Work from home (WFH) approach in public organizations in COVID19 era: productivity and efficiency issues

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is also known as coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome. After its first identification in China in December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public Health Emergency of International Concern regarding COVID-19 on 30 January 2020. It was already spread to many countries including Italy, Spain and others before the declaration by WHO.  Later on 11 March 2020, WHO declared the problem as a pandemic. As of 31 May 2021, more than 170 million cases have been confirmed, with more than 3.54 million confirmed deaths which are attributed to COVID-19.  making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has revealed how the global systems can become vulnerable and lead to unintended consequences in every sector. As reported, many countries had imposed lockdown to reduce the pressure of the disease infection as the virus transmits very easily from one person to another when they are in close contact. The first wave of pandemic was followed by the second wave which have been hitting the countries like India, Nepal, Brazil, Bangladesh and so on. Experts in the medical sector have also warned the world leaders that the third wave of the pandemic could come in a harsher way in the near future.

The pandemic has resulted in significant social and economic disturbance globally, including the largest global depression. It has led to shortage of supplies in the market. Numerous educational institutions and public areas have been partially closed in the countries where COVID-19 infection rates were normal, and fully closed where the rates were extremely higher. Many events have been cancelled or postponed due to the imposed lockdown and fear of disease infection. Activities that requires public gathering or the public service sectors where general public are the customers, are also impacted by the COVID-19 and lockdown induced by its spread. Public offices had to be closed completely in the complete lockdown.

In the meantime, many public offices, including government and non-governmental organizations brought the approach of work from home (WFH) to the employees to adapt with the new situations and continue the office works amid lockdown. The organizations are compelled to deploy the work from approach as the lockdown imposed by the governments created the situation where working from their office is really tough to implement.

Critical Assessment

The impacts of COVID-19 on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. While most of the literatures available are mostly from outside Nepal, those will have implications in Nepalese context as well. The emergent issues related to work from home (WFH) in the context of COVID19 pandemic are critically analyzed from different perspectives.

Nature of Jobs: 

As proposed by Dingel & Neiman (2020), the nature of job positions will have tremendous role in efficacy and productivity of the work from home scheme. Based on the job types, they can be categorized whether applicable for work from home approach. There are some job types which can be done through the WFH approach like the work which do not need direct public engagement. They encompass mostly the table works, communicating with the staff members, teaching by virtual means, handling IT department, etc. Opposite to this, field works, technical maintenance of mechanic and electrical items, serving the patients at hospital, hospitality services in hotels and so on need direct engagement of the service providers or the employees. If the jobs which need direct engagement in-person are granted for WFH, then surely, there will be chaos in providing the services to the clients as it is impractical to serve the clients in such circumstances. So, that will yield less efficient and less productive outcomes. However, proximity from the employees’ home and the service providing area will possibly affect the efficiency of the work meaning that if practically managed, the organization can allow such job holders to stay at home in assurance of their prompt service whenever required. However, in such scenario, productivity of the work may reduce.

Literatures on this topic showed that higher positions that need higher qualifications might be productive when allowed or granted for WFH. For instance, in an agriculture extension office working for a district, the senior officers and experts can be allowed for WFH and the field level technicians might need to engage with farmers unless there is requirement of high-level expert service. The field level employee can monitor the field status and report back to the experts and senior officers for necessary actions. The communication of such work can be done by email or telephone conversations.

Scheduling and time allocation: 

This are an important management issue when the employees are instructed to stay at home and work. Since this could be slightly different scenario, at the starting time, it might be difficult to manage the time with proper scheduling. When an employee remains at his/her home, this may create difficult situations for him/her to prioritize the office and family work. Unless managed successfully, the employee could plunge into a chaotic situation when the COVID19’s threat comes together with the official tasks and family works. This can create immense pressure to the employees which eventually results on low productivity and efficiency of the office works. It might be further difficult to manage meetings with office team as the team members may not be capable enough to get a common time for the meetings as the situation differs in each home.

Employees’ behavioral factors and family/society settings: 

Employees when work in office premises, they must abide the strict rules of their organization to keep uniformity and integrity at the office locations. However, the work from home situation is completely different from the formal settings. While working from home, the different work environment in his/her home may be a causal factor for changes in psychological behavior. The neighboring social contexts and situations also play crucial role in making the environment conducive for the office work.  The employees’ behavior in the WFH setting will be highly dependent upon the surrounding situations. Family issues sometimes derail the office works as the other family members may not understand fully the complexity of the office tasks implementation. If the family environment is conducive, the employee’s productivity and efficiency will increase while the unfavorable environment will produce inefficient outcomes. Employee’s economic condition and resourcefulness will also impact the work efficiency. For instance, virtual meetings could be arranged or managed in an excellent way if internet facilities are sound in home.

Gender Implications: 

It should be noted that the gender dynamics will affect the WFH approach to a great extent. In the patriarchal societal contexts, if the family follows traditional notions, the women employees might be the victim of WFH schemes as they need to work for home and office together. To balance both works, it will be very difficult to women members of the family as they need to involve in culinary works, take care the children, and manage time for their office works. Several studies have been published after the COVID induced lockdown in many countries that depict pitiable situation of women workers. The positive outcomes could be the better availability of time for both man and woman to participate in family matters as there is no need to go the offices.

Leadership or supervisor’s role: 

Because of changing environment, the employee might have faced multiple challenges to adapt in new situations. Organization’s expectations could be high, but it could be very difficult for the employees to manage his/her time at initial stage. In such cases, leaders or the supervisors can play creative role to encourage the employees rather than enforcing to complete the assigned activities in a harsher way. In fact, creatively encouraging the employees might result in positive outcomes. Productivity of the jobs done through work from home approach could be enhanced with the support from the immediate supervisors and the project team leaders.

Job satisfaction: 

As the work from home scheme initiated, the organization’s expectation could be much higher as it is presumed that the employees are at their home. In the changed contexts, the activities are to be altered according to the contexts to adapt to new environment. For instance, if a job holder is a trainer in normal times, he/she might need to be involved in virtual training events as a resource person. These kind of modifications in the working strategy will eventually demands highly adaptive work force. If the employee can not grab the path, he/she could be dissatisfied with the new changes. Likewise, some organization have deployed performance-based promotion practices. In the case when work from home is implemented, the workload could be lower for the individuals and the remuneration might have been adjusted accordingly. This means that the employees will get lesser money from their work. In such case, the employee could be unsatisfied with his/her job. Several factors contribute to the job satisfaction during work from home and those need to be addressed judiciously.

Considering the above points, it is evidenced that there are pros and cons of work from home (WFH) strategy. The organization should be coherently managing the issues emerged during the implementation of the scheme.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing global problem affecting larger sections of the society. The unique spreading capacity of the novel coronavirus has threatened the human civilization and disrupted the global economy. The restricted movement in the severe case has compelled the public and private organizations to adapt a new system of work order called ‘work from home’. However, the issue of the productivity and efficiency of the works done by the employees in the WFH approach is a crucial one.  First, it is crucial to ensure that goals of an organization are achieved during the enforced working from home period. The pace and patterns of working before COVID-19 should be re-examined, and employee wellbeing and domestic situation should be considered when allocating team tasks and planning team communications. Second, in post-COVID-19, businesses could evaluate how to change processes to keep the benefits arisen during COVID-19 such as increased productivity, reduced communication barriers, and integrated remote working through e-services. Thirdly, businesses could evaluate how the occasional working from home could maximize the benefits for the organization and the employees.

Several factors are contributing to the success of work from home approach. The nature of jobs, managerial capacity to scheduling and allocating time, gender implications, employees’ behavioral factors including psychological situation, social contexts, family settings, pandemics situations and leadership’s role in managing the team members efforts are the crucial factors in this process. Working environment should be smooth at the home to achieve higher productivity. Otherwise, the whole approach could be counter-productive which in turn damages reputation of the organization due to poor service delivery. So, leadership of the organizations need to take this approach seriously and should brainstorm among the team members and policy makers to get right decisions at right time. Reports from various literatures claim that the WFH approach can be mainstreamed whenever the situations get disordered and even in the post pandemic period if the scheme has potential to scale up.

One of the key limitations of the WFH approach is the unsuitability of the approach when the nature of the job demands direct engagement with the clients or customers. Such kind of activities should be done in a different way by following the standard safety protocols and by employing social distancing as prescribed by the health practitioners.

Recommendations

The rapid adoption of digital technologies is witnessed especially by using the collaboration software in the team for various events in the organizational context that disrupted many industries and organizations. It is agreed that the COVID pandemic could be the starting point of a new era for world-wide flexible working arrangements and digital team collaboration. As the lockdown was imposed in the countries, digital literacy was increased tremendously. So, the opportunities exist in the organizational contexts to innovate new ideas and approaches of functioning of organizations in different contextual arrangements. The following suggestions are made as a part of recommendations to the public and private service sectors for the implementation of genuine approaches in near future:

1)     As stated earlier, literacy under digital technologies is increasing, but it is not at enough scale. So, the organizations need to have campaigns or capacity building exercises for the employees of their organizations so that qualified team is generated in using sophisticated and advanced digital technologies. The several digital technologies are booming. So, this kind of exercises need to be carried out regularly to give latest updates on the technologies to the employees. New skills have to be gained to maintain or develop the kinds of supporting communication away from the audience that create a sense of belonging to both team and work (Hafermalz & Riemer, 2021).

2)     Work from home is itself a crucial and complex issue for the management team. It is very hard to monitor the work being done by the employees unless the organization has some concrete platform or the advanced tool to monitor the work. This might need deployment of project management software or any customized version of applications. Leaders or supervisors need to get proper trainings to handle those applications so that the work of employees can be closely monitored.

3)     If work from home is inevitable, the organizations need to make the employees resourceful by providing necessary devices, tools and home appliances so that smooth activity implementation can be carried out in the employees’ home. The official arrangement could be sophisticated and well-equipped which helps to run the work smoothly. However, in employees’ home, the services may not be available which eventually derail or slow down the work process. In other way, it could create dissatisfaction in the employees’ mindset only because of unavailability of required materials.

4)    The organization should closely monitor the impact of the work from home approach, not only from the perspective of activity implementation, but also from the employee’s welfare perspectives. The leadership or the supervisors should be watchful in assisting their subordinates and be ready to facilitate whenever required.

5)     It the outcome of the WFH approach is positive, organizations should explore opportunities to mainstream the approach even in the post-COVID era. As the approach is already employed by some top international companies like Google successfully, it is worthwhile to scale up the approach if the organization feels it productive and efficient. Future world will be the era of digitization which eventually makes the world even smaller village. So, there could be the cases where we don’t need to open offices for many service sectors. Further, working for organization by sitting with the family members could create a satisfying environment for the employees which will be eventually beneficial for the organization in long run.

   

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