COVID-19 has led to work from home (WFH) arrangement for many employees. Using the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this arrangement has been studied in detail both from a household perspective and an employees' perspective (with special emphasis on women employees). Aspects such as resource consumption in a household, how WFH has affected an organization, and the implications for working women have been examined. Households can now optimize resources based on the findings, and organizations can learn how to adapt to this new WFH reality. An in-depth interview-based qualitative methodology with 25 working women was used, in addition to analyzing their social media accounts and audio/video clips. This chapter will be useful for organizations to design work from home policies such as infrastructure, work timing, job motivation/incentives, role definition, and cybersecurity. Additionally, working women perspectives will be strengthened. The chapter ends by highlighting future areas of research.
TopIntroduction
COVID-19 is a black swan event that has caused economic disruption and has significantly altered all aspects of life - home, office, school, shopping, health care, transport, entertainment – the list goes on (Mitta, 2020). In the wake of the pandemic and a global call to control its spread, the need for maintaining social distancing became imperative. And this forced companies to embrace the concept of “Work from home (WFH)”, to keep alive the working spirit of the employees.
WFH became an inevitable part of a ‘portable office’, as employees learnt to navigate in these uncertain times. The impact on both employers and employees have been manifold viz; dealing with the new normal of WFH, strained resources in a household, lack of appropriate infrastructure at home, lack of demarcated boundaries between personal and professional assignments, to name a few. With many businesses coming to a grinding halt, lay-offs, salary cuts, hiring freezes also raised their ugly heads during the pandemic’s choppy waters and added to the resource crunch. These have in turn affected stress levels and relationships too. As far as organizations were concerned, the practice of WFH was prevalent in several IT companies even in pre-COVID times, hence they blended more seamlessly into the format than their non- IT counterparts, who were not geared up to a remote working culture. While this arrangement was welcomed as the best alternative in the pandemic situation, no one could have predicted that it would continue for so long. Almost one year down the line, some offices are re-opening in phases, while some have deferred their return-to-office plans depending on the vaccine roll-out while some others have asked their employees to permanently work from home. A survey by Cardiff and Southampton universities indicated that 90% of the employees wanted to continue to WFH and the productivity during the lockdown period remained stable when compared to the 6-months period prior to the pandemic (BBC News, 2020). JP Morgan Chase & Co however urged its employees to return to their workplaces as they found that both productivity and creativity was hit, particularly on Mondays and Fridays (Davis, 2020). WFH led companies to adopt McGregor’s Theory Y model of management which talked about the results of positive motivation in the workplace.
Working women have had a mixed experience during this WFH arrangement. In the absence of help at home (maids not allowed during the pandemic), they have doubled up as shoppers, maids, cooks, parents, caregivers and of course professionals- all in one go! The WFH model as being the flexible model which “helps women in maintaining full-time jobs and helps to avoid losing traction in their careers also cautions on potential trip wires” (Worline, Dutton, Hardin, 2017). The article views WFH in the context of working women, with a different prism, and states that networking opportunities to advance to leadership positions may be hampered, staying at home could exacerbate the domestic conflicts and lead to disproportionate share of domestic work, and could at best help in retaining or increasing the proportion of women working in the lower rung of management. There have been contradictory theories about its effectiveness. As per McKinsey’s Report of May 2018, “India has one of the largest opportunities in the world to boost GDP by advancing women’s equality—$770 billion of added GDP by 2025”. The report further stated that the contribution of women to India’s GDP is 18%, one of the lowest proportions in the world, reflecting the fact that only 25% of India’s labor force is female.
Given all of the above, this study (undertaken in May and June 2020), aimed to decode the complexity and challenges of the COVID-led new WFH arrangement:
The specific research questions were:
- 1.
How does a household cope with a shock event like COVID-19? How do things change in terms of resources utilization, role clarity and relationships?
- 2.
How can organizations modify themselves to suit the new reality of WFH? Also how to keep the employee motivated?
- 3.
How has WFH impacted working women? Are they able to manage the famed Work-balance while WFH?
Theoretical Construct
The construct of Conservation of Resources theory was used as a theoretical framework to analyze the responses.