The Paradox of Work and Home Segmentation

Separating work from home life is seen as a way of achieving psychological detachment from work that allows workers to restore the energy they deplete from work and maintain high levels of well-being, particularly through minimising conflict between work and nonwork domains. My research, with colleagues across three universities, found support for this causal chain in our studies of homeworkers. But also, we found some support for our theory that there are negative consequences to segmentation which may reduce the positive effects on well-being; though these only arose when hybrid workers worked on site but not when they worked at home.

An inability to detach from work was a major influence on the well-being of employees in universities (academics and non-academics) in the diary study that I led during the Covid-19 pandemic. Alongside feeling lonely, it was negatively correlated with measures of well being (anxiety–calmness, depression–enthusiasm and the meaningfulness of life) in two four-week periods during the Spring and Autumn of 2020. Well-being declined between May and September, and increases in these two factors largely accounted for the reduction. Work–nonwork conflict was related to an inability to detach from work, as well as to all well-being measures. Pandemic-specific homeworking factors, such as the extent to which work could be done normally, in contrast, were insignificant; though in the Spring period the pandemic itself was important as the daily change in the Covid-19 death rate had a significant negative effect on the weekly fluctuations in wellbeing throughout May, with it affecting older workers more; but not in September. 

Detaching from work may be especially difficult when working at home; equally enacting segmentation through boundary management may be more demanding. Nonetheless homeworkers can and do develop segmentation strategies, alongside the use of video-conferencing, to help manage their lives. In a follow-up study based on focus groups, I found that boundary management methods included having a separate office or instructing children and other household members to avoid interrupting them. More subtle strategies to segment work from home life included people dressing in their work clothes just before logging on, then changing out of these when finishing their work; or that of a person living alone who used a towel to cover his PC after logging off, to completely hide his work equipment and signal the end of a working day. The extent of the success of such micro-management of homeworking, particularly in aiding work performance, was a major influence on employees’ orientation towards homeworking and its role in their future after the pandemic.

However, enacting segmentation may not be costless. It involves self-regulation as people have to override and replace a spontaneous and habitual response of attending to current tasks, thoughts or feelings with an alternative, goal consistent response of segmentation. Reflecting this, my colleagues and I, developed a dual process theory of segmentation and work–nonwork conflict.  Positive effects of boundary segmentation on such conflict, and in turn well-being, will be countered by the negative effect of the emotional effort and depletion of people’s capacity for self-control it entails. Testing our theory, using the homeworking survey data, we found that the theory did not apply when people were working full-time at home; the positive side of the model was supported but no strong negative effect was found. However, through data from a later survey of employees across the economy, conducted in 2022, who worked some days as home and some on site, we found support for the dual process theory, segmentation had two counteracting consequences. On the days that the hybrid employees worked on site, the level of enacted segmentation increased both detachment from work and energy depletion, through reducing employees’ self-control capacity. The combined effect of the two paths to work–nonwork conflict when working onsite is to cancel each other out. Thus a conclusion from data showing segmentation has no effect on work–nonwork conflict would be misleading. Equally generalising from homeworkers or from onsite studies to homeworking would be risky. More attention to the location of work needs to be given in assessing work-related mental health.

A likely explanation for the variability in segmentation’s effects between locations is that employees are more likely to leave tasks unfinished at the end of the day when working on site, as they may have fixed official working hours and commuting arrangements, whereas the time flexibility that homeworking may provide means people are more likely to complete tasks by the end of their working day. This may be helped by the relative lack of interruptions from work colleagues that homeworkers report as an advantage of homeworking, and conversely that interruptions break the flow of work when onsite.

The research team was Stephen Wood, Elizabeth Hurren (both University of Leicester), George Michaelides, Kevin Daniels (both University of East Anglia), Ilke Inceoglu (University of Exeter) and Karen Niven (University of Sheffield).

G. Michaelides., S. Wood, K. Niven and I. Inceoglu, A dual process theory of the effects of boundary segmentation enactment on work–nonwork conflict, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 2024, Vol. 97, 1502–1525.

S. Wood, G. Michaelides, I.Inceoglu, E. Hurren, K. Daniels, and K. Niven, Homeworking in the Covid-19 Pandemic: a diary study, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021, Vol 18, Issue 14, 7575.

S. Wood, Exposing the downsides of Homeworking in time to design new normal, Annals of Social Sciences & Management Studies, 2022, Vol. 22, No 7, 555705.