Perception of Work from Home and Employee well-being: A Pilot Study on Entry Level IT Employees

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic has necessitated governments to enforce social distancing norms and lockdown. Organizations had to implement complete remote working in order to keep the business running. This sudden change could not provide training to employees to move to this new arrangement. Also, these measures taken by governments across the world had huge impacts on labor markets. Though the term workplace flexibility was first introduced by the IT industry, Work from home (WFH) as a permanent component added in the HR practices has multifaced consequences. Few types of research have shown positive effects like, work-life balance, cost reductions, increased productivity, where as some have contradicting impacts on employees e.g., work family interferences, increased stress, burnout and unpaid overtime. Leadership’s effectiveness may act as an influencing factor in employee well-being, especially at entry-level employees who need more guidance in on job role and responsibilities. The present research aims to bring together three separate strands-work from home, IT sector, and employee well-being. This paper measures employees’ perception towards well-being by considering pre-validated items and measuring each construct like Psychological well-being, Subjective well-being, Physical well-being, Leadership effectiveness, and Perception of Employees on WFH. Based on a pilot study on 33 entry-level IT employees during December 2021, this research has validated the measurement of each construct through multiple measurement items and established an indicative relationship between Perception of WFH on employee well-being. Data was analyzed using SPSS and AMOS software.