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Headed for a crash?: what we don't know about working from home and human health - a literature review

Published: 08 December 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Working from home has exponentially increased as a result of the pandemic and is likely to remain as a central part of the ecosystem of work. However, little is known about the impact that the physical home-environment can have on stress. Many organisations use self-reported surveys to assess and monitor employee stress when working from home. Results from this literature review, highlight the limitations of self-reported and neurobiological stress measures to correlate with one another, supporting the need for further evaluation into whether self-reported stress measures alone, are an accurate indication of employee stress when working from home. Findings largely evaluate valid psychological paradigms of self-reported stress, such as the Perceived Stress scale (PSS). To the best of our knowledge, widely adopted organisational wellbeing surveys are not based on psychologically validated scales and therefore may be more unreliable at identifying employee stress. Findings also identify a lack of research correlating physical home-environmental design characteristics and neurobiological measures of stress. Several physical home-environmental design attributes and their corresponding impact on neurobiological stress are identified but represent single, stand-alone studies that require replication to validate results. Future research should focus on defining the characteristics of physical home-environmental design; its correlation with neurobiological stress and how these may align with self-reported stress to validate survey-based measurement and monitoring.

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cover image ACM Conferences
BuildSys '22: Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation
November 2022
535 pages
ISBN:9781450398909
DOI:10.1145/3563357
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 December 2022

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Author Tags

  1. environmental design
  2. home working
  3. neurobiological measures of stress
  4. perceived measures of stress
  5. stress

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