Work-From-Home occurs in the space of homes comprising physical and non-physical spaces where agents interact in personal, social and transactional relationships. These spaces are nested in a dynamic relationship with the external environmental space. This study aims to adopt a Systems Thinking perspective, the premise being that all issues and/or constituents of a phenomenon interact with each other, either influencing others or getting influenced themselves.
Extant literature points out that Work-From-Home is an ambivalent experience. Employees are aware that the flexibility offered to them is also a contribution to their organizations so that organisations can adapt to environmental changes and demands. The ‘inducement’ and ‘contribution’ of this flexibility create a push and pull against one another for the employee and the question that arises is to what extent are organizational leaders managing flexible workers with this paradox in mind?
The office, in this study, is considered to comprise of ‘collective space’ and ‘transit space’ and the home space is considered in the light of office goer-household chores- caregiving conflict within families. A definition of Work-From-Home is formed to clarify the type of ‘out-of-office’ work considered: ‘Work that is carried out by employees of organisations at their homes- in the same city or otherwise during fixed hours stipulated by employers, not necessarily on all days of the working week and who are renumerated by salaries’.
A literature review is carried out along two streams; the first concerns itself with ‘why’ a phenomenon could get affected by the space it occurs in and the second with ‘what’ and ‘how’ does this happen. The first stream explored space-phenomenon relationships across domains of knowledge followed by space-organisation dynamics. A General Morphological Approach was adopted for the second stream wherein Work-From-Home literature and Work-From-Home phenomenon were both characterized by dimensions, sub-dimensions and values. We define seven ‘settings of space: physical, emotional, household, facilities, job, environmental and temporal.
A mixed method research design is adopted which consists of qualitative studies forming the basis of formulating hypotheses. Preliminary interim results of qualitative studies indicate that ‘flexibility’, both in terms of ‘time’ and ‘work’ is the primary factor that drives employees to seek Work-From-Home arrangements; at the same time, ‘social connect’ emerges to be a consequence of Work-From-Home, be it enhanced social connect with family and friends outside office or diminished social connect with office colleagues.