Does Working from Home Influence Motivational Level of Employees? The Analysis of Gender Differences in Turkey

Abstract

Working from home has become “new normal” and great majority of employees have started to WFH (working from home), which has had profound effects on their personal and professional lifestyle. Taking into account the fact, this study aims to investigate the significant items affecting the motivational level of employees by considering the role of gender differences. In essence, this paper is proposed to understand that how the transforming of work form due to current circumstance, has impressed the various aspects of employees work-life. The sample of research includes 254 responders of diverse age, gender, educational situation, and their duration of employment working for different companies from all over Turkey. Data were collected through an online structured survey and the data were analyzed by descriptive statistic methods using probability sampling. The results illustrate that the overwhelming majority of respondents have started to work from home after the Coronavirus outbreak. Moreover, the findings of this study reveal the main reason behind the motivation on working home among remote employees but and the reasons, which have detrimental impacts on workforce desire to continue WFH. Surprisingly, participants are satisfied with the current trend of remote work altogether and they have also gravitated toward continuing work from home even after the Covid-19 pandemic period. Additionally, the other results of this research demonstrate that items such as the absence of social life, distraction by family members, self-organizing problems, time management, technological problems and productivity levels can have positive and negative impacts on WFH. Generally, by looking more into the details of findings, we can obviously distinguish the differences between results regarding gender categories.