1. Introduction
Teleworking or telecommuting is a work mode that consists of implementing labour tasks outside a conventional workplace, such as at home or in a remote place, and usually relies on the use of information communication technologies (ICTs) (
Baruch and Nicholson 1997). Teleworking implemented at home is called working from home (WFH); otherwise, it is labelled as nomadic telework (
Bailey and Kurland 2002). Although many of the questions developed in this paper can be extrapolated to any telecommuting mode, we will constrain our analysis to WFH.
The advantages of working from home benefit workers (e.g., allows a better balance between job and family), firms (e.g., WFH could be more productive) and society (reduces workers’ commuting, traffic congestion, contamination, etc.). They have been extensively argued in the literature and tested empirically (
Baruch 2001;
Beauregard et al. 2019). Those positive consequences and the energy crisis in the 1970s led to the prediction of its generalized spread in developed countries (
Bailey and Kurland 2002). However, it did not happen in many countries either at the beginning of the 21st century (
Illegems et al. 2001;
Baruch 2001) or at the beginning of March 2020 (
Fana et al. 2020). Until Spring 2020, the development of WFH across territories was not uniform, due to factors such as labour cultures and regulations or the development of ICT infrastructures (
Gschwind and Vargas 2019). In Europe, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries reached a notable development of WFH, but in Mediterranean states such as Spain, France, Italy and Greece, teleworking arrangements displayed a limited expansion (
Elldér 2019;
Gschwind and Vargas 2019).
In Spring 2020, practically all countries around the world adopted lockdown measures to mitigate the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. In Spain, companies were strongly advised to allow WFH for those employees whose functions could be carried out from home (
Corral and Isusi 2020). Similar measures were applied in neighbouring countries with similar degrees of development in working from home, such as Portugal (
Tavares et al. 2021) and Italy (
Donati et al. 2021). Undoubtedly, WFH allowed many firms to carry on economic activity despite quarantine measures (
Belzunegui-Eraso and Erro-Garcés 2020); however, many companies and employees without any experience in WFH were pushed to implement this working mode (
Corral and Isusi 2020). Therefore, during 2020–2021, practically all Spanish workers worked from home if their work was adaptable. Otherwise, although the tasks of a given worker were not adaptable, their interaction with the administrative departments of the company was surely implemented by means of ICTs. Likewise, the majority of citizens received telecommuted services such as medical aid, online shopping, procedures with public administrations, gymnastic activities, etc.
Tavares (
2017) report three principal issues on well-being in a WFH setting: musculoskeletal pain, isolation and stress. Isolation is usually linked with a lack of worker comfort, engagement, satisfaction and commitment (
Gainey et al. 1999); occupational stress (
Dussault et al. 1999); morbidity and mortality (
Johnson et al. 1989); psychological strain (
Bentley et al. 2016); and overall well-being (
Yang 2017). Undesirable manifestations of stress include fear, worry, an inability to relax, an increased heart rate, difficulty breathing, disturbances in sleeping patterns, changes in eating patterns, difficulty concentrating, worsening of pre-existing health conditions (physical and mental) and increased use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs (
WHO 2022).
The above considerations motivated us to write our paper. It analyses Spanish workers’ perceptions of the influence of individual, environmental, organizational and job factors of WTF and whether they cause isolation and stress. To develop this empirical analysis, we have used the survey by the Spanish government agency Research Centre of Sociology (CIS) (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, in Spanish): “Tendencies in the digital society during COVID-19 pandemic in Spain”, from March 2021. We answer the following research questions (RQ):
RQ1: What are the explanatory factors of workers’ perceptions that working from home causes stress?
RQ2: Does isolation have a significant impact on stress, according to the opinions in our sample?
RQ3: What are the explanatory factors of workers’ perceptions that working from home causes isolation?
5. Discussion
This paper evaluates the factors that inhibit the Spanish working population from perceiving or enable their perceiving that working from home (WFH) produces stress and isolation. Although WFH was a marginal practice in Spain before March 2020, it became a generalized work mode during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, practically all the respondents whose jobs were compatible with WFH have experienced this work arrangement. In any case, the surveyed persons had remotely performed some tasks for their jobs and for some common activities of daily life. Therefore, it is expected that a great proportion of the Spanish working population has formed an opinion on WFH.
RQ1 was “What are the explanatory factors of workers’ perceptions that working from home causes stress?” This question was answered by performing hierarchical logit regressions on stress. We sequentially introduced individual variables, organizational and environmental factors, job factors and isolation. We checked whether a better model includes all kinds of variables and reaches a McFadden’s R2 close to 70%, which can be considered excellent. However, this finding does not imply that all the variables are significant. Whereas XGEN, B_W_FAM, COMMUTING, EMPLOYER, OVERLOAD and ISOLATION showed statistical significance in the best (the fourth) model, this did not follow for the other factors (GENDER, CHILDREN, B_BOOM, A_DEGREE, G_CONNECT, HOME_NO_A, ORG_SUPP, N_PROMOT, WFH_USU).
Neither gender nor having a child in care presents a significant impact on feelings of stress. This result contradicts several reports, such as those by
Beckel and Fisher (
2022),
Calleja and Mota (
2022),
Pataki-Bittó and Kun (
2022) and
de Sousa et al. (
2022), regarding the link between being female and mental issues.
Macciotta et al. (
2022),
Heiden et al. (
2021),
Mendonça et al. (
2022),
Pataki-Bittó and Kun (
2022),
Maillot et al. (
2022) and
Niu et al. (
2021) found a significant relationship between having children to care for and stress. However, our findings are not an exception. While
Adamovic (
2022),
Palma-Vasquez et al. (
2021) and
Giudice et al. (
2022) did not find gender to be a relevant factor,
Giudice et al. (
2022) also outlined that having children at home was not impactful, and even
Danker et al. (
2022) pointed out that being a man without family obligations is the profile with a greater risk of stress. Likewise, we believe that the nonsignificance of gender in stress perception could be a symptom that Spanish family culture has evolved in the past decades toward a more balanced distribution of household duties between men and women.
Contrary to
Sutarto et al. (
2021), we did not find a significant influence of academic level on the perception that WFH produces stress. The reason may be that nowadays it is easy to find a wide variety of positions that can be easily adapted to WFH, such as telephone operation and after sales, that does not necessarily require a high academic education, although efficiently performing their duties requires experience and some skills.
We have checked whether perceptions about personal benefits from WFH are relevant to explaining stress perceptions. As we expected, perceiving that WFH improves work–life balance inhibits the perception of stress. Therefore, this result confirms the theoretical statement in
Baruch (
2001) and the empirical findings by
Ferrara et al. (
2022),
Beckel and Fisher (
2022),
Golden (
2012),
Pataki-Bittó and Kun (
2022) and
Maillot et al. (
2022) on that influence. Surprisingly, perceiving that an advantage of WFH is avoiding commuting has a positive significant relation with stress. This unexpected sign could be explained by the extraordinary context in which WFH has been performed in our survey. WFH was mandatory during 2020 in Spain and so avoiding commuting was not optional but obliged. There is a profile of employees who appreciate face-to-face interactions, who perceive them as a satisfying consequence of their work (
Maillot et al. 2022). To join these interactions, of course, moving from home to the workplace is needed, and thus, not commuting is linked to the negative feeling of losing person-to-person relationships. However, that relationship does not seem to be robust, given that the
p-value of commuting presents great variability between models.
