Employees’ satisfaction with working from home experience and work-life balance in Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic

The discussion/paper examines employees’ satisfaction with their experience of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. It assesses how employee’s satisfaction was influenced by the need to balance their work and private life, by several socio-demographic variables as well as some job characteristics. The relationship between employee satisfaction with the working from home experience and work-life balance was tested using data from the Living, Working and COVID-19 dataset, provided by Eurofound (2020). The results from standard probit models and from robustness analysis show that satisfaction with the working from home experience was influenced by several work-life balance issues among which workers’ difficulty in concentrating on their jobs due to their family responsibilities. Overall, women reported less satisfaction with their experience of working from home than men. The paper suggests several policy interventions that could improve workers’ job satisfaction after the pandemic when working from home.