Work From Home and Mental Well-Being: Psychological Impact of the Practice over a Prolonged Period
Source | allthingstalent.org | Team – All Things Talent
Before the pandemic struck, many studies highlighted the benefits of remote working and it seemed like an incredible perk for many employees. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to Work from Home, it was expected to be a win-win situation for the employee, however, the outcome has been quite the opposite, studies have shown - the trade-off is often long hours, more virtual never-ending meetings, and if there were boundaries separating work and personal life, it seems they have faded away.
Bandwagons are easy to get on, they are difficult to stay balanced on, however. As the pandemic hit us, organizations that used to look at work from home with suspicion, suddenly found themselves opening their hearts to the idea. Revenue depended on it, after all. Suddenly, quite early into this experiment, we had a whole bunch of organizations committing a future roadmap without fully studying the feasibility of the idea, especially the psychological impact on a social entity. Everyone wanted to hook on to this biggest thing since the steam engine!
10 months hence, with schools still largely closed, never-ending calls, and twice the amount of work, the entire WFH house of cards is collapsing in on itself. The pragmatics are getting back to work in a more normal fashion. If the traffic on the roads is any indication, barring IT, everyone else is getting back to work. Despite the Internet of Things, wheat still largely gets cultivated by farmers who actually go out there and toil in their fields and then get it ground on machines run by workers on an actual shop floor and that’s how we get to eat. That is the real deal about how human beings work and how they socialize.
That, however, is not how we have been functioning over the last year. Many of us have been reduced to 12-14 hours of seeing a lot of faces on a computer screen (if the video is on, which strangely is not even the case most of the time and that tells a lot about whether we are enjoying it at all) and productivity has been reduced to meetings. Somehow actions have been reduced to activities.