Variables linked to home infrastructure impact on stress with the expected sign (negative if it is perceived as good connectivity and positive if the home is not adequate for WFH). Even though in Model 2, these variables are significant, the
p-value does not denote statistical significance in the models with better adherence to data (i.e., Models 3 and 4, which have the lowest values of AIC, BIC and HQIC). Therefore, in contrast to
Gajendran and Harrison (
2007),
Weinert et al. (
2015),
Nakrošienė et al. (
2019),
Niu et al. (
2021),
Sutarto et al. (
2021),
Soubelet-Fagoaga et al. (
2022),
Macciotta et al. (
2022),
Maillot et al. (
2022) and
Pelissier et al. (
2021), we have not found clear evidence of the direct impact of home equipment on perceiving that conducting one’s job at home can produce stress. The weak influence of G_CONNECT and HOME_NO_A on STRESS could be partially explained by the limited variability in these variables. In regard to G_CONNECT, 75% of answers reported having satisfactory or good internet service. Similar considerations can be conducted for the relationship between HOME_NO_A and STRESS.
As far as variables linked to organizational issues are concerned, technical and material help by the organization has no significant influence on the perception that working from home produces stress. This finding contradicts
Nakrošienė et al. (
2019),
Danker et al. (
2022),
Soubelet-Fagoaga et al. (
2022) and
Deschênes (
2023). However, we must also outline that
Beauregard et al. (
2019) and
Niebuhr et al. (
2022) reported the stressor effect of organizational support because it may push workers to feel that employers are exerting greater control and surveillance. We cannot rule out that the absence of a significant impact of organizational support on feelings of stress could be because the positive effects of material and technical help are dissolved by the perception of greater surveillance.
Perceiving that WFH could be a barrier to career promotion has a significant positive impact on stress in the second logit model. However, when job variables and isolation are introduced, the significance of that impact is lost. In short, we have not found a significant direct impact from variables linked to organizational support and an organization’s position about WFH on the perception that it causes stress. On the other hand, being an employer has a negative relation with the perception that WFH produces stress. The reason may be that in fact, in many firms, home teleworking is still a new arrangement, and employers may have problems measuring workers’ productivity (
Mello 2007); therefore, a loss of trust in employees could lead employers to believe that employees are not productive enough because they are not being supervised in person (
Fairweather 1999), and therefore, their job-related effort decreases (
Mello 2007).
We have found that whereas having experience in WFH before the COVID-19 crisis does not have a significant impact on stress, information and work overload is the most relevant variable. The first finding does not confirm that employees who had already performed their jobs from home will have a lower probability of feeling stress, as pointed out by
Maillot et al. (
2022) and
Lange and Kayser (
2022). The ICTs used to perform teleworking are essentially the same those used in many daily activities, such as teleshopping and joining social networks. Thus, a very relevant requirement to avoid stress, such as self-efficacy (
Lange and Kayser 2022), has been achieved by many workers with the daily use, in their personal sphere, of ICTs, so previous experience in telecommuting was not highly relevant.
RQ3 was “What are the explanatory factors of workers’ perception that working from home causes isolation?” To answer this research question, we fitted a set of hierarchical tobit regressions on ISOLATION. Individual factors, organizational and environmental variables and job factors were sequentially introduced, and we checked whether the better model has factors of all types as its explanatory variables. This does not imply that all the variables have statistical impact. While B_BOOM, G_CONNECT, HOME_NO_A, N_PROMOT, EMPLOYER and OVERLOAD are significant to explaining ISOLATION at standard statistical levels, this does not follow for GENDER, CHILDREN, A_DEGREE, ORG_SUPP or WFH_USU.
We found that among sociodemographic factors only variables linked to age (B_BOOMER and XGEN) have a significant negative impact on perceived isolation. Therefore, we can conclude that younger generations (such as millennials) are more sensitive to isolation in remote work arrangements. Note that even though this finding is in accordance with the empirical literature (
Carillo et al. 2021;
Van Zoonen and Sivunen 2022), paradoxically, the millennial is the first generation to be considered digital natives (
Akçayır et al. 2016).
