The Effects of Telecommuting on Well-Being

Abstract

With remote work on the rise after the COVID-19 global pandemic, the current study was conducted to understand well-being among those who work remotely within the United States. Well-being outcomes in this study include work engagement, burnout, self-efficacy, stress, and loneliness. Some factors that were believed to affect well-being included having a home office setup and having children at home. A second contribution was to determine whether what we currently know about telecommuting applies during this “unprecedented” time during which vast numbers of people are forced to telecommute full-time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are two theoretical foundations for the current research: The boundary theory and the job demands-r esources (JD-R) model. Only those who were telecommuting at the time of survey implementation were eligible to complete this survey. Two-hundred and twenty-six participants completed the survey through the crowdsourcing platform, Prolific (https://www.prolific.co). In sum, the main findings indicated that telecommuters had decent well-being ratings and that desire to work from home, participants’ work from home situation (i.e., pre- COVID-19 or because of COVID-19), nor the time spent working from home did not necessarily play a role in well-being. Beyond this, self-efficacy was correlated with the remaining well-being aspects. Lastly, children were not indicated as playing a role in loneliness ratings and it was found that having a home office setup did not impact participants’ well-beings.