Global Journal of Management and Business Research, A: Administration and Management, Volume 22 Issue 4

Another primary focus of working from home- related topics is its implication in the lives of working women. These studies highlight how the sudden change in work environment dynamics has affected the female employee segment during the pandemic. They focused on how the female working population has encountered working from home policy and the issues they face in balancing their responsibilities. Women are perceived to have more duties in the home than their male counterparts. Various statistical procedures such as reliability and validity checking, multiple regression analysis, ANOVA, and hypothesis testing were used to assess the data collected from a sample of women engaged in different sectors (Basak, 2021). The existing research and studies have focused on the scope of working from home, the challenges faced in implementing this policy, and the benefits and drawbacks. Work from home impacts productivity and employee motivation and satisfaction, work-life balance, etc. The studies have focused on women's challenges in job sectors that play a dual role in life. Most scholars have explored the relation of work from home to employee benefits and organisation goals alignment in the western business setup, which is, in fact, rich in structure, technologies, opportunities, and resources. However, few papers on how this policy is implemented and perceived as useful in semi- developed and underdeveloped countries with various limitations and obstacles. Even the existing studies are observed to focus mainly on the female population of the workforce, who are considered for their responsibilities at home, which are thought to be affected by working from home. The male respondent samples are small and cannot be expected to provide an accurate picture. Moreover, the impacts of work from home should vary from sector to sector, provided that organisations’ business functions differsignificantly across industries. In light of the above information, this study has been conducted to explore the impact of work from home on the work-life balance of professionals from the telecommunication sector and fast-moving consumer goods sector of Bangladesh and to understand further which kind of working policy is preferable based on their experiences. III. M ethods a) Research Design The paper follows an exploratory qualitative research approach employing a multiple case study design (Eisenhardt, 1989; K. M. EISENHARDT & M. E. GRAEBNER, 2007)) to understand the impacts of work from the home policy on work-life balance. The qualitative study helps to explore different real-life problems and phenomena and gain relevant insight from non-numerical data. We adopted qualitative research to understand the participant’s real-life experiences related to the topic. We adopted a multiple cases study approach as numerous case study allows us to investigate various aspects of a phenomenon that may be difficult to achieve in a single case study (Cruzes et al., 2015). We used 06 case studies in total in this research. The selection of the cases was subjected to the following criteria: a) working in a telecommunication or FMCG based company; b) having experienced work from home in their work tenure. b) Data Collection We collected material through a semi-structured interview. The semi-structured interview is efficient if researchers want to know each person's individual thoughts (Adams, 2015). It is precisely the case for our multi-case study approach. We collected data from 06 respondents who have directly experienced work from home in their own company and working tenure. For confidentiality purposes, participants were given the initials R1, R2, R3, R4, R5 & R6. As shown in Table 1, the participants spanned equally across both the telecommunications and FMCG sectors. We have a healthy distribution of gender among the participants. The participants are selected from diversified roles. We also picked up participants from 06 different companies. We conducted a single interview for each participant. The discussions ranged from 15 minutes to 45 minutes depending on how the interviews progressed, and the interviews were conducted through phone calls, online audio calls and in-person interviews. Interviews were conducted in Bengali. All discussions, with permission, were recorded with audio and then verbally transcribed. We developed an interview questionnaire to guide us through the process focusing on the following aspects: a) Work from home related; b) work-life balance related; c) Specific situation based & d) Preference of work policy. Impact of Work from Home (WFH) on the Work-Life Balance of Professionals Working in the Telecommunications and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Sector: An Exploratory Study in Bangladesh 73 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Volume XXII Issue IV Version I Year 2022 ( ) A © 2022 Global Journals