that specific WFH job demands and resources have on WFH outcomes. Among the job demands, we examined the effects of family-work conflict, social isolation, and distracting environment. Job autonomy was evaluated as a job resource, and self-leadership as a personal resource. The JD-R model 13,14 has also practical implications since it not only allows to focus on job-related risk prevention strategies (by decreasing job demands) but also on benefit promotion (by increasing job resources and, when possible, personal resources) to sustain employees’ productivity and work engagement and decrease the stress experienced when WFH for the long periods required from the pandemic. In a time in which employees had to adapt quickly to WFH, the identification of obstacles, as well as of enablers, to well-being and job performance is a priority for many organizations, and this study contributes to this purpose. Overall, findings observed in the present study are in line with the assumptions developed following the theoretical framework of the JD-R model 13,14 and also consistent with the literature related to remote work.

Social isolation and family-work conflict were associated with all the three tested outcomes, in the direction we envisioned, thus proving to be important job demands of remote work that can significantly decrease productivity and work engagement on the one hand and increase job stress on the other. These results are in line with previous studies 4,8,18 and also improve extant knowledge concerning the relationship with productivity, engagement, and stress experienced during WFH. Findings suggest that organizations and employees should consider these factors and develop guidelines on how to better manage them to observe the positive outcomes typically expected from remote work. In particular, increasing opportunities to communicate with colleagues and superiors represents the first strategy for organizations, HR officers, and employees, because communications can decrease social isolation perceptions. The available technological resources can do a lot in this direction: although lean communications, such as e-mails, allow an exchange of information often functional for work, the social exchange between human beings takes place through “richer” forms of interactions, among which the face-to-face interaction represents the “gold standard.” 51 Many companies accelerated the acquisition and use of technologies and software that offer interactive experiences that imitate the face-to-face or group interactions among people. The other side of the coin, however, concerns the issue of the digital privacy defense and the fear of digital surveillance 52,53 that the massive use of technologies may increase. At the same time, managers and HR officers should also effectively reflect on the frequency, timing, and structure of such communicative exchanges to avoid the risk of excessive interruptions and distractions of workers.

The theme of distractions is, in fact, another major issue related to WFH. The results of this study capture the deleterious role that family-work conflict and a chaotic environment, characterized by visual and acoustic distractions and lack of privacy, play on WFH outcomes. Distracting environments, while fortunately proving not to be predictors of reduced productivity and increased stress, seem to exert a negative influence on the motivational drivers of people. Employees may decrease their engagement, with weakened work motivation when their work setting becomes more distracting. The family-work conflict, instead, has shown significant and unfavorable effects on every dependent variable of this study. Probably, its centrality—already known in research on telework 4 —is also increased by the contingent situation related to the COVID-19 pandemic: in this period, workers’ homes are often “crowded” by cohabitants grappling with their work and educational commitments. A crowded home further complicates the family and work-life balance, a learning process that previous studies suggested to require 1 year of WFH experience. 5

Learning how to manage remote work can decrease the perception of family-work conflict. In addition, organizations should support employees’ time management skills, enabling them to divide the two spheres and give each of them the right attention at the right time, with a view to the right to disconnection and physical and mental recovery of each worker.

The importance of personal work management skills is also underlined by the resources tested in this study. Our findings show that autonomy and self-leadership have a positive relationship with productivity and work engagement. So, they may represent two relevant resources, able to sustain WFH productivity and engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to potentially bring favorable outcomes for both organizations and employees. In practical terms, promoting autonomy and self-leadership may be a solution to improve the efficacy of remote work programs and related implications in terms of WFH engagement. In light of this, training interventions may be supplied to WFH employees to develop self-observation strategies and to promote the schedule of work-related goal-based deadlines and priorities. Furthermore, these findings call attention to new work processes supporting the work autonomy of individuals, leveraging the specific skills of individuals, and providing functional tools for job management in the new context of remote work. Advancements in this sense seem fully compatible with work visions that are increasingly geared to working towards objectives and less based on directive leadership processes, and instead more participatory. 54 Consequently, organizations should empower workers through training courses aimed at developing self-leadership behaviors.

No significant relationship has been observed between resources and stress levels. In the JD-R model, job and personal resources are expected to directly impact well-being and motivational processes or to moderate the impact of job demands on stress and ill-health. 16 These results suggest that future studies should investigate the buffering role of specific WFH jobs and personal resources on the relationship between WFH demands and stress.

Other notable findings should be outlined. Our results suggest that remote work can be a useful solution especially for people concerned about COVID-19. In line with the previous literature, 18 the perceptions of people about the COVID-19 virus seem to play an important role in work during the pandemic. Our findings show that the fear for this pathogen is positively associated with higher levels of productivity and engagement. In other words, people emotionally affected by COVID-19 also reported being more productive and motivated when WFH. This suggests that, consistently with the literature, 55,56 this way of working may also play a protective, anxiety-relieving role for workers, since they were not asked to go to work, and thus be exposed to possible contagion by leaving home. On the other hand, we also observe that perception of lower productivity is associated with the increasing age of workers, a result probably explained both through the difficulties that these employees may have with technological tools, and their potential less ability to adapt to changes, 57 especially if they take place quickly.

There are some implications for future research in this field that derive from the present study. Indeed, our model, although including many variables, gives only a small account of the many dynamics that underlie the complex phenomenon of the WFH. Based on this, we believe it is important that future studies take into consideration, with a more specific research design and a more representative sample, other constructs, particularly among the job and personal resources. In particular, we point out that the PsyCap, a psychological state consisting of the dimensions of self-efficacy, optimism, resilience, determination, 58 applied both at the personal and team level, can open important horizons for future studies, which still have much to investigate on the complex reality of remote work and its outcomes in terms of employees’ well-being and health.

We also point out some of the limitations of this study, as well as some suggestions for future studies. One limitation of this study is its cross-sectional design, which allows us to trace associations between the investigated constructs but on the other hand does not allow determining causal relationships between the variables. Furthermore, we also believe that to generalize the results may be not possible, since our sample was a convenience sample, susceptible to biases, including the fact that the data collection took place online, among people accustomed to the use of digital technologies.

In this study, we investigated if WFH-related job demands and job resources are related to remote work productivity and work engagement as well as on stress. We found that the empirical results we analyzed and discussed, except for the relationships between distracting working environment and the outcomes of productivity and stress, and the relationships between both autonomy and self-leadership and stress, mostly confirmed our assumptions.

We believe that this study contributes to the literature concerning remote work and the well-being of remote workers that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is marked with relevant emotional and health implications. Furthermore, the implications of this study are of further importance as they provide information concerning the needs of workers who have had to adapt to enforce full-time WFH due to the pandemic, most of whom have no prior WFH experience. Managers, HR officers, and workers engaged in remote activities should consider family-work conflict, social isolation, and distracting work environments as potential obstacles and job autonomy and self-leadership as potential enablers of WFH engagement. In times of pandemic, such as the COVID-19, where containing the spread of the disease is crucial, WFH is a key opportunity and can give a competitive advantage to sustain and improve performance of organizations.

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The Impact of Working from Home on Mental Health: A Cross-Sectional Study of Canadian Worker’s Mental Health during the Third Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Aidan bodner.

1 Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada

Arti Shridhar

Shayna skakoon-sparling.

2 Department of Psychology, Toronto Metropolitan University (Formerly Ryerson), Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada

Kiffer George Card

3 Institute for Social Connection, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada

Associated Data

Data used in the study analysis is stored and available on the OSF Repository ( https://osf.io/87vgs/ , accessed on 3 August 2022).

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a considerable expansion in the way work settings are structured, with a continuum emerging between working fully in-person and from home. The pandemic has also exacerbated many risk factors for poor mental health in the workplace, especially in public-facing jobs. Therefore, we sought to test the potential relationship between work setting and self-rated mental health. To do so, we modeled the association of work setting (only working from home, only in-person, hybrid) on self-rated mental health (Excellent/Very Good/Good vs. Fair/Poor) in an online survey of Canadian workers during the third wave of COVID-19. The mediating effects of vaccination, masking, and distancing were explored due to the potential effect of COVID-19-related stress on mental health among those working in-person. Among 1576 workers, most reported hybrid work (77.2%). Most also reported good self-rated mental health (80.7%). Exclusive work from home (aOR: 2.79, 95%CI: 1.90, 4.07) and exclusive in-person work (aOR: 2.79, 95%CI: 1.83, 4.26) were associated with poorer self-rated mental health than hybrid work. Vaccine status mediated only a small proportion of this relationship (7%), while masking and physical distancing were not mediators. We conclude that hybrid work arrangements were associated with positive self-rated mental health. Compliance with vaccination, masking, and distancing recommendations did not meaningfully mediate this relationship.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many risk factors for poor mental health in the workplace. As this pandemic has intensified, with rising cases and deaths globally, so too have feelings of worry and fear in response to ongoing COVID-19 community transmission [ 1 , 2 ]. Studies from across the world have demonstrated that many workers are afraid of contracting and transmitting COVID-19 while at work [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ]. Fear is an adaptive defense mechanism for humans when confronted with a risk or danger, however chronic fear can lead to adverse mental health outcomes and behaviours. In the COVID-19 pandemic, fear of COVID-19 has been associated with depression, anxiety, and even impaired job performance [ 5 ]. A Canadian study from May 2020 reported that mental health has worsened since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, due in large part to economic uncertainty and fear of illness [ 7 ]. Notably, these negative mental health effects have largely been observed in work settings that are predominantly public-facing and more exposed to viral transmission [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ].

