Who moved my boundary? Strategies adopted by families working from home

With the increase of remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be expected that soon a great number of households will consist of more than one teleworker. This raises the question of how to manage work and nonwork boundaries for the collective of household members who work from home. To better understand the adjustment to collective work from home, we examined the experiences of 28 dual-income households with school-age children residing in five countries. In doing so, we found specific strategies that families used to manage boundaries between two or more household members’ work, learning, and home domains. We identified four strategies to define boundaries in the collective (i.e., repurposing the home space, revisiting family members’ responsibilities, aligning family members’ schedules, and distributing technology access and use) and five strategies to apply boundaries to accommodate the collective (i.e., designating an informal boundary governor, maintaining live boundary agreements, increasing family commu nication, incentivizing/punishing boundary respect/violation, and outsourcing). Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for remote work and boundary management.

With the increase of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic (hereafter “the pandemic”), we can expect that soon a great number of households will consist of more than one teleworker2 (McKinsey Global Institute, 2021; Shirmohammadi et al., 2022). This raises the inevitable challenge of how to manage boundaries around work and nonwork, not just for the individual(s) working from home, but for everyone in the household. How do family members who work from home manage boundaries in the household? How does a family distribute the home space, responsibilities, technology devices, and even internet access to allow all members to get their work done? How are the work, family, and school schedules of parents and children coordinated, communicated, and aligned? These questions are unanswered by current work-nonwork research, which has paid little attention to either boundary management at a collective level or to strategies adopted to address the unique challenges of working from home. To provide more insight in managing work family boundaries, the scope of work-nonwork boundary research should expand to consider what family systems need to function effectively when more than one member is working from home.

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mshirmohammadi@uh.edu (M. Shirmohammadi), m.beigi@soton.ac.uk (M. Beigi), Wee.Au@newcastle.ac.uk (W.C. Au), c.n. tochia@soton.ac.uk (C. Tochia). 1 The first and second authors contributed to this work equally. 2 Individual workers performing tasks away from their primary offices, using electronic media to interact with others inside and outside the organization (Chong et al., 2020; Delanoeije et al., 2019; Spreitzer et al., 2017).

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Journal of Vocational Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvb https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2023.103866 Received 14 February 2022; Received in revised form 1 March 2023; Accepted 20 March 2023

