The relationship between telework from home and employee health: a systematic review

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Abstract

Background

Globalization and technological progress have made telework arrangements such as telework from home (TWFH) well-established in modern economies. TWFH was rapidly and widely implemented to reduce virus spread during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, and will probably be widespread also post-pandemic. How such work arrangements affect employee health is largely unknown. Main objective of this review was to assess the evidence on the relationship between TWFH and employee health.

Methods

We conducted electronic searches in MEDLINE, Embase, Amed, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Scopus for peer-reviewed, original research with quantitative design published from January 2010 to February 2021. Our aim was to assess the evidence for associations between TWFH and health-related outcomes in employed office workers. Risk of bias in each study was evaluated by the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and the collected body of evidence was evaluated using the the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach.

Results

We included 14 relevant studies (22,919 participants) reporting on 28 outcomes, which were sorted into six outcome categories (general health, pain, well-being, stress, exhaustion & burnout, and satisfaction with overall life & leisure). Few studies, with many having suboptimal designs and/or other methodological issues, investigating a limited number of outcomes, resulted in the body of evidence for the detected outcome categories being GRADED either as low or very low.

Conclusions

The consisting evidence on the relationship between TWFH and employee health is scarce. The non-existence of studies on many relevant and important health outcomes indicates a vast knowledge gap that is crucial to fill when determining how to implement TWFH in the future working life.

Systematic review registration number

PROSPERO registration ID # CRD42021233796.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-021-12481-2.

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Most cited references 48

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The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews

Matthew J L Page, Joanne E McKenzie, Patrick Bossuyt … (2024)

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement, published in 2009, was designed to help systematic reviewers transparently report why the review was done, what the authors did, and what they found. Over the past decade, advances in systematic review methodology and terminology have necessitated an update to the guideline. The PRISMA 2020 statement replaces the 2009 statement and includes new reporting guidance that reflects advances in methods to identify, select, appraise, and synthesise studies. The structure and presentation of the items have been modified to facilitate implementation. In this article, we present the PRISMA 2020 27-item checklist, an expanded checklist that details reporting recommendations for each item, the PRISMA 2020 abstract checklist, and the revised flow diagrams for original and updated reviews.

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Critical evaluation of the Newcastle-Ottawa scale for the assessment of the quality of nonrandomized studies in meta-analyses.

Andreas Stang (2010)

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The good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting: meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences.

Ravi S Gajendran, David A. Harrison (2007)

What are the positive and negative consequences of telecommuting? How do these consequences come about? When are these consequences more or less potent? The authors answer these questions through construction of a theoretical framework and meta-analysis of 46 studies in natural settings involving 12,883 employees. Telecommuting had small but mainly beneficial effects on proximal outcomes, such as perceived autonomy and (lower) work-family conflict. Importantly, telecommuting had no generally detrimental effects on the quality of workplace relationships. Telecommuting also had beneficial effects on more distal outcomes, such as job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and role stress. These beneficial consequences appeared to be at least partially mediated by perceived autonomy. Also, high-intensity telecommuting (more than 2.5 days a week) accentuated telecommuting's beneficial effects on work-family conflict but harmed relationships with coworkers. Results provide building blocks for a more complete theoretical and practical treatment of telecommuting. (c) 2007 APA

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Author and article information

Contributors

Lars-Kristian Lunde: lars-kristian.lunde@stami.no

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): BMC Public Health

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): BMC Public Health

Title: BMC Public Health

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 1471-2458

Publication date (Electronic): 7 January 2022

Publication date PMC-release: 7 January 2022

Publication date Collection: 2022

Volume: 22

Electronic Location Identifier: 47

Affiliations

[1 ]GRID grid.416876.a, ISNI 0000 0004 0630 3985, Department of Occupational Medicine and Epidemiology, , National Institute of Occupational Health, ; Oslo, Norway

[2 ]GRID grid.416876.a, ISNI 0000 0004 0630 3985, Department of Work Psychology, , National Institute of Occupational Health, ; Oslo, Norway

Article

Publisher ID: 12481

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-021-12481-2

PMC ID: 8741267

PubMed ID: 34996400

SO-VID: 4b5e377b-7d17-4a2f-861a-b90bf10fb2fd

License:

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

History

Date received : 20 September 2021

Date accepted : 24 December 2021

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Public health

Keywords: working from home,e-work,satellite work, remote work,general health,stress,well-being,exhaustion,burnout,pain,life satisfaction,leisure satisfaction

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Public health

Keywords: working from home, e-work, satellite work, remote work, general health, stress, well-being, exhaustion, burnout, pain, life satisfaction, leisure satisfaction

The relationship between telework from home and employee health: a systematic review

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Abstract

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Conclusions

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Supplementary Information

Related collections

Novel Coronavirus Disease COVID-19

Most cited references 48

The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews

Critical evaluation of the Newcastle-Ottawa scale for the assessment of the quality of nonrandomized studies in meta-analyses.

The good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting: meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences.

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