Alongside healthcare workers, many low-wage service workers have been deemed essential workers in Canada, and like other front-facing workers at the start of the pandemic, these workers have not always had access to safe working environments [ 3 , 13 ]. At several points in the pandemic, many workers had to attend in-person positions without widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines or public health mandates, effectively exposing them to anxiety-provoking environments. The pandemic has also heightened burdens that impact mental health among essential workers, including: adopting caretaking roles of vulnerable family members; choosing between working through illness or taking time off and facing financial losses when sick; lower job security; reduced income; greater risk of contracting COVID-19; and slashed work hours [ 10 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. These burdens intersect with other socio-demographic factors. For example, ethnic minorities and recent immigrants in Canada are more likely to work in low-wage, public-facing positions, which highlights health equity concerns given the increased risk for COVID-19 transmission and accompanying mental health disorders in this population [ 18 , 19 ].

While mental health risks are well-known among public-facing workers, it is less clear what the mental health impacts are on workers who have been able to transition to working from home. Workers at home may experience a more complex impact of their work settings on their mental health, despite having a generally lower risk situation [ 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Although much of the research studying teleworks impacts on workers mental health during the pandemic is ongoing, several studies have already shed light on this relationship. For example, some research has shown that workers who were more afraid of COVID-19 were more productive when working from home [ 23 ]. When faced with going back to in-person work, many workers anticipate negative impacts specifically due to concerns about COVID-19 safety [ 24 ]. Conversely, telework during the pandemic has also been associated with increases in social isolation and work stress [ 23 , 25 ], family conflict [ 22 , 23 ], distractions [ 22 , 23 ], as well as food and alcohol consumption [ 22 , 26 ]—which can all negatively impact the mental health of workers [ 22 ]. A recent study from Portugal has shown that employees working from home felt like they needed to appear online and in touch with their colleagues more often, correlating depression, anxiety and stress [ 25 ].

The literature exploring differences in mental health outcomes between workers in public-facing occupations and those working from home in Canada has been sparse [ 13 , 27 ]. One study conducted in the first half of 2020 measured anxiety and depression symptoms through Generalized Anxiety Disorder 2-item (GAD-2) and Patient Health Questionaire-2 (PHQ-2) screeners. These objective measures of mental health contribute only to a narrow understanding of mental health in relation to overall wellbeing. Similarly, most of the current research has examined telework during the first waves of COVID-19. Although useful, this work may not fully capture the impact that novel interventions such as vaccines and mask mandates have on the mental health of workers. Unlike during the first waves of the pandemic, Canadians now have access to free vaccines and masks; and other risk mitigation approaches (e.g., physical distancing, ventilation) are better understood by the public. These measures may, therefore, mitigate the fear of COVID-19 and its associated stress for people working in public, front-facing jobs [ 3 ]. Conversely, we have also experienced a slow relaxation of public health orders which enforced COVID-19 protection behaviours, such as social distancing, vaccine, and mask mandates, which may increase feelings of fear or anxiety about returning to work. Thus, there is a need to explore this area further.

Furthermore, the first doses of the vaccine rollout for the general population in Canada were underway during the third wave of the pandemic in 2021, bringing about another layer of nuance to consider when assessing mental health of [ 28 ]. This development added complexity in both negative and positive directions via the potential for increased apprehension and vaccine hesitancy, as well as the potential for reduced mental distress as a result of the sense of protection offered by the vaccine [ 29 , 30 ]. Reduced mental distress due to the availability of COVID-19 vaccines may have also been more likely due to the mentally taxing events of the first and second waves which saw an overwhelmed healthcare system, deaths in long-term care facilities, and socially isolating lockdown measures [ 31 , 32 , 33 ].

Presently, at the end of the sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen jurisdictions move further away from public health orders, following roll-outs of third doses for the majority of working age adults in response to the Omicron variant [ 34 , 35 ]. It remains unclear how the ongoing need for vaccine uptake and the turbulent nature of the pandemic will impact mental health. Moreover, as many companies and organizations transitioned large numbers of staff to working from home or a hybrid of working from home and in-person work during earlier waves of the pandemic, this work will be relevant for both employers and policy makers respectively to assess the costs and benefits of different arrangements as workplaces largely return to in-person work. Determining the extent of any differences in mental health related to work-from-home status has clear health equity implications for employers and policy makers to ensure best practices throughout the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as well as for future public health crises. As COVID-19 risks continue to the present day—particularly with risks such as long-COVID and unmitigated Omicron infection—it has become important to understand mental health differences according to where participants are working.

