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The ongoing circumstances of maintaining social distance have forced companies to shift their on-campus activities online to the extent possible (The Economist, 2021; Lund et al., 2021). According to a survey from Enterprise Technology Research, many organizations have increased the permanent work from home as much as twice what they expected before the CoVID 19 pandemic (Castrillion, 2020). According to recent reports in international magazines and newspapers, several companies, particularly information technology companies including Microsoft, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Facebook, and Twitter, have either proposed or implemented their permanent work from home plans for most of their workforce (Kelly, 2020; ETHRWorld, 2021).
In 2021, TCS claimed to have 25 percent better productivity with work from home (Das, 2021). While prima-facie it appears to be a win-win situation for employers and employees, preliminary studies paint a different picture (van der Lippe & Lippényi, 2020). It has been argued that compared to physical meetings, engaging employees physically, emotionally, and cognitively online (popularly known as electronic engagement) is challenging. It has consequences on employee performance, whether good or bad (Wang et al., 2021; Kim & Ausar, 2018). Studies relating to electronic engagement and its forms such as brand engagement, citizen engagement, and user engagement are in plenty (see Chang et al., 2021; Rouibah et al., 2021; Ifinedo et al., 2021; Rivera-Trigueros & Olvera-Lobo, 2021; Vakeel & Panigrahi, 2018) but relating to work are sparse, the area that our study proposes to explore.
There are a few scholars who studied the behavior of office returnees. For instance, a recent investigation by Samuel (2021) to find out the changes that have come in employees’ behavior post- work from home reveals a lack of trust in the employer, feeling surveillance unnecessary, etc. These questions pertain to the employee's challenges while with an only electronic medium of interaction and connectivity, and know-how of limitation of investing physical, emotional, and cognitive resources into work only electronically affecting employees’ engagement levels. However, studies answering the core questions about IT employees’ electronic engagement in India are sparse (Gupta, Kar, & Jebarajakirthy, 2021). India, a global Information Technology (IT) hub, attracts multi-national IT companies, making it a suitable venue for an IT-related study (Bala Subrahmanya, 2017; Thomas, 2021). To make the results of this study relevant to the global audience, we also conduct depth interviews of IT workers living abroad, United Kingdom. Inclusion of a developed country in the study not only helps increasing the scope of our study but also enhancing transferability of our study results.
Specifically, the following are the three key research questions that need to be answered: (1) What challenges do employees face while working from home? (2) Why do they face those challenges? (3) How are they overcoming these challenges? Thus, the overall objective of the present paper is to explore the challenges faced and possible remedies proposed by the IT employees in India to engagement themselves electronically in the work while working remotely.