Result: Worker well-being in the post-pandemic job design

Workers all over the world experienced physical and mental challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic which brought new work-related recommendations and changes to job characteristics. The present study aims to provide insight into differences in the well-being of workers in the post-pandemic era and explore how job demands and job resources affected workers’ exhaustion and work engagement. We expand upon the job demands-resources theory and confirm the model in a new context. We surveyed workers who continued to work from the office throughout the pandemic, and those working from home during the pandemic. Our multi-group structural equation model shows that social support positively affects engagement in both groups and that their exhaustion is positively predicted by their workload and work-family conflict. The engagement of those workers working from home during the pandemic was positively influenced by their perceived job autonomy while the same effect was not observed for the group commuting to work throughout the pandemic. Exhaustion of the commuters was negatively affected by the perceived family-work conflict, while those that worked from home did not experience such an effect. The opposite is observed for the role ambiguity’s relationship with exhaustion. The post-pandemic changes in the workplace positively reflected the worker’s well-being, where the interchange between working from home and working from the office leads to lower levels of exhaustion in workers.