As in the case of stress, we have not found a significant impact on gender and having children to care for on the perception that home telecommuting may produce isolation. This suggests that in our sample, there is evidence of neither an increase in gender inequalities during the COVID-19 crisis, which was reported by
Fang et al. (
2022), nor a greater perception by women that WFH produces conflicts between work and home, as
Macciotta et al. (
2022) outlined. This fact is also in accordance with the nonsignificant impact of these factors on STRESS and reinforces our conjecture about a balanced between men and women in performing household tasks. Our results also contradict reports such as
Calleja and Mota (
2022) that point out that a woman with children in care is a profile that experiences stress and isolation.
We observed that the perception of WFH as an enabler to attain a satisfactory balance between work and a personal life is negatively linked with the perception of isolation. This result is in accordance with
Weinert et al. (
2015). In fact, this is the individual variable with the greatest marginal effect on isolation.
Environmental and organizational variables are the most influential factors in the perception of the relationship between isolation and remote work. Feeling that ICTs were adequate to develop work with enough quality had a significant negative impact on isolation perception. Perceiving that home is not adequate to implement WFH is positively linked with experimenting isolation. Both findings are in accordance with our expectations, which were grounded in the reports by
Van Zoonen and Sivunen (
2022),
Beauregard et al. (
2019),
Mello (
2007),
Even (
2020) and
Giudice et al. (
2022). The marginal effect of home adequacy is much greater than that of ICT infrastructure. These results are in accordance with
Fana et al. (
2020) on the adequacy of ICT infrastructure in performing teleworking in Spain and in accordance with
Cuerdo-Vilches et al. (
2021), who reported that on variables linked with infrastructures, physical space is a more critical issue than technological space.
The perception that WFH inhibits career development displays a significant positive influence on the feeling that it produces isolation. In fact, this is the variable with a greater marginal effect on isolation perception. It is in accordance with the reports on the relevance of so-called distance to power: distance makes the worker invisible to managers (
Orhan et al. 2016;
Sahai et al. 2020) and is a barrier to influencing colleagues and events in the workplace; therefore, it is an obstacle to being promoted and rewarded (
Baruch 2001;
Adamovic 2022). On the other hand, although technical and material support by organizations has been outlined as a key factor in avoiding workers’ isolation (
Van Zoonen and Sivunen 2022;
Even 2020;
Sahai et al. 2020), we did not find statistical significance in that variable. A possible explanation is that available resources for ICTs in households before March 2020 were perceived good enough, and this allowed satisfactory mediated interactions with coworkers and supervisors. Thus, it is logical to suppose that the lack of organizational support in this regard was not an issue for workers’ well-being, because it was not perceived as necessary.
Overload is a significant factor in explaining isolation. The reason may be that jobs that are more virtual may produce more isolation (
Sahai et al. 2020). Likewise, we found that having experience with working from home before the COVID-19 crisis did not display significance, which contradicts
Van Zoonen and Sivunen (
2022). A plausible explanation could be that technologies of mediated communication, which are crucial instruments to avoid worker isolation, in 2020 were in common use for personal and recreational purposes. Thus, adapting to mediated communication in a job setting was not an issue for many employees.
To explain stress, the most influential variables are, by decreasing importance, work and information overload (marginal effect = 5.825) and isolation (marginal effect = 1.838); the variables with greater capability to explain isolation are linked with material work resources and how WFH impacts professional career development. The balance between family and work, and age, are also significant variables (but less) to explain both outputs. Although organizational and environmental variables did not display statistical significance to explain stress in the logit models when we introduced overload and isolation in the regression equation, some of those variables were significant if overload and isolation were not considered. This result suggests that home infrastructure factors and the perception that WFH inhibits obtaining a promotion produce stress. Even though both explanatory factors have weak direct impacts on stress, they may have significant mediated influences by means of exacerbating the perceptions of overload and isolation.
