Office workers view on the new work environment at home : A quantitative study of office workers experiences with the change regarding the work environment while teleworking

When the covid-19 pandemic struck, most of those who work in offices in Sweden had to conduct their work from their homes. When the work is conducted from home, new problems can arise when the work environment no longer is limited to the physical office. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the work environment on office workers and whether their experiences of the work environment has changed when office workers have been forced to work from home as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. In order to be able to answer this purpose, three research questions have been designed that are inspired by three theoretical perspectives, which are: the demand-control-support model, the demand-resources model and the work/family border theory. Previous research regarding telework is also used to shed light on what previous studies have resulted in regarding the impact of telework on the employee. The study has a quantitative research method where the data collection has taken place through surveys and the selection of respondents has been those who work in offices but have to some extent been forced to work from home due to the covid-19 pandemic. The collected data material has then been processed and interpreted in the IBM SPSS program and then made into frequency tables and crosstabs that are used to report the results in the chapter for results and analysis. The conclusions that emerge in this study are that teleworking is a complex phenomenon that has both positive and negative effects for the employee. Many aspects of teleworking prove to have positive effects to a lesser extent for the employee, however, no particularly prominent aspect turns out to have changed drastically for the better. The most negative effect of teleworking that emerges in this study is the social support that most people experience as something that has changed for the worse. Women also prove to handle telework in a better way than men do, where women find it easier to keep their work life and their private life separated when they are working from home