Accelerating work from home. A study of teleworkers’ everyday time use, time pressure and well-being during the 2021 pandemic

During the pandemic, required work from home (teleworking) suddenly reorganized many people´s everyday lives with potential consequences for well-being and health.

This project examines how the extensive and mandatory work from home has affected people´s everyday lives and welfare during the pandemic year 2021.For this purpose, we use newly collected data on the population´s everyday use of time - the national Time Use Survey (TID) conducted by Statistics Sweden in the autumn of 2021.

The gross sample is nationally representative and consists of 18,000 individuals.

Data includes information on the amount of time used for gainful employment in the home and can be related to other essential time use during a day - household work, care and family life, social interaction, sleep and rest, etc.

Furthermore, data includes information on how the individuals experience their time use in terms of felt time pressures, stress, perceived health and wishes about their future time use.In a theory-informed way and using multivariate statistical methods, we analyze questions about the scope of homework, its distribution and temporal impact on everyday life outside working hours.

We pay special attention to social differences in homework practice, time use and welfare implications, for example between women and men, different family constellations, and employees with different skills, education and professions.

Furthermore, we analyze issues of homework´s connections to individual´s expressed need for more time for different purposes, felt time pressures and perceived health conditions.Since teleworking is expected to be permanent at higher levels even after the pandemic, the results of the study are of great relevance to the actors in working life and the future organization and arrangement of telework and working hours in time and space.