This study used survey data collected during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada [ 36 ] to examine whether there were any differences in self-rated mental health based on work setting and if so, what contributes to these differences? The dataset provided a unique opportunity to explore the nuances of self-rated mental health, and thus, bivariable and multivariable logistic regression models were used to test the hypothesis that mental health status is poorer among individuals who are not working from home. Additionally, physical distancing and mask wearing, which have been common practice since the onset of the pandemic, will be tested as mediators due to their potential for combating pandemic-related stressors related to concerns about COVID-19 transmission [ 37 ]. A mediation analysis tested whether COVID-19 vaccination, physical distancing, and mask adherence—due to their effectiveness as COVID-19 mitigation measures—had significant and protective effects on self-rated mental health. In conducting these analyses, we hypothesized that people working from home or engaging in hybrid work arrangements had better self-rated mental health than those working exclusively in-person. We further hypothesized that the exposure to COVID-19, as reflected in lack of compliance with public safety COVID-19 prevention guidelines, would partially mediate the association between working from home and worse self-rated mental health.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. study data.

The study utilized the Canadian Social Connection Survey (CSCS) dataset, which collected data from 21 April to 1 June 2021. The survey was circulated on the internet using paid advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google. Participants were eligible if they were Canadian residents and 16 years of age or older. Ethics approval was granted by the University of Victoria Research Ethics Board (Ethics Protocol Number 21-0115) [ 36 ]. All participants provided informed consent and were able to complete the questionnaire in English or French. Given the need to determine mental health effects in various work settings, the dataset allows for a comprehensive exploration. Inclusion for the current study was conditional on whether a respondent indicated that they were working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A total of 2286 eligible participants completed the survey. Of these, 1917 were working during the COVID-19 pandemic. We excluded participants with missing observations on the primary outcome (i.e., self-rated mental health) and primary exposure variable (i.e., amount of work from home during COVID-19); thus, the analytic sample size for this analysis was 1576.

2.2. Study Measures

2.2.1. outcome variable.

Respondents’ self-rated mental health was the primary outcome variable for the study. This variable has previously shown a positive correlation to other mental health morbidity measures [ 38 ], but should not be conflated with other more specific diagnostic categories such as depression or anxiety [ 39 , 40 ]. Indeed, as a more global and subjective measure, many authors consider self-rated mental health as a more holistic measure of mental health outcomes which allows for a broad range of mental health issues to be captured [ 38 , 41 ], including mental health problems that are developing but which are not captured by more clinical mental health indicators [ 40 ]. Participants evaluated their current mental health on a Likert scale (At the present time, would you say your MENTAL HEALTH is: “Poor”, “Fair”, “Good”, “Very good”, or “Excellent”) (see Supplementary Materials File S1 ). The variable was dichotomized to “Negative Self-Rated Mental Health” (“Poor” and “Fair”) and “Positive Self-Rated Mental Health” (“Good”, “Very good”, and “Excellent”). This was deemed to be an acceptable (if not conservative) approach to capture a general sense of mental health status based on precedent from previous studies using self-rated mental health [ 38 ]—allowing us to explicitly identify factors associated with sub-optimal (i.e., fair or poor) mental health.

2.2.2. Primary Explanatory Variable

Work setting (listed as work_from_home in the dataset) was the primary explanatory variable for the study. The variable measured how often participants worked from home (“Not Working During COVID”, “Not at all”, “Very little of the time”, “Some of the time”, “Most of the time”, and “All of the time”). The levels “Very little of the time”, “Some of the time”, and “Most of the time” were collapsed into a single level—“Hybrid”. “Not at all” was recoded as “Do Not Work from Home” and “All of the time” was recoded as “Work from Home Only”. These levels allowed for a continuum of working from home to be represented. Participants who reported not working during COVID-19 were removed from analyses as our goal was to explore the effects among Canadian workers who were currently employed.

2.2.3. Confounding Variables

Other explanatory variables related to employment, adherence to COVID-19 mitigation measures, income, and identity were controlled for in multivariable analysis. This allowed us to isolate the effects of demographic and socio-economic factors which may otherwise play an important role in self-rated mental health while also being correlated with work setting. The included variables were household income (originally collected in increments of CAD 10,000, but binned into four groups capturing low, lower-middle, middle, and upper income groups: Less than CAD 30,000, CAD 30,000 to CAD 59,999, CAD 60,000 to CAD 89,999, CAD 90,000 or more), age (18 to 29 years-old, 30 to 39 years-old, 40 to 49 years-old, 50 to 59 years old, 60 years and older), gender (Male, Non-binary, Woman), ethnicity (White; African, Caribbean, or Black; Asian; Indigenous; Middle Eastern; Other), educational attainment (High School Diploma or Lower, Bachelor’s Degree or Higher, Some College), hours worked per week (participant-reported numeric value), national occupation class (Art, culture, recreation and sport; Business; Education, law and social, community, and government services; Health; Management; Manufacturing and utilities; Natural and applied sciences; Natural resources and agriculture; Sales and service; Trades, transport and equipment operators).

