Introduction:
The sudden outbreak of the life-wrenching virus has turned human existence upside down. Throughout the world, the COVID 19 pandemic has caused chaos and distress. The virus has prompted questions about the survival of mankind. Aside from health-related impacts, the virus has affected economic, political, and certainty-related aspects. Additionally, businesses are struggling to cope with the changes because they have disrupted operations on a large scale. Hence, employers and employees are both left with many questions concerning the unfortunate situation. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations are rapidly changing their work habits. Moreover, a large group of people have remained in their homes to avoid the disease or because of shelter-in-place orders (Brynjolfsson et al., 2020). Many businesses have shut down all operations, and many have taken drastic measures to revamp their internal and external functioning. Since the emergence of new regulations and guidelines worldwide, the workforce has experienced a rapid shift from office to remote work. With new working paradigms, companies have indeed found it challenging to manage the workforce. Also, flexibility is an increasingly common work practice in the modern workplace.
New safety measures were introduced to prevent the spread of the virus has affected the usual modes of communication and task delegation at the workplace to decrease human interaction. The prohibition of working in groups was essential for health and safety purposes, but it poses a threat to working productivity. Consequently, organisations have adopted new approaches, such as work from home, to support flexible working and maintain business operations. Many organisations considered positive outcomes on working from home with long term benefits to the organisations. Although, many employees have faced difficulties in adopting the work from home culture and balancing work and personal life. As a diverse effect, people may take flexibility for granted that can impact work productivity. This paper will discuss the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic in working culture and the concept of work from home practice. Further, it will focus on the relationship between the work from home approach and employee productivity. At last, the investigation of positive and negative outcomes of working from home on the employee productivity.
COVID 19 Pandemic and Work from Home:
Globally, the number of people infected by the virus has increased rapidly since the outbreak began. There has been a widespread lockdown, in which all public places, schools, and offices must shut down. To prevent the spread of the virus, the government-controlled all kinds of activities where people could gather. Hence, COVID 19 has a huge impact on the global economy which was unexpected and tragic. The impact of COVID 19 lies far beyond the increase in infected people and death. The inconvenience by the measures as lockdown has more impact on businesses, employability, financial survival, and mental health. As a result, the virus outbreak has increased a lot of pressure on firms to take immediate action for survival in the market. Thus, many firms tend to cut down on wages, benefits, and support. Consequently, many companies shut down their entire operations, while others that provide necessities keep them running under strict regulations, and most firms transit to remote working. In contrast, neither companies nor employees were prepared for the dynamics of remote work. However, the remote working method was essential for organisations to prevent the virus from spreading and ensure safety.
The term work from home defines as any employment-related work performed at home regardless of whether the individual is performing the work as an employee of an organisation or is self-employed (Venkatesh and Vitalari, 1992). In general, the concept of work from home is easy to understand and believed to be efficient and productive. As well, many organisations adopted the work from home concept long before COVID 19 emerged. A home-based work method is designed to provide flexibility for workers and opportunities for employment for people who are unable to leave their homes. Working from home is a way of working outside of physical space, enabled by technology that reduces commuting time and improves efficiency. Work from home offers various benefits to employees including flexibility, autonomy, and the comfort of working in your own space (O’Hara, 2014).
As a result of the COVID 19 consequences, businesses have realised the benefits of work from home, so many firms decided to continue to use this method post-reopening. Organisations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have extended their work from home policy and even Twitter just announced that it is planning to
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