Working from home during COVID-19: boundary management tactics and energy resources management strategies reported by public service employees in a qualitative study

Abstract

Background

Increased working from home has imposed new challenges on public service employees, while also granting opportunities for job crafting. Grounding on the Job Demands-Resources model and Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources theory this exploratory research aims to investigate the work-nonwork balance of employees one and a half years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the research focus lies on employees’ job crafting strategies to optimize their working from home experience concerning boundary management and energy resource management.

Methods

Twelve semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with public service employees from different sectors in Germany. The experiences were content analyzed using the software MaxQDA and inductive and deductive categories were derived.

Results

Boundary management comprised different strategies such as communicative (e.g., negotiating work time), physical (e.g., going to the garden), temporal (e.g., logging off in between the work day) and behavioral (e.g., prioritizing tasks) strategies. The job crafting strategies regarding energy management included preventing exhaustion (e.g. taking breaks), healthy cooking and energy management in case of sickness (e.g. deciding on sick leave).

Conclusions

This qualitative case study enriches research on job crafting by offering insights on boundary tactics and energy resources management strategies for remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results point out different starting points for employees and decision makers, how a work-nonwork balance, energy management and thus employees’ wellbeing may be increased when working from home in the future.

Trial registration

The study design and methodology were approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Cologne and the study was prospectively registered (Ref No. 21-1417_1).

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-024-18744-y.