Work-nonwork boundary management refers to an active process including decisions and actions to demarcate or combine the boundaries between work and nonwork domains of life (Rothbard & Ollier-Malaterre, 2016). The literature suggests that boundary management minimizes undesirable outcomes such as work-family conflict (Ashforth et al., 2000) or maximizes desired outcomes such as work-family balance (Clark, 2000), satisfaction (Rothbard et al., 2005), and productivity (Perlow & Kelly, 2014). The increasing permeability between work and nonwork domains has intensified the need to utilize strategies to manage the boundaries between them more actively (Allen et al., 2014; Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013). The most commonly studied boundary management strategies include segmentation (e.g., keeping work out of the family), integration (e.g., combining work and family) (Allen et al., 2014; Rothbard et al., 2005), and use of technology to control boundaries between work and nonwork (Derks et al., 2016; Golden & Geisler, 2007). However, existing theory and research have primarily approached boundary management as an individual-level phenomenon (e.g., Kossek & Lautsch, 2012; Kreiner et al., 2009; Reissner et al., 2020). A collective or a small group of interdependent actors who recognize themselves as a unit (Gibson & Gibbs, 2006) may also adopt boundary management strategies. For example, when a group of people reside in the same physical space and have different roles and responsibilities, it is highly likely that they need to define and apply boundaries for the collective. This raises the question of "How do households manage boundaries between work and nonwork domains when more than one member works from home?" Studies suggest that work from home increases the possibility of work and nonwork boundary-blurring and difficulty in dis tinguishing between work and nonwork roles (Fonner & Stache, 2012; Sullivan & Lewis, 2001). To manage boundaries, employees working from home may try to physically segment work and family domains by designating a home office space and closing the door (Allen et al., 2021; Mustafa & Gold, 2013), using work equipment, such as laptops, as symbolic rites of passage to transition from home to work, and communicating availability with office-based colleagues (Fonner & Stache, 2012). Very little pre-pandemic research has examined employees working from home by incorporating inputs from same-household co-residents in data collection (Raghuram et al., 2003; Sullivan & Lewis, 2001), thus excluding strategies adopted to manage boundaries in the household and/or actions taken for the sake of others. Pandemic-induced research has shown that the confinement, blurred boundaries, intensified work, and nonwork stressors in households where members stayed and worked from home led to family dysfunctions, such as tension, relationship density, and stress (Goldberg et al., 2021; Ipsen et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2020). To extend the existing understanding of adjustment to work from home, the question we answer is “What strategies do households with more than one member working from home use to navigate and manage boundaries?” We conducted a qualitative study of 28 dual-earner households in China, Iran, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which had at least one school-age child learning from home and both partners working from home during the pandemic lockdown. Upon initiating our research, we positioned our work within the theoretical framework of work-nonwork boundary management theories (Ashforth et al., 2000; Clark, 2000). Also, informed by the first stage of our data analysis, we complemented the boundary management lens by drawing on the family systems theory (Broderick, 1993). We recognize the family as a social system (i. e., an entity beyond each member) (Bavelas & Segal, 1982), a collective unit, and identify boundary management strategies for the collective. Family members, when deciding about their work and nonwork boundaries, need to consider one another, and sometimes, for a system to function, boundaries need to be established for the whole family. If we consider boundary management solely at the individual level, we will miss not only accounting for the role of others in how work-nonwork boundaries are defined and applied, but also the multiple people who are impacted. Specifying the household as the unit of analysis allows the defining features of boundary management—the physical, behavioral, or temporal boundaries between individuals’ work and nonwork domains—to extend to boundaries of multiple and interdependent actors in a system. Family systems theory (Broderick, 1993) draws attention to how family members behave to ensure functioning in changing circumstances. It allows expanding the outcomes of individual boundary man agement, such as personal balance, to include improvements in family functioning and adjustment to change. Categorizing individuals as integrators or separators does not fully capture how the work-nonwork boundary management may be experienced in a family system. Viewing family as a social system comprised of dynamic interactions creates opportunities to capture unique boundary management strategies. Most importantly, our approach accounts for inputs from multiple parties, since members of a family system may have different needs and constraints or bring varied resources to their collective unit. Our research extends work-nonwork boundary management scholarship to a collective level. We define boundary management for a collective as defining and applying boundaries between two or more household members’ work, learning, and home domains. We identify four strategies families use to define their work, learning, and home boundaries: (1) repurposing the home space (spatial), (2) revisiting family members’ responsibilities (temporal), (3) aligning family members’ schedules (behavioral), and (4) distributing technology access and use (technological). We also describe five distinctive strategies that families adopt to apply these boundaries: (1) designating an informal boundary governor, (2) maintaining live boundary agreements, (3) increasing family communication, (4) incentivizing/punishing boundary respect/violation, and (5) outsourcing. Second, complementing pandemic-induced research, we show that the stress caused by confinement and the unexpected transition to work-from-home were addressed by boundary management strategies. Family systems theory suggests that families take actions to continue to function in stressful situations, which maps onto the boundary management strategies we have identified and the positive adaptation to adverse circumstances (Carr & Kellas, 2018; Olson, 2000). Accordingly, our findings outline what can be done in response to blurred boundaries when parents are working from home and children are learning at home. Since families were adjusting to new and involuntary circumstances, they explored boundary management through trial and error, creating a reciprocal dynamic between defining and applying boundaries. Third, boundary management strategies drawn from lived experiences of families residing in five culturally different countries present a set of solutions that can inform many families with similar dynamics. Seeking patterns across families in five countries enables a nuanced understanding of the meaning and the essence of a shared lived experience, with great resonance for contexts beyond the current study (Meier & Wegener, 2017). By highlighting shared lived experiences across Western and non-Western con texts, we respond to the call for more inclusive work-from-home research. Finally, our findings have practical implications for em ployers who benefit from and support the emerging generation of remote and hybrid workers.