Organizations and Employees Say “I do” to Work from Home during the Pandemic: A Sentiment Analysis of Twitter

Abstract

Social media platforms like Twitter have become an integral part of daily life. Twitter is emerging as a powerful digital platform for people to express their emotions and opinions on varied events and issues with the world. Working from home during the coronavirus lockdown is one phenomenon that has affected billions across the world, generating intense debates and polarizing global factions. This study aimed to analyze the sentiments of the Indian workforce about their work from home experience imposed during the coronavirus lockdown. To this end, a total 10,400 relevant English language tweets were collected from Twitter. Sentiment analysis and social network analysis were performed on the retrieved tweets. The results indicated that though the sentiments of the tweets were about consistently distributed among the three principal categories (positive, negative and neutral), there was a predominance of positivity towards working from home due to the coronavirus lockdown. Further, social network analysis of the tweets unraveled varied clusters indicating employee’s sentiments towards the pandemic-induced work from home policy.