Shifting Workplace Paradigms: Twitter Sentiment Insights on Work from Home

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organisations to evaluate whether work from home (WFH) best fits future office management and employee productivity. The increasing popularity of web-based social media increases the possibility of using employees’ sentiment and opinion-mining techniques to track and monitor their preferences for WFH through Twitter. While social media platforms provide useful data-mining information about employee opinions, more research must be conducted to investigate the sentiment on Twitter of WFH employees. This paper meets this research demand by analysing a random sample of 755,882,104 tweets linked to employees’ opinions and beliefs regarding WFH. Moreover, an analysis of Google trends revealed a positive sentiment toward WFH. The results of this paper explore whether people (as employees) are enthusiastic and optimistic about WFH. This paper suggests that WFH has positive and supportive potential as an HRM strategy to increase workplace effectiveness for greater staff engagement and organisational sustainability.