Making Daily Decisions to Work from Home or to Work in the Office: The Impacts of Daily Work- and COVID-Related Stressors on Next-Day Work Location

• Published in: Journal of applied psychology 2021-06, Vol.106 (6), p.825-838
• Main Authors: Shao, Yiduo, Fang, Yanran, Wang, Mo, Chang, Chu-Hsiang (Daisy), Wang, Lin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Coordination; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; COVID-19 - prevention & control; COVID-19 - psychology; Employees; Family Work Relationship; Female; Flexibility; Human; Humans; Male; Occupational Stress; Occupational Stress - psychology; Pandemics; Personal safety; SARS-CoV-2; Stress; Technology; Telecommuting; Teleworking - statistics & numerical data; Work; Work at home; Work Load; Working Conditions; Working Space; Workloads; Workplace - psychology
• ISSN: 0021-9010; 1939-1854
• DOI: 10.1037/apl0000929

To protect workers' safety while gradually resuming on-site operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are offering employees the flexibility to decide their work location on a daily basis (i.e., whether to work from home or to work in the office on a particular day). However, little is known about what factors drive employees' daily decisions to work from home versus office during the pandemic. Taking a social ecological perspective, we conceptualize employees' daily choice of work location (home vs. office) as a way to cope with stressors they have encountered on the previous day, and conducted a daily diary study to examine how five categories of work-related and COVID-related stressors during the pandemic (identified through a pilot interview study) may jointly predict employees' next-day work location. We collected data over five workdays from 127 participants working in a Chinese IT company which allowed employees to choose their work location on a daily basis amid the pandemic. We found that experiencing more work-family boundary stressors and work coordination stressors on a certain day were associated with a greater likelihood of working in the office (vs. at home) on the next day, while experiencing more workload stressors prompted employees to work at home (vs. in the office) on the next day. Furthermore, we found that COVID-19 infection-related stressors moderated the effects of technology stressors and workload stressors on next-day work location. Our research findings offer implications for understanding the driving factors of daily work location choices during and beyond the pandemic.