Research Article - (2023) Volume 9, Issue 4
Received: 23-Jan-2023, Manuscript No. IPCP-23-15545; Editor assigned: 25-Jan-2023, Pre QC No. IPCP-23-15545 (PQ); Reviewed: 08-Feb-2023, QC No. IPCP-23-15545; Revised: 27-Mar-2023, Manuscript No. IPCP-23-15545 (R); Published: 03-Apr-2023, DOI: 10.35841/2471-9854.9.4.39
The Coronavirus changed the workplace for people across the globe in 2020. Little is known about the foreseeable future of what and how COVID-19 has affected and the future of the people who left the customary office space to work remotely. It is a well-known fact that remote or not, increased job satisfaction and decreased levels of job stress always benefit the employee, the employer, and the organization. In this research, we study how working from home affects Job satisfaction and Job stress for the employee. We study whether working from home helps enhances job satisfaction and whether working from home does reduce the levels of work stress. The results and analysis of this study give insightful data which can connect an ideal remote working model for white collar jobs.
Research on this study topic helps determine whether employers and employees benefit from remote work options. The study will collect data from 150 employees who have worked from home for at least a year and analyze their levels of satisfaction and stress with the job.
Most research indicates a positive correlation between remote working and job satisfaction. But most of this data is not compared or analyzed with job stress during work from home, and this study does precisely that. This study aims to find a negative correlation between job stress and Job satisfaction. Many Studies have outlined various variables such as enthusiasm, motivation, and organizational commitment as contributing factors to job satisfaction and stress in a remote work environment. The study will collect data from employees who have worked from home for at least a year and analyze their levels of satisfaction and stress with the job.
Job satisfaction; Job stress; Work from home; Coronavirus
One effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a colossal development in the number of people working from home. This study is about: Whether these employees working from home get adequate job satisfaction and whether they’re more burdened with work stress. Work From Home (WFH) has been ascending for a long time, as additional occupations use PCs and broadcast communications, more individuals have dependable home internet associations, and more families have two guardians working all day. The COVID-19 pandemic sped up this cycle by driving a massive part of the worldwide labor force to briefly change to WFH. Contrasted with Working From the Office (WFO), WFH can decrease drive time, give more flexible working hours, increment work fulfillment, and further develop a balance between fun and serious activities. In any case, little is yet known about the more basic results of WFH, remembering its belongings for efficiency and which elements assume a part in making WFH pretty much more helpful than WFO. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of WFH on white collar employees working from home.
Many organizations unexpectedly changed all representatives from WFO to WFH in March 2020 due to the generally unforeseen pandemic shock. This study also measures the level of stress and work stress undertaken by employees during work from home. The business and occupations broke down. Most were working from home in whatever circumstances were available. Many representatives are profoundly gifted experts in their roles. The organization has generally assigned a severe level of work and responsibility to work from home without colleagues, bosses, and mentors physically present but rather through online communication. Simultaneously they are the absolute generally hard to break down. The positions include critical mental work, a joint group effort, working with clients, and development. Efficiency is difficult to quantify for such callings. These incorporate every worker's critical result and work hours, which give a characteristic proportion of efficiency [1-5].
Review of the Study
Remote work: The expression "remote working" itself has changed over. Now is the ideal time. It has been alluded to as teleworking (A review of telework research: Findings, new directions, and lessons for the study of modern work, working from home teleworking in the new millennium and remote working (assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well-being and work-life balance with the new COVID-19 pandemic, when representatives across the globe were sent home to work. While remote working customarily alluded to a willful work game plan, COVID-19 has made this work climate obligatory, in any event, for callings thought about fundamental. Research features the two obstacles and advantages of working from a distance. Obstructions to remote working incorporate factors, for example, a chief's hesitance and trouble in planning a small working project, concerns concerning controlling representatives who work beyond the office, and individual inclinations concerning remote working. Advantages of remote working include the chance for representatives to the more likely equilibrium between work and family, cost benefits for both worker and boss, improvement to the climate, and working inspiration.
Work satisfaction: Work fulfillment assumes a vital part in the connection between representative and boss as it impacts turnover rates. Research demonstrates that the degree of fulfillment a member feels inside their occupation is generally impacted by individual viewpoints. These variables incorporate kind of work, authoritative climate, human assets parts, character type, individual qualities, and mental traits. The expression "work fulfillment" has been approximately characterized. It has been alluded to as the level of happiness an individual is with their work. It has been characterized as "an emotional relationship to one's work that is an element of situational factors.” The satisfaction of balance between serious and fun activities and good work in work from home in combination with negligible job struggle can be characterized as fulfillment too.
The findings from the study of Mohammed et al., suggest that organizations and industries should design for working from home so that workers can easily switch jobs in the event of unforeseen circumstances, as Golden and Veiga argue: Be cautious in implementation given the plausible threshold of positive association above where job satisfaction declines as telecommuting increases are required. Overall, the results highlight, among other things, anxiety and stress related to the work from home hurt employee job satisfaction and that job autonomy improves work outcomes [6-10].
Work stress: The word related to pressure or work pressure, a quiet executioner, is presently a generally perceived issue by social researchers, wellbeing trained professionals, and all associations, including industry, research, and data innovation. Work related pressure presents a massive impact on the strength of a representative at the superior level, which prompts truancy, less inspiration, a low impulse to perform, low efficiency, exhaustion, and no curiosity to learn new things and foster groundbreaking thoughts and impact on worker's presentation and negative or less interest in work. Most analysts presumed that pressure was impacted by an assortment of individual and situational factors and the impression of a person of those elements. Studies revealed the critical negative connection between work pressure and occupation fulfillment in the study.
The essential professional requirements of remote work can significantly reduce productivity and work engagement on the one hand and increase work stress on the other. These results are consistent with previous studies 4,8,18 and also improve existing knowledge of the relationship between productivity, engagement, and stress experienced while working from home. The findings suggest that organizations and employees should consider these factors and develop policies to better manage them to achieve the positive outcomes typically expected from remote work suggests.
Objectives
• To study levels of Job satisfaction among employees
working from home.
• To study levels of stress among employees working from
home.
• To analyze the relationship between job satisfaction and
job stress for employees working from home.
Hypothesis
• Alternative hypothesis: There’s a significant negative
correlation between Job satisfaction and Job stress.
• Null hypothesis: There’s no correlation between Job
satisfaction and job stress.
The descriptive research design method has been used for this research. The research aims to identify the benefits of remote working and how it affects job satisfaction and stress. The descriptive research design method aims to obtain information to systematically describe a phenomenon, situation, or population. More specifically, descriptive research involves the collection of quantifiable and systematic data that can be used for the statistical analysis of the research problem.
The variables studied are job satisfaction and work stress. A sample of 150 responses has been obtained from employees. Inclusion includes employees working from home or who have worked from home for at least 1 year, who work in the corporate sector, and who are between the ages of 20-40 and exclusion employees who work in hybrid mode can’t be part of the study, and employees who have worked less than 1 year in work from home mode and fresher’s. The sampling technique used purposive sampling technique has been used and the data collection tool–Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS) by Paul Spector, has 36 questions. The employee must show their level of agreement on a scale from 1 to 6, where 1 indicates 'disagree very much' and 6 indicates 'agree very much. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) developed by Cohen, Kamarck, and Mermelstein. PSS consists of 10 questions ranging from 0 to 40, with higher scores indicating higher perceived stress. Scores ranging from 0-13 would be considered low stress. Scores ranging from 14-26 would be considered moderate stress. Scores ranging from 27-40 would be considered high perceived stress.
Data Analysis
Once the 150 samples were collected, the data from the questionnaire was manually entered into the excel sheet, and checking for any missing data was carried out. The data was then coded, and the total score was calculated according to the scoring key of the JSS and PSS scales (Table 1).
| Levels | Counts | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Low stress | 19 | 12.8% |
| Moderate stress | 119 | 79.9% |
| High stress | 11 | 7.4% |
Table 1: Stress level.
The first indication derived from the data was the frequency of stress which was distributed between 3 levels of stress such as low stress, moderate stress and high stress. The frequency percentage shows 12.8% in low stress, 79.9% in moderate stress and 7.4% in high stress. This indicates that most of the employees working from home experienced moderate stress levels irrespective of their job satisfaction level.
The calculated total score was considered a continuous variable, and the normality test was conducted as per the Shapiro-Wilk test. As per the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality, it is indicated that the data collected was not normally distributed as in the normally distributed data; the “p-value” is supposed to be >0.05. As mentioned in the above table, the p-value is lesser (Table 2).
| Job stress | Job satisfaction | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Job stress | Spearman's rho | — | |
| p-value | — | ||
| Job satisfaction | Spearman's rho | -0.264*** | — |
| p-value | < .001 | — | |
| Note: Ha is a negative correlation. *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001, one-tailed. | |||
Table 2: Correlation between job satisfaction and job stress.
As the data were not normally distributed, the data were tested through spearman’s correlation test to understand the correlation between Job satisfaction and Job stress. The spearman’s test indicated p-value as <.001 and the spearman’s rho as -0.264***, which indicates that the two variables are highly and negatively correlated. This means high job stress results in low job satisfaction, an d low job stress results in high job satisfaction (Table 3).
| Model | R | R2 | Adjusted R2 | Overall Model Test | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F | df1 | df2 | p | ||||
| 1 | 0.277 | 0.0765 | 0.0702 | 12.3 | 1 | 148 | < .001 |
| Model coefficients-Job satisfaction | |||||||
| Predictor | Estimate | SE | t | p | |||
| Intercept | 115.153 | 3.693 | 31.18 | <.001 | |||
| Job stress | -0.625 | 0.178 | -3.5 | <.001 | |||
Table 3: Study on the significance of the negative correlation between job satisfaction and job stress.
After spearman’s correlation test indicated a significant negative correlation between job stress and job satisfaction. A linear regression test was conducted to understand the impact of the independent variable, i.e., Job stress, on the dependent variable, job satisfaction. The linear regression test showed R2 as 0.0702, p-value <.001, and F value as 12.3. As the p-value is <0.05, it further indicates that a 1 unit change in job stress brings a 7.65% change in job satisfaction. To elaborate further, a 1 unit increase in job stress results in a 7.65% decrease in job satisfaction. This indicates that job stress is a significant predictor of job satisfaction [10-15].
In the academia there has been a lot of researches on the topic of job satisfaction, job stress and remote working. Research papers with combinations of job satisfaction and job stress, job stress and work from home, job satisfaction and work from home. There though has been limited number of researches on the topic that includes both variables job satisfaction and job stress in the context of work from home. This paper was made to study job satisfaction and Job stress among employees working from home and to study and test the hypothesis of whether there is a negative correlation between job satisfaction and job stress. The above data analysis suggests a significant negative correlation between job satisfaction and job stress.
That is, when there is high job stress, it results in low job satisfaction, and when there are low job stress results in high job satisfaction. Now to understand and interpret this data into applicable and valuable information, the context of job satisfaction and job stress needs to be studied in the context of remote working.
Remote working as a factor of employment, though it has existed for centuries, came into its professional and verified form only in the near 1990’s with the invention of computer desktops and in the 2000’s laptops. This began a new trend of remote working in the working culture. Although this remote working trend was new, it was prolonged. COVID-19 sped up this slow growth of the trend of working from home. With the pandemic shutting down the world, almost all employees were compelled to work from home. Most multinational companies were faced with a fundamental question “Is it necessary in every profession to report to an office to perform the job?/can working from home be considered permanent and feasible work?
This change in dynamic was brought to the entire world and resulted in most jobs shifting to working from home. Now to understand how productive work from home is, there’s a heavy demand in most companies to understand the levels of productivity, job satisfaction, job stress, and other factors. Many might agree that job satisfaction and stress are the two major factors that affect one’s job performance. The study of these factors in the context of remote working is necessary to understand how efficient working from home actually is for the employees and the company.
This study provides evidence that there is moderate level of stress in almost 80% of the employees who work from home. One can deduce the levels of stress being low and moderate is indication that there can be significant impact on satisfaction level and future employers can focus on helping reduce the stress level to benefit the employees which in turn can help the employer as well as company. There are diverse factors that affect the efficiency, productivity and stress levels of an employee who is working from home. Job satisfaction, productivity, motivation, satisfaction, stress levels, mental wel lbeing (stress/anxiety/burnout), work autonomy and the effect of work-family conflict these are some of the factors that influence an employee’s efficiency when working remotely. As these factors are an ever evolving dynamic it is important to study and consider them when understanding remote working. This study shows that high stress levels can result in low job satisfaction which is known to further affect turnover and retention within a company and many a times further result in increase or decrease of productivity of the company.
The possible limitations in this research can be the sample size of 150 as it was comparatively a smaller size. Other variables such as a specific metropolitan city, a specific industry such as IT, or a specific department such as Human resources could have been taken. Other variables such as productivity, motivation, burnout and work life balance could be some other variables that can be studied to understand remote working. Additional research is needed to understand and perhaps explore the relationship between job satisfaction and job stress within the context of remote working. As this research was conducted in 2022, just 2 years after the pandemic there has been a lot of current shifts and there is need to perform longitudinal research to test out whether the levels of stress and satisfaction remain the same over half a decade and where the levels of stress and anxiety settle or increase post and future pandemic years.
[Crossref] [Google Scholar] [PubMed]
Citation: Nair P, Hemalata K (2023) Job Stress and Job Satisfaction among Employees Working From Home. Clin Psychiatry. 9:39.
Copyright: © 2023 Nair P, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