Practical Implications
Our findings have clear, practical implications. We found that infrastructure is perceived as a crucial variable to avoid isolation in working from home. In this regard, practically 50% of responses reported neither material nor technological help from their employers. Therefore, Spanish legislation on telework in Royal Decree 28/2020 of September 22 did not solve the imbalance of rights and obligations between companies and workers pointed out by
Corral and Isusi (
2020). In any case, it is not exclusive to Spain. The lack of legal frameworks for how workplaces in the home office should be equipped is a common problem in many countries (
Niebuhr et al. 2022). Likewise, it is commonly agreed that there is a lack of regulation at a collective level (
Williamson and Pearce 2022). The results in this paper reveal that more regulation on these issues is needed.
Information and work overload has been revealed to be a key issue in explaining the perception of stress and isolation. Of course, the employee must be protected against this drawback by means of labour regulations such as the right of digital disconnection, which in Spain is regulated by Royal Decree 28/2020 of September 22. Additionally, there is a need for measures at a firm level to manage communication overload. They must include rationalizing the information stream and communication channels because its diversification may cause overflow. It is also necessary to help employees to efficiently manage, and to inform them about, ICTs in a WFH setting.
Firms committed to the use of telecommuting and WFH as work modes must solve many challenges to reach an optimal organization: training workers in new modes to implement tasks, changing organizational culture, modifying organizational infrastructure, etc. (
Herrera et al. 2022). Similarly, teleworkers face a situation where work–home balance is of particular relevance (
Kohont and Ignjatović 2022). When developing a WFH scenario, home is not only a place to spend personal time but also an extension of the office. Therefore, spatial and temporal boundaries must be stated to ensure that a balance between personal life and professional life, which is relevant to explaining stress and isolation, is reached. Training is needed for the management of limited home physical spaces in a WFH setting.
Spanish labour authorities have introduced some regulations to prevent work overload. However, legal efforts will never be enough without cultural changes in organizations and workers. The organizational culture must focus on criteria with alternative criteria to presentism, such as measurable objectives and trust. If WFH is perceived as less productive than work conducted in the workplace, teleworkers may be forced to work longer hours and with more intensity than those in the conventional workplace. On the other hand, employees assume more responsibility to be productive. In this regard, authors such as
Harris (
2003) have outlined the relevance in a teleworking arrangement of a so-called implicit psychological contract that reflects the recognition between employee and employer of their respective inputs to the job in relation to implementing WFH practices.
6. Conclusions
This paper is inquiry into the factors that Spanish workers perceive relevant to explaining stress and isolation 1 year after the COVID-19 crisis started. Whereas the most relevant factors to explain stress are overwork and isolation, perceiving fewer professional development opportunities, infrastructure dotation and overwork are the most influential variables on isolation. Age and work–life balance have significant impacts on both output variables, but with much less weight.
The limits of this paper can be objects of further research. We analysed a cross-sectional survey that took place in Spain in March 2021. At that time, COVID-19 was a great concern for the health authorities of many countries, and the population had low vaccination coverage. To take a complete perspective on workers’ feelings, a longitudinal assessment covering more-advanced phases of the SARS-CoV-2 crisis is necessary. For example, when the population was fully vaccinated or when COVID-19 became an endemic illness, working from home was no longer mandatory.
WFH was widely extended when the survey was carried out, but it was an exceptional period. First, WFH was not optional but instead mandatory. Likewise, in Spring 2020, there was a lockdown for schools, and thus, the challenge of adopting a new work mode was added to the difficulty of facing it with children at home during working hours. Third, feelings of stress and isolation from the COVID-19 constraints and quarantines may bias perceptions about the effect of WFH on well-being. These questions reinforce the need for a longitudinal study to obtain a more complete picture.
Our work focused on Spain, which had a similar labour culture and similar telecommuting coverage before March 2020 to that of other Mediterranean countries, such as Italy or Greece. However, both issues were unlike those of other countries, such as Anglo-Saxon or Nordic states. Therefore, the statements made in this paper must be considered with caution before extrapolating them to other territories. Similar studies may be performed in other geographical areas to identify patterns that may be similar or dissimilar in regard to the perception of factors that enable or inhibit teleworkers’ isolation and stress.