In addition to these conventional confounding variables, several additional variables were selected based on their potential to mediate the relationship between self-reported mental health and work setting. COVID-19 vaccine status and adherence to mask and/or physical distancing recommendations were identified as particularly important factors with mediation potential. These concepts were measured by asking to what extent participants wore masks in public (“Not at all”, “Somewhat”, “Very Closely”), to what extent participants practice physical distancing in public (“Not at all”, “Somewhat”, “Very Closely”), and whether participants were vaccinated (“No”, “Yes, one dose”, “Yes, two doses”).

2.3. Statistical Analysis

All statistical analyses were performed using R Statistical Software version 4.1.1 (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) [ 42 ]; DescTools and regclass packages were used to assist in model assessment and fitting [ 43 , 44 ]; the mice package was used for multiple imputations of missing observations [ 45 ]; and the mediation package was used for mediation analysis [ 46 ]. Missing observations on the remaining variables were imputed using multiple imputation in the mice package [ 45 ].

An initial multivariable binary logistic regression model ( Supplementary Materials File S1 ), with the outcome variable of self-rated mental health and primary explanatory variable of work setting, was constructed with 30 confounding variables. The final multivariable model was developed by running a backwards selection process favouring the model with lowest Akaike Information Criterion [ 47 ]. This process was balanced by supplementing the model with variables critical to understanding the relationship between work-setting and self-rated mental health that the backwards selection process had excluded. McFadden’s Pseudo R 2 and variance inflation factor were assessed for reasonability of model fit and collinearity, with variables exhibiting collinearity removed to arrive at a final multivariable model. Bivariable logistic regression models were constructed from the newly developed study sample between all explanatory variables and the outcome variable.

Mediation analysis was followed firstly via Baron and Kenney’s (1986) steps for determining mediation via logistic regression models and secondly by utilizing the mediate package in R with bootstrapping enabled [ 48 , 49 ]. The mediate package explicitly allows for handling of binary and logistic measures outside of a linear framework, while Baron and Kenney’s (1986) steps provide a process for reviewing bivariable and multivariable models, which has helped us to evaluate the associations between our primary exposure and outcome, primary exposure and mediator, mediator and outcome, and primary exposure while controlling for the mediator and outcome. The mediate function was then used for more rigorous tests of indirect (mediation) effects on the outcome variable [ 49 ].

3.1. Sample Overview

2286 respondents were initially included. However, 370 indicated they were not currently employed and of the remaining 1916 employed respondents, 340 were missing data on our primary measures. This resulted in 1576 participants eligible for analysis. Descriptive statistics, stratified by self-rated mental health, are presented in Table 1 . The study sample predominantly reported positive self-rated mental health (80.7%) with the majority of participants in both outcome groups responding that they work both from home and in person (hybrid); however, a greater proportion (46%) of those not working from home reported negative self-rated mental health compared to those in other work setting configurations ( Figure 1 ). In terms of demographics, 41.8% were 18 to 29 years-old; 49.9% identified as a man; 65.5% were White; 36.0% earned between CAD 30,000 and CAD 59,000 in 2020; and 51.0% had a Bachelor’s degree or higher. The average number of reported hours worked per week was 23.87; 19.9% worked in sales and service; 53.7% indicated they very closely practice physically distancing 2 metres from others; 72.8% reported very closely adhering to wearing masks in public; and 56.8% had received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Work Setting and Self-Rated Mental Health.

Sample Characteristics Stratified by Self-Rated Mental Health.

3.2. Regression Analysis

Bivariable associations were investigated between all explanatory variables and self-rated mental health ( Table 2 ). Associations between self-rated mental health and work setting were significant among people not working from home as well as those exclusively working from home. These groups had respectively 5.70 (95% Confidence Interval [95% CI]: 3.98, 8.15) and 3.97 (95% CI: 2.85, 5.52) greater odds of negative self-rated mental health as compared to people working in hybrid arrangements. Other significant bivariable associations with negative self-rated mental health were age (all ages over 40 years-old versus those 18 to 29 years-old) and being non-binary or a woman (vs. a man). Positive self-rated mental health was significantly associated with African, Caribbean, or Black ethnicity (vs. White) and Indigenous ethnicity (vs. White); having some college education or a Bachelor’s degree or higher (vs. high school diploma or lower); employment in business, health, management, natural and applied sciences, or trades, transport and equipment operations (vs. sales and services); and having one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine (vs. not having received a COVID-19 vaccine).

