The COVID-19 outbreak has forced companies to embrace home-based working (HBW) at such speed that they have had little opportunity to consider the impact on their workers. It can be argued that the crisis has led to the most significant, intensive social experiment of digital, HBW that has ever occurred. The current situation, which involves the whole household being based at home, is an unprecedented challenge which may be at least an intermittent fixture for the next eighteen months.
The press have suggested that this revolution “might also offer an opportunity for many companies to finally build a culture that allows long-overdue work flexibility …many employees for companies who have sent all staff home are already starting to question why they had to go into the office in the first place” (The Guardian, 13/02/20). These optimistic takes on the current patterns of work focus on HBW’s emancipatory potential, offering flexibility, the lubrication of work and family responsibilities and the promise of increased productivity. Yet, this new world order, where the home becomes a multi-occupational, multi-person workplace and school, not only challenges boundaries but also conceptions of the domestic space.
The experience of homeworking is likely to present significant variation depending on organisational support, the worker’s role, socio-economic status, employment status, as well as household composition and size of living space. There are noteworthy concerns regarding intensified HBW, including poor work-life balance, enhanced domestic tensions and disproportionately negative impacts on those in lower socio-economic groupings. Moreover, HBW more generally increases the proportion of time women (most often) spend on housework and childcare, reproducing and reinforcing gender roles within the new ‘work-space’
The Working@Home project examines in-depth this radical shift in working arrangements and how it impacts on the wellbeing and productivity of workers and their households. Using a combination of in-depth interviews with sixty participants, representing the spectrum of this novel group of homeworkers, as well as a large-scale survey, the Working@Home project provides unrivalled insights into the experience of home-working for the UK population and the lives of citizens in this unprecedented time.
The findings will provide a benchmark for the resilience of both individuals and businesses and demonstrate the potential for the robustness of the infrastructure in the return to a ‘new normal’ after the crisis.
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