How to Alleviate Feelings of Crowding in a Working from Home Environment: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

So Yeon Park (), Caroline Newton and Rachel Lee
Additional contact information
So Yeon Park: Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Julianalaan 134, 2628BL Delft, The Netherlands
Caroline Newton: Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Julianalaan 134, 2628BL Delft, The Netherlands
Rachel Lee: Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Julianalaan 134, 2628BL Delft, The Netherlands

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 2, 1-21

Abstract: The sudden adoption of working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic has required the reconfiguration of home spaces to fit space for remote work into existing spaces already filled with other domestic functions. This resulted in blurring of home and work boundaries, the potential lack of space for telecommuting from home, and telecommuters’ feelings of crowding. Numerous studies have shown the negative effects of crowding feelings on workers’ responses. This study focused on the issue of crowding in the residential workspace. An online survey was conducted to investigate how features of the home workspace correlate with telecommuters’ feelings of crowding and how these feelings affect satisfaction, health, and productivity. As a result, we found that various environmental features of home workspaces (e.g., house size, purpose of workspace, accessible balcony, lighting, noise, etc.), as well as psychological aspects (e.g., individual control over space use), had significant effects on telecommuters’ feelings of crowdedness. It was also found that feelings of crowding in the WFH environment can directly and indirectly affect teleworkers’ satisfaction with work environments, well-being, and work performance. Based on the results, we offered various potential ways to alleviate overcrowding issues in the WFH context.

Keywords: feelings of crowding; working from home; work environment; COVID-19; health; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/2/1025/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/2/1025/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:2:p:1025-:d:1026868

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().