Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well‐being and work‐life balance

By Alan Felstead, G. Henseke. 2017

761 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper critically assesses the assumption that more and more work is being detached from place and that this is a ‘win-win’ for both employers and employees. Based on an analysis of official labour market data, it finds that only one-third of the increase in remote working can be explained by compositional factors such as movement to the knowledge economy, the growth in flexible employment and organisational responses to the changing demographic make-up of the employed labour force. This suggests that the detachment of work from place is a growing trend. The paper also shows that while remote working is associated with higher organisational commitment, job satisfaction and job-related well-being, these benefits come at the cost of work intensification and a greater inability to switch off.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24890497c48020697e9dac7634a0771e2fff50cf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. K. Möhring
2. Ghulam Abid

In Sociology and Political Science

1. K. Möhring
2. Francoise Contreras
3. Eva Thulin
4. Bertil Vilhelmson
5. Martin Wetterstrand
6. Ghulam Abid

Citations in the corpus

• E-Leadership and Teleworking in Times of COVID-19 and Beyond: What We Know and Where Do We Go (2020, background): “After 2000s, work has been increasingly detached from on-site (Felstead and Henseke, 2017) to facilitate the workforce and to provide better services to the customers.”
• The COVID-19 pandemic and subjective well-being: longitudinal evidence on satisfaction with work and family (2020, background): “Studies on the effects of remote work on well-being have investigated job satisfaction but less so the satisfaction in other life domains (e.g. Felstead and Henseke 2017; Wheatley 2017).”
• Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy (2018, neutral): “Longer working hours, higher work intensity and work–home spill-over have been found to be associated with remote working made possible by new digital technologies (Felstead and Henseke, 2017).”
• New Telework, Time Pressure, and Time Use Control in Everyday Life (2019, background): “While the private home has continued to be the most common place for teleworking, other places have also become sites of teleworking practice, largely thanks to the spread of mobile ICTs such as laptops and mobile phones [8].”