Working from Home when Teachers Do the Same – Teleworking and Work-Family Conflicts during COVID-19 Lockdowns

Teleworking is often considered as a means to ensure better work-life balance for employees, especially for parents. While empirical findings are less than conclusive even during “normal” times, the relationship between working from home and work-life balance became even more complex during the pandemic when lockdown measures were in place. To ensure social distancing during the first wave of the COVID-19, an unprecedented number of employees across Europe started working from home while at the same time childcare institutions and schools remained physically closed and hundreds of thousands of children were left to their parents’ responsibility. Using Eurofound’s Living, Working and COVID-19 survey data from April 2020, this paper looks at two types of time based work-family conflicts: the incidence of Family Interference with Work (FIW) and the incidence of Work Interference with Family (WIF) among the working population. Estimating a series of multinominal logit models (MNLM) we find that both types of tension were significantly but very differently related to teleworking as opposed to working away from home. While teleworking increased FIW at the same time it also reduced WIF for the overall population. The effects of working from home were however highly heterogeneous by parental status as well as by gender. Most of the negative effects of teleworking appeared among parents and especially among mothers with young children who also enjoyed none of the positive effects of working from home during the pandemic. Possible explanations and consequences are discussed