Does Telework Stress Employees Out? A Study on Working at Home and Subjective Well-Being for Wage/Salary Workers
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Does Telework Stress Employees Out? A Study on Working at Home and Subjective Well‑Being for Wage/Salary Workers Younghwan Song1 · Jia Gao2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract With the expansion of high-speed internet during the recent decades, a growing number of people are working from home. Yet there is no consensus on how working from home affects workers’ well-being in the literature. Using data from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines how subjective well-being varies among wage/salary workers between working at home and working in the workplace using individual fixed-effects models. We find that compared to working in the workplace, bringing work home on weekdays is associated with less happiness, and telework on weekdays or weekends/holidays is associated with more stress. The effect of working at home on subjective well-being also varies by parental status and gender. Parents, especially fathers, report a lower level of subjective well-being when working at home on weekdays but a higher level of subjective well-being when working at home on weekends/holidays. Non-parents’ subjective well-being does not vary much by where they work on weekdays, but on weekends/holidays childless males feel less painful whereas childless females feel more stressed when teleworking instead of working in the workplace. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of working at home and sheds lights for policy makers and employers to re-evaluate the benefits of telework. Keywords Working at home · Telework · Subjective well-being · Happiness · Time use JEL Classification J22 · J28 · D1
* Jia Gao [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Union College, Schenectady, NY 12308, USA
2
Poverty and Equity Global Practice, the World Bank, Washington, D.C., USA
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Y. Song, J. Gao
1 Introduction With the expansion of residential high-speed internet and advances in telecommunication tools, recent decades have seen an increased prevalence of people working from home. In 2003, about 15% of wage/salary workers reported that they worked from home at certain times on an average day, whereas in 2016, this number went up to 19%.1,2 Currently, half of the US workforce has a job that allows them to work from home at least part time, and the number of employees who regularly work from home more than doubled from 2005 to 2015.3 In addition to the development of technology, the reduced wage penalty for teleworkers, increased work–family conflicts, and rising female labor force participation also led to this homeworking trend (Felstead et al. 2005; Oettinger 2011). In both media and academic literature, two contradictory images of homeworking exist. Some people depict it as “the best of both worlds” because it facilitates the integration of paid work and family, whereas others portray it as “cutting my own throat” because of the negative intrusions on work in home (such as a cat sitting on the laptop, a baby crying on the ground, or a dog chewing on the s
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