Bivariable and Multivariable Logistic Regression Models.

Numeric bolding: Indicates statistical significance.

In the multivariable model, after controlling for potential confounders, negative self-rated mental health retained the association with not working from home (Adjusted Odds Ratio [aOR]: 2.79, 95% CI: 1.83, 4.26) and working from home exclusively (aOR: 2.79, 95% CI: 1.90, 4.07) versus hybrid work. Furthermore, negative self-rated mental health was significantly associated with increasing hours worked per week, being 40 years or older (vs. 18 to 29 years-old), identifying as non-binary (vs. man), Middle Eastern or Other ethnicity (vs. White), Conversely, positive self-rated mental health was associated with employment in business, health, management, natural and applied sciences, or trades, transport and equipment operations (vs. sales and services); and having two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine (vs. not having received any).

3.3. Mediation Analysis

Table 3 illustrates the results of the mediation analyses for each of the three COVID-19 prevention factors. Vaccination status was found to be a statistically significant mediator ( p = 0.02), mediating approximately 7% of the relationship between work setting and self-rated mental health; mask wearing ( p = 0.76) and physical distancing ( p = 0.20) were not found to significantly mediate the relationship. In the mediation analyses for vaccination status, the first part of the pathway between work setting and self-rated mental health, when adjusting for having received a COVID-19 vaccine, shows not working from home is significantly associated with negative self-rated mental health (aOR: 3.91, 95% CI: 2.74, 5.56). The next part of the pathway between work setting and having received a COVID-19 vaccine indicates people not working from home had lower odds of having at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine (OR: 0.52, 95% CI: 0.39, 0.70). The last part of the pathway shows a significant association between having received a COVID-19 vaccine and positive self-rated mental health (OR: 0.30, 95% CI: 0.21, 0.43).

Relationship between Work Setting (Ref = At least some of the time (Hybrid/Work from home only)), Mediators (Vaccination Status (Ref = No), Adherence to Mask Wearing Recommendations (Ref = Not at all), and Adherence to Physical Distancing Recommendations (Ref = Not at all)), and Self-Rated Mental Health (Ref = Positive).

1 OR = Odds Ratio (95% Confidence Interval); 2 aOR = Adjusted Odds Ratio (95% Confidence Interval); * p ≤ 0.05; Numeric bolding: Indicates statistical significance; WS = Work setting; SRMH = Self-rated mental health.

4. Discussion

Primary findings.

This study represents a preliminary assessment of the relationship between work setting and self-rated mental health, controlling for relevant demographic factors, and providing several preliminary insights into the ways in which COVID-19 stressors and protections shape these relationships. In doing so, our findings show that mental health is adversely impacted for those either working exclusively from home or in person. This is in agreement with existing literature showing poor mental health among workers in public-facing workspaces across numerous international contexts [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ]. Similarly, although findings of studies examining mental health effects of working from home prior to the COVID-19 pandemic have been inconsistent [ 21 ], studies exploring this increasingly normalized work setting during the pandemic have generally found working from home associated with poorer mental health outcomes [ 26 ]. This is often attributed to difficulties in establishing a work-life balance and due to feelings of isolation [ 22 , 23 , 50 , 51 ]. However, the current findings are unique in that only a handful of studies investigating the link between workplace and mental health during COVID-19 to-date have directly examined varying degrees of working from home [ 8 , 9 , 13 , 27 ] and none to our knowledge have investigated these associations during the later phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccines were made widely available. Furthermore, the majority of studies have explored the mental health of healthcare workers [ 2 , 11 , 12 , 52 ] or those in public-facing positions [ 10 ]. As such, the present study makes a valuable contribution in terms of the timing within the COVID-19 pandemic, its focus on a broad range of labour sectors, and its use of holistic self-rated mental health measures.

As such, these findings help to further research into the mental health outcomes of the Canadian workforce during the later phases of ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. One Canadian study exploring the relationship between working from home and self-rated mental health (although not of primary interest) during the first wave of the pandemic found that workers who transitioned to working from home did not differ or have affected mental health when compared to those who remained working in-person. Conversely, another Canadian study from the first wave of the pandemic found lower prevalence of depression and anxiety among respondents working from home or those working in person whose employers met all of their infection control needs [ 27 ]. These findings differ from what this study has found during the third wave, namely: both not working from home and working exclusively from home are significantly associated with negative self-rated mental health. Turning to international evidence (again from the first wave), both Gómez-Salgado et al. (2020) and Mazza et al. (2020) found poorer mental health was associated with not working from home, when compared to working from home, and not working at all, respectively. The range of evidence adds credence to our findings indicating negative mental health outcomes at either end of the work from home continuum—where workers are exclusively working from one location.

