Revolutionalising work-life balance: Revealing the impact of telecommuting on levels of fatigue and work engagement.

The lines between people's work and personal lives have gotten thinner over the last two decades. Since

COVID-19 entered the workforce, this condition has gotten worse. Working from home (WFH), a notion that dates back to 1973 and is also known as "telecommuting" or "telework", has made a comeback and is now frequently referred to as "the new normal" in many organizations. 

Like this an involuntary telecommuting has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. Work overload in

covert locations is a direct result of telecommuting. Conflict is more likely as a result of the blurring of the

boundaries between personal and work life. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, workers' working conditions

and environments have been noted to be more demanding, involving increased workloads, pressure to

perform, violence exposure, and yielding to administrative and boss demands. Professionals were

negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic for a variety of reasons, such as inconsistent work

schedules, shift work arrangements, role ambiguity, role conflict, inadequate pay, excessive or low

workloads, and physical aspects of the workplace. 

As a flexible work arrangement, telecommuting from home is said to give employees more control over

the spatiotemporal context of their work, improving the caliber of organizational activities. Due to the

increased flexibility of work commitments, the chance to work in a comfortable environment, and other

benefits of working from home, people who work remotely are likely to be more productive and

experience fewer work-life conflicts. Home-based telecommuting is also believed to improve work-life

balance by lowering the perception of conflict between work and personal life, despite being widely

perceived as an employee-oriented human resource practice.

Conversely, improved work-life balance has direct and indirect benefits for businesses, such as

improved social exchange procedures, decreased turnover. Furthermore, home-based telecommuting

is generally perceived as an employee-oriented human resource practice that promotes better work-life

balance by lowering the perception of conflict between work and personal life. More work-life balance,

on the other hand, has both direct and indirect benefits for businesses, such as improved social exchange

procedures, lower employee turnover, and higher productivity.

But it's important to emphasize that since working from home depends only on social and economic

factors, its benefits are debatable. There are a few disadvantages to telecommuting, including insufficient

time for personal obligations and work-related obligations, as well as impaired administrative exposure

due to decontextualised working practices.

Further, WFH can impact outcomes in the work and life domains, which are two broad domains. Research

has shown that Work From Home (WFH) positively affects work-related domains like engagement and

performance. We reasoned that people's difficulty in reconciling work and personal life could be caused

by the "dark side" of work engagement because WFH leads to work engagement, and work engagement is

positively related to work-family conflict and generally to work-life conflicts due to its resource-depleting

capabilities. In summary, working from home can have unfavourable consequences on remote workers'

capacity to handle work-life conflicts and, consequently, strain the perception of work-life balance.

Realistically speaking, a thorough examination of how life and work interact is necessary to design resilient

work practices that permit employees to work from home. In order to avoid incorporating work-related

issues into everyday routines, workers must have more control over the spatial and temporal aspects of their

work. This is especially true for some personality types that exhibit higher levels of focus, energy, and

dedication when working. In actuality, employees who are very committed to their jobs are probably not go

ing to notice the imbalance between work and life that comes with telecommuting, which leaves them open

to burnout and work overload.

This suggests that by taking a managerial stance, telecommuting will exacerbate the worker's sense of fatigue from their job. These days, it takes a great deal of energy to work at irregular times, which may be an implicit result of telecommuters' inability to manage the juxtaposition between work and life. To deal with this situation, explicit HRM strategies tailored to the demands of telecommuters should be created, taking into account the particular difficulties that affect the actions and results of people working from home.

References

Palumbo, R. (2020). Let me go to the office! An investigation into the side effects of working from home on work-life balance. International Journal of Public Sector Management, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print).

Ugwu, F.O., Enwereuzor, I.K. and Mazei, J. (2022). Is Working from Home a Blessing or a Burden? Home Demands as a Mediator of the Relationship Between Work Engagement and Work-Life Balance. Applied Research in Quality of Life. ‌

Zahid Hussain Bhat, Yousuf, U. and Saba, N. (2023). Revolutionizing work-life balance: Unleashing the power of telecommuting on work engagement and exhaustion levels. Cogent Business & Management, 10(2).