The impact of work from home on work life-balance from Bangladeshi working women’s perspective

Abstract

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, it changed our way of life and the process of office work in each and every trade. Organizations had to enforce a new way of attending work, which would require everyone to stay at home for safety but at the same time be present and available to work; also as known as remote working or work from home. Although the concept of remote working or teleworking is not relatively new, the emergent Covid-19 situation made this process of working compulsory for most employees in most organizations, which was never the case before the pandemic. This new way of work has undoubtedly made noticeable changes in our way of life. The resolution of this study was to determine if the work from home setup of work is beneficial for working women in a developing country like Bangladesh, to find out the connection between work from home and work-life balance. Therefore, the intentions of this study were to observe the effects of working from home, work-life balance, and work stress on job satisfaction, and specifically from the point of view of working women in the context of Bangladesh. Working women already face multiple challenges in their day-to-day life, be it in their work-life or personal life. The pandemic has been hostile to working women, especially working mothers because it has put more pressure in their livelihood. The pandemic has made socio-economic and psychological adversities rather high on women far more than men for obvious reasons, and the working women of developing countries such as Bangladesh have it harder than others because of the certain lifestyle we practice here. Therefore, implementing some simple but effective policies can help in establishing good WLB in working women’s life. as women are getting the chance of staying close to their family members at their respective homes, the work from home policy is well accepted among them. However, the work stress needs to be paid attention to, seeing as women also have another shift of work at home which includes doing all the major household tasks. Doing further research and finding out the problems and solutions regarding this issues will help in increasing work life balance in working women’s life and will ultimately result in better employee productivity altogether.