Who will save employees from working at home?

Working from home has become the new normal, thanks to coronavirus.

In keeping with international trends, Kenyan companies have been forced to embrace this new normal whose potential benefits include increased productivity, stronger organisational loyalty, increased morale and job satisfaction, additional flexibility, increased family time, fewer monthly expenses, and fewer sick days taken, according to research conducted by Ajay Garg and Jan van der Rijst, who co-wrote a paper titled “The Benefits and Pitfalls of Employees Working from Home”.

The working-from-home phenomenon has also arrived with big, hairy, unprecedented challenges. Anecdotal evidence suggests that both employers and employees are unprepared to handle them.

One social media user, Bernard Moseti, tells me: “We are working longer hours than usual. Taking up assignments of up to three colleagues at ago. Everything sent on email is now an emergency. The eight-to-five rule is no more. Then the Zoom meetings that take the first 30 minutes of asking whether Person X is joining.”

His words encapsulate the frustrations of most employees who have been “blessed” with the gift of working from home.

Garg and Rijst concur. They note in their study that technologies like email and teleconferencing lack warmth and social presence, getting in the way of working effectively.

WORKING WOMEN

Zoom, Skype and their hallowed relatives have become the blue-eyed children of working from home.

But even so, they’ve made it that much harder to disconnect from work. One social media user commented that she felt like she was always working because of this constant connectivity.

Research has also shown that continual meetings via these platforms are likely to cause burnout, fogginess and alienation, according to an article in the New York Times.

Technology also exacerbates working-from-home challenges for women. A study I conducted in 2019, "Opportunities Digital Technologies Present for Women in Media", concluded that flexibility, which has often been viewed as a great benefit of technology, is both a blessing and a curse for working women.

While the blessings are obvious, the curses come packaged in the socially accepted and expected roles of the woman in the house as the primary caregiver of her children and husband, cook, home-teacher, and other stereotypical duties in addition to her work duties.

In her book Women and Journalism, Suzanne Franks referred to it as being in an electronic cage as opposed to an electronic cottage.

NO LEVERAGE

A female Facebook user pointed out that between homeschooling, housekeeping, working remotely and a one-week virtual office retreat they were undergoing, she felt like she was going to drop dead from fatigue.

With the current state of affairs, men seem to be right inside the cage with women.

Employers are facing the prospects of injured profits and a host of other business challenges, and this might explain the overzealousness and radioactive speed with which they are summoning employees for virtual meetings, among other extra demands on their time.

The impression one gets sometimes is that employers believe their employees have an extra eight hours to their days.

And employees, cognisant of looming layoffs, pay cuts and unpaid leave (if they have not happened already), are dancing to the tune of the employers, often leaving little time or room to experience the benefits of working from home that were mentioned earlier in this article.

It’s quite disturbing to think that the post-pandemic employee might be a jaded, burnt-out version of himself or herself, if the challenges are not contained.

For employers, it would work in their favour to regard the physical and mental well-being of their employees as highly as they do Zoom meetings, and to trust that their employees are doing all they can at home to be worthy of employment because they simply can’t afford not to.

The author works for the Nation Media Group; [email protected]