THE IMPACT OF WORKING FROM HOME ON EMPLOYEES’ PRODUCTIVITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION ORGANISATION

Abstract

The present study focuses on evaluating the relationships between job demands, resources in working from home arrangements and employees' productivity in a higher education organization during the COVID-19 crisis in Malaysia. The multiple regression technique was utilized to determine the effect of work-life conflict, social isolation, distracting environment, and job autonomy on the employees' productivity using the Statistical Package for the Social Science version 18 (SPSS 18). The data was collected through an online survey that yielded 120 usable questionnaires. The results showed that job autonomy positively and significantly influences employees' productivity during WFH in the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, the distracting environment negatively and significantly influences employees' productivity during WFH. The results suggest that the higher education organization should pay more attention to strengthen the job autonomy as the higher job autonomy given to employees will increase the employees' productivity while working from home. It means that the workplace environment has to be improved when applying WFH, as a distracting environment will reduce the employees' productivity while working from home. In addition, other job demand factors such as work-life conflict and social isolation were found to influence employees' productivity insignificantly.