The mediation analysis found that, of the three variables tested, COVID-19 vaccination status was the only significant mediator of the effect of work setting on self-rated mental health. However, this variable mediated only approximately 7% of the effect of work setting on self-rated mental health. Both the lack of significance and the low impact of the mediation among the variables tested suggests that the prominent source of psychological stress may not arise from fear of COVID-19 infection. Although it is likely that these prevention measures may do less to mediate mental health among workers who are not continually facing risk of viral exposure, it is less clear why this would also be the case for public-facing workers. One possibility could be that, by the later phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, workplaces already tended to have high levels of COVID-19 control measures in place [ 53 ], likely reducing the contribution of the environment to stress related to concerns about viral exposure. Secondly, views on the severity of COVID-19 symptoms or susceptibility to it may have an impact on the extent that the COVID-19 prevention measures mediate mental health [ 54 ]. Lastly, uncertainty related to the unpredictable trajectory of the pandemic, such as economic concerns may present as greater stressors when compared to fears of COVID-19 infection [ 55 ].

This study also highlighted poor negative mental health among several groups. Though we did not specifically explore groups that are more likely to work from home, concerns have been raised about the well-being of ethnic minority groups who disproportionately work in public-facing occupations [ 56 ]. These sectors have experienced numerous disruptions in their capacity to operate throughout the COVID-19 pandemic [ 19 ]. This has had severe effects on members of ethnic minorities. For instance, in mid-2020, 44% and 40% of people of Arabic and West Asian ethnicity respectively, reported that the COVID-19 pandemic had moderate to strong impacts on their financial stability [ 57 ].

The identity groups associated with negative self-rated mental health—non-binary individuals and people over 40 years—are less clear in terms of contextualizing within work setting. For non-binary individuals, it is unclear whether they are more likely to work from home; however, it does appear that the pre-pandemic stressors have been compounded by COVID-19 for members of sexual and gender minorities [ 58 ]. As for middle-and-older age workers, the association with negative self-rated mental health corresponds to a general trend that mental health has worsened for all age groups in Canada since the onset of the pandemic [ 59 ]; however, it is unclear what this finding may mean in the context of other studies, indicating better mental health among older adults during the pandemic [ 60 , 61 ].

Despite COVID-19 prevention measures not emerging as a primary influencer of self-rated mental health, Canadian provinces such as British Columbia have routinely made it a priority to vaccinate frontline workers, a category of worker who cannot typically work from home [ 62 ]. Moreover, in examining other sources of economic-related stress, initial pandemic responses did see the Canadian federal government initiating supports for unemployed workers such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) in conjunction with provincial eviction bans, and to a lesser extent, rent freezes [ 63 ]. Though CERB provided support for workers financially impacted by the pandemic, workers who continued to be employed did not enjoy these benefits, despite facing the possibility of reduced work hours. Moreover, rent freezes that were widely enacted by provincial governments were largely discontinued after December 2020 [ 63 ]. Thus, despite a relatively rapid implementation of social protections in response to the arrival of COVID-19 in Canada [ 64 ], the lack of continuity of these measures coupled with pandemic uncertainty may feed into stressors affecting Canadian workers.

5. Limitations

This exploratory study has limitations but provides rationale for more rigorous investigations of the potential benefits of hybrid work. Limitations include our use of secondary data that likely does not fully capture the nuanced associations between work setting and self-rated mental health. These relationships are further simplified by our analytic choices to collapse work setting to three levels and self-rated mental health to two levels. Future studies should explore more comprehensive measures of mental health, including using specific measures of anxiety and depression. Such analyses might be feasible in large surveys, such as ours, through the use of short scales developed for large surveys, such as the PHQ-2 and GAD-2. It is possible that these more specific measures would allow for greater granularity in understanding how working conditions during an ongoing public health crisis is related to mental health and well-being—particularly in terms of the mediating effects of COVID-19 prevention on anxiety and stress (vs. depression). Qualitative research could also be used to better understand specific pathways of poor mental health for those working exclusively from home or in-person. Given limitations in measurement, the results of the current study must be interpreted with caution when considering specific psychological disorders. As well, the dataset over-represented (77.2%) individuals who work in hybrid arrangements, compared to the other two groups (exclusively working from home and exclusively working in-person). Caution should therefore be taken in interpretation, as this drastically departs from the range of Canadian workers working the majority of their hours from home—40.5% in April 2020 to 26.5% in June 2021 [ 65 ]. Lastly, as the CSCS did not include questions assessing individuals’ worry about COVID-19 exposure at work, nor how well their workplace implemented protection protocols, we were not able to account for the nuance of psychological distress related to COVID-19 infection. The measures we use to assess compliance are global and not work specific. As such, our mediation models should be interpreted as preliminary. Likewise, some measures need refined assessment in future studies. For example, to measure income, participants’ household incomes were collected in increments of $10,000 CAD. Bins of $30,000 CAD were selected with consideration of classifying individuals according to approximate thresholds for low- (e.g., Approx. $30,000 per households) and median income (approx. $90,000 per household) in Canada. As household size and cost-of living values varied, a more nuanced measure of income would have been preferred by was not available in this secondary data analysis. Personal income, adjusted for cost of living, could provide a more nuanced insight into working condition and types of work engaged in, as these parameters are undoubtedly important for understanding worker health.

6. Future Research Directions

Recognizing these limitations, as well as several opportunities to establish new lines of inquiry, we recommend that future research on the COVID-19 pandemic and future communicable disease epidemics should aim to sample a more representative group of people working from home; determine interactions between ethnic, sexual and gender minorities, and older populations; and incorporate measures of self-assessed psychological distress around workplace safety. Furthermore, as noted above, the present study did not account for important and salient factors such as living conditions, household composition, sources of material, social, and emotional support, non-work-related labor, and other undoubtedly important factors. Future research will explore these factors in relation to working arrangements. Such analyses are critical for understanding the gendered dynamics of work from home. We hypothesize that this would be a critical moderator for exploration in future research. As well, family composition and income are critical moderators for understanding how people can best be supported in distance work environments. Therefore, future research should conduct more narrow analyses or improve measurements of these key factors so that a more nuanced profile of working conditions (e.g., income, class, status, hierarchy) can be assessed in relation to our research questions. Finally, it is critical for longitudinal within person studies to continue examining the effect of work from home on individual health and wellbeing.

7. Conclusions

Given the few studies that are available assessing the effect of work setting on mental health, this study provides important data demonstrating potential hazards to mental health associated with exclusively in-person or home-based work. Hybrid models of work may therefore provide promising opportunities to improve the mental health of workers. Of course, replication will further advance our understanding of telecommuting and in-person work, particularly in the context of an ongoing public health crisis that has disproportionately impacted low-wage and marginalized people.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the 2021 Social Connection Survey Participants for their contributions of time and attention in completing our survey.

Supplementary Materials

The following supporting information can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/ijerph191811588/s1 , File S1: Independent Variables Included in Initial Multivariable Binary Regression Model.

Funding Statement

Funding for the Canadian Social Connection Survey was received from a Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Project Grant (#480066) and a Genwell Project Research Catalyst Grant (#2021-001). KGC is funded by a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Award (#1547).

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, A.B., K.G.C., A.S., and E.B.; Data curation, K.G.C.; Formal analysis, A.B.; Funding acquisition, K.G.C.; Methodology, A.B. and K.G.C.; Supervision, K.G.C.; Writing—original draft, A.B.; Writing—review & editing, A.B., L.R., E.B., A.S., S.S.-S. and K.G.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Institutional Review Board (or Ethics Committee) of University of Victoria (protocol code 21-0115; 9 April 2021).

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Aggravated Surface O3 Pollution Primarily Driven By Meteorological Variations In China During The 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown Period

• Lu, Zhendong
• Henze, Daven K.

Due to the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in China from late January to early April in 2020, a significant reduction in primary air pollutants, as compared to the same time period in 2019, has been identified by satellite and ground observations. However, this reduction is in contrast with the increase of surface ozone (O3) concentration in many parts of China during the same period from 2019 to 2020. The reasons for this contrast are studied here from two perspectives: emission changes and inter-annual meteorological variations. Based on top-down constraints of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from TROPOMI measurements and GEOS-Chem model simulations, our analysis reveals that NOx and volatile organic compound (VOC) emission reductions as well as meteorological variations lead to 8 %, ‑3 % and 1 % changes in O3 over North China, respectively. In South China, however, we find that meteorological variations cause ∼ 30 % increases in O3, which is much larger than ‑1 % and 2 % changes due to VOC and NOx emission reductions, respectively, and the overall O3 increase in the simulations is consistent with the surface observations. The higher temperature associated with the increase in solar radiation and the decreased relative humidity are the main reasons that led to the surface O3 increase in South China. Collectively, inter-annual meteorological variations had a larger impact than emission reductions on the aggravated surface O3 pollution in China during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic.