Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Mar 25;16(3):e0249127.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249127. eCollection 2021.

Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Balazs Aczel  1 , Marton Kovacs  1   2 , Tanja van der Lippe  3 , Barnabas Szaszi  1
Affiliations

Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Balazs Aczel et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary for most professionals. Whether working from home is the key or impediment to academics' efficiency and work-life balance became a daunting question for both scientists and their employers. The recent pandemic brought into focus the merits and challenges of working from home on a level of personal experience. Using a convenient sampling, we surveyed 704 academics while working from home and found that the pandemic lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers but around a quarter of them were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on the gathered personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that in the future they would be similarly or more efficient than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data. Taking well-being also into account, 66% of them would find it ideal to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown. These results draw attention to how working from home is becoming a major element of researchers' life and that we have to learn more about its influencer factors and coping tactics in order to optimize its arrangements.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Percentages of the responses (N = 684) given to the three answer options when asked how working more from home would affect the efficiency of their research after the lockdown.
Fig 2
Fig 2. The comparison (N = 703) of working at home and in the office concerning how the different aspects of research and work-life balance can be achieved.
The bars represent response averages of the given aspects.
Fig 3
Fig 3. The density distributions of the responses (N = 704) when asked how much of their worktime they worked from home before the pandemic lockdown and how much they would find ideal to work from home in the future.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Westfall RS. Newton’s Marvelous Years of Discovery and Their Aftermath: Myth versus Manuscript. Isis. 1980;71(1):109–21.
    1. Charalampous M, Grant CA, Tramontano C, Michailidis E. Systematically reviewing remote e-workers’ well-being at work: a multidimensional approach. Eur J Work Organ Psychol. 2019;28(1):51–73.
    1. Van der Lippe T, Lippényi Z. Beyond formal access: Organizational context, working from home, and work–family conflict of men and women in European workplaces. Soc Indic Res. 2018;1–20. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Felstead A, Henseke G. Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well‐being and work‐life balance. New Technol Work Employ. 2017;32(3):195–212.
    1. Parent-Thirion A, Biletta I, Cabrita J, Vargas O, Vermeylen G, Wilczynska A, et al. Sixth European working conditions survey: Overview report. Eurofound (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working …; 2016.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources