Song and Gao investigated how wellbeing is influenced by telework; their findings will interest people developing and managing workplaces. Specifically, Song and Gao probed “how subjective wellbeing varies among wage/salary workers between working at home and working in the workplace…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 wellbeing also varies by parental status and gender. Parents, especially fathers, report a lower level of subjective wellbeing when working at home on weekdays but a higher level of subjective wellbeing when working at home on weekends/holidays. Non-parents’ subjective wellbeing 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.”
Younghwan Song and Jia Gao. 2019. “Does Telework Stress Employees Out? A Study on Working at Home and Subjective Well-Being for Wage/Salary Workers.” Journal of Happiness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00196-6
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.