Having to Work from Home: Basic Needs, Well-Being, and Motivation.

Hannah M Schade,Thomas Kleinsorge,Jan Digutsch,Yan Fan

doi:10.3390/ijerph18105149

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees were asked to start working from home for an extended time. The current study investigated how well employees worked and felt in this novel situation by following n = 199 German employees—56% of them female, 24% with childcare duties—over the course of two working weeks in which they reported once daily on their well-being (PANAS-20, detachment) and motivation (work engagement, flow). Participants reported on organizational and personal resources (emotional exhaustion, emotion regulation, segmentation preference, role clarity, job control, social support). Importantly, they indicated how well their work-related basic needs, i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness, were met when working from home and how these needs had been met in the office. Multilevel models of growth showed that work engagement, flow, affect and detachment were on average positive and improving over the two weeks in study. Higher competence need satisfaction predicted better daily work engagement, flow, and affect. In a network model, we explored associations and dynamics between daily variables. Overall, the results suggest that people adapted well to the novel situation, with their motivation and well-being indicators showing adequate levels and increasing trajectories. Avenues for improving work from home are job control and social support.

Highlights

In the first months of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic resulted in an unforeseen disruption of many people’s daily life
In order to allow for this study to tap into adaptation dynamics to a somewhat novel situation, we reduced the total sample of n = 328 to people that worked no more than 30% of their work hours from home before the coronavirus situation, which led to the exclusion of 59 persons
Given that schools and pre-school facilities were closed, we asked participants to indicate to what extent (%) they were currently responsible for taking care of a child or children in the household (M = 11.8, SD = 25.0); 152 people, 76% of the sample included in the analyses reported 0 childcare duties

Summary

Introduction

In the first months of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic resulted in an unforeseen disruption of many people’s daily life. Germany did not issue a hard lockdown with a strict confinement order or curfew in the spring of 2020, but instead relied on people’s compliance with social distancing rules—no more than two people (from different households) were allowed to meet at the same time, and violations were fined. Background variables were related to basic needs as reported, which presents the results from three partial regression models predicting work-from-home levels of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Older employees had the additional advantage of reporting a higher satisfaction of their relatedness needs—this was likely due to older people needing less contact with people outside their inner circle in order to feel satisfied with their social relations, as posited by socio-emotional selectivity theory and often corroborated [24]. We do note that the wording of the segmentation preference scale [13]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion