Questions on Indian Society made easy

Understand how to deal with a topic like 'Impact of Work from Home' in the post-pandemic era

Hyderabad: Today we will discuss the questions asked from Indian Society syllabus of the UPSC in the recent UPSC Mains – 2022 GS-1 paper.

Decoding and solving recent year’s questions will help us in understanding the most important areas in the syllabus and recent trends of the examination. Focusing more on these areas/topics will help in the upcoming State PSC Mains examination too. Because if we observe the recent mains questions in other State PSCs, a few themes are repeating from the UPSC Mains exam.

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The topic for today is ‘Impact of Work from Home’. Now we will see how to address this topic in question-and-answer format.

Explore and evaluate the impact of ‘Work from Home’ on family relationships (2022)

Introduction: The rising wave of the Covid-19 outbreak in India and the subsequent lockdowns has forced the corporate world to opt for ‘work from home’, wherein employees were allowed to work remotely without coming to the office.

Body: Impact of Work From Home on Family Relationship:
Positive Impacts:

1) On relation with children:

a) Development of strong bond: It provides more time to spend with children and spending more time with little ones enhances the cooperation and understanding between parents and little ones.

b) Better relationships with elder children: Older children (above-12) generally need less constant supervision and care, so parent’s work roles aren’t as badly affected, allowing them to enjoy spending more time at home with the kids without it affecting work.

c) Increased sense of responsibility: Parents who work from home can customise their day to meet their family’s needs. For example, School drop-off and pick-up are easier when you are not required to be in a physical workplace at a set time.

2) With parents:

a) More time for parents and older people: WFH provides more time for parents and elderly people to share traditional knowledge and experiences. Moreover, the children also get more time to take care of their parents.

b) Joint families: Reinforcement of the joint family as most families were back to their home

3) Balanced life:

a) Often WFH allows one to be more flexible in terms of hours worked, allowing one to find a good balance between work role and marriage/ family roles.
b) Supportive environment: People with a healthy marriage will find the home a very supportive environment to work from, but poor marital quality may make working from home harder.

Negative impacts:

1) With partners and children:

a) Disagreement with partners and children’s: According to well-being report, among parents staying in work mode, 54% say that their work has led to arguments with their children while 57% say it has led to disagreements with their partners.
b) Spill-over effect: When working from home, the work stress and family is at same place. As a result, it may lead to situation where husband vents out work stress on wife and children.

c) Lack of privacy: Many children were under constant surveillance of their parents which deprived them of privacy and they required counsellor support.
Women-specific issues:

a) More responsibilities, more challenges: Working mothers don’t just have professional responsibilities, they are also invested in care-giving. The workload increases as they also have to devote time to help kids with homework results in quick frustration and fights within the family.
b) Increased divorce rates: An increased incidence of divorce was observed during the work from home phase.

c) Domestic violence: The incidence of domestic abuse, both physical and emotional, increased (nearly 200% increase in reporting).

d) Others: Some people become irritant due to background disturbance and lack of required work infrastructure.

Conclusion: Therefore, the governments are expected to make a regulatory framework to enable teleworking, and organisations should understand the implications of work from home during the crisis and ensure that they inadvertently do not miss critical compliances.

Do make a note of important points from the above model answer and make your answers enriched. We will discuss a few more questions related to recently asked questions in the upcoming articles in this series.