THE IMPACT OF HOME WORKING ON EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION. FOCUS ON THE UK CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY.

This study focuses on the impact of home working on employee motivation. Specific emphasis is on the UK’s construction industry the growing rate of organizations within the sector moving towards working from home as a normal business practice. This research examined several academic literatures that covered the concept of home working from a historical perspective and its relevance within a contemporary context. Furthermore, there were reviews on the theoretical frameworks on motivation such as Maslow's needs theory and Herzberg's two-factor theory which underpins those factors that could inspire or demotivate employees' perceptions to work and how it relates to the construction industry.

The method of data collection adopted for this research is the questionnaires which are analysed using the quantitative method of data analysis. To provide logical analysis to the findings soured from the research, the deductive research design is adopted as a means of verifying and justifying the data obtained from the research and reasonable conclusion drawn from the study. The limitation of this research could be assessed from the fact that most of the secondary data sourced during the research are obtained from non-academic sources which would need to be verified against theoretical frameworks for data validity and verification.

Contents Abstract 1 SECTION ONE 3 1.0 Introduction 3 1.1 Research Rationale 3 1.2 Research Aim and Objectives 3 1.2.1 Research Aim 3 1.2.2 Research Objectives 3 1.3 Research questions 4 SECTION TWO 4 2.0 Review of literature 4 2.1 Theoretical perspectives 4 SECTION THREE 5 3.0 Research methodology 5 3.1 Research design 5 3.2 Research context 5 3.3 Procedure 5 3.4 Method of data collection 5 3.5 Method of data analysis 6 SECTION 4 6 4.0 DISCUSSION 6 4.1 Significance of proposed research 6 4.2 Practical implication 6 4.3 Research Limitation 6 5.0 Provisional work schedule 6 References 6

The recent past events that saw the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about some of the most devastating consequences that left global economies and businesses seeking strategic measures for survival (Meyer et al. 2021; Strange, 2020). According to a current fact from the Office of National Statistics (ONS, 2021), the United Kingdom recorded the highest deficit in gross domestic profit GDP in 2020, which was 8.6% more than those of the G7 countries. Similarly, several industry sectors across the UK were also hit by the adverse effect of the pandemic (Allas et al., 2021), most especially the construction industry which is one of the major contributors to the economic development of the region (Shibani et al., 2020).

Consequently, while this research focuses on the UK’s construction industry, it is important to point on the overbearing impact of the pandemic on the sector. According to Suresh et al. (2020) the post-COVID-19 episode saw an increase in the number of organizations promoting the need for home working for their employees. This initiative has been received with a varying consensus of opinions by workers in the construction industry (Jallow et al., 2020), particularly those individuals whose job roles focuses on managerial and administrative functions (Pirzadeh and Lingard, 2021). Hence, this research seeks to review the underlying impact that the context of home working has on employee motivation within the industry.

There has been an increase in the number of workers in the UK construction industry that are critical of their organizations move to adopt the option of home working against the traditional basic work activities. The foregoing argument has inspired this piece of research which is to examine the impact which home working presently has on employees within the industry. Thus, the findings from the research would help provide useful insight into the experiences of workers engaged in home working and its impact on their level of motivation.

To investigate the impact of home working on employee motivation in the UK construction industry.

· To explore literatures on the concept of home working and its effect on the level of employee motivation.

· To examine using questionnaires challenges of home working and its impact on employee motivation.

· To study the participants, view on the context of homeworking from the data collected from a range of quantitative data sets.

· To offer sensible recommendations on the merits and demerits of homeworking and how it would underpin employee motivation across the industry.

· What are the issues arising from home working in the UK construction industry?

· How has the strategic approach by organizations in the industry to adopt home working impacted employee motivation?

· What are the feasible measures for ensuring employees remain motivated while working from home?

The idea of home working has existed for decades throughout the entire human cycle and is still being practised to date. Toniolo-Barrios and Pitt (2021) seeks to describe home working as any form of instituted structure that tends to alter the traditional idea of where, how and the period for which a specific job function would take place. Similarly, Waizenegger et al. (2020) believes home working underpins any work functionalities that ensure the employee delivers a task outside the designated working hours. However, the context of home working Van Der Lippe and Lippényi (2020) argues transcends beyond the narrative of work duration for which an employee is expected to deliver a task but should underpin the aspect of delivering a job role outside an organizational space. A study of the various scholarly opinions is relevant as they provide useful narratives that enable the understanding of the concept of home working as an age-long practise and its relevance in the modern-day context.

However, there are several dimensions to home working which can be assessed from the standpoint that most employees still demand workplace visibility (Leduc et al., 2019). Maskuriy et al. (2019) goes on to emphasize that while working in a physical business environment might be perceived as outdated from a contemporary sense, it remains a major determinate factor in employee motivation. This is so because most employees feel the workspace provides them with an environment that ensures that are both mentally and physically inspired to achieve over and beyond their current goals (Dhamija et al., 2019). Furthermore, construction workers who occupy managerial and administrative positions who are made to execute their various job functions outside of the natural work environment are becoming increasingly demotivated as they enjoy the intricacies associated with the real workspace (Ayodele et al., 2020). Studies show that workers in the UK construction industry lack the motivation to work from home because of associated factors such as distractions, mental health issues, working transition and adaptability to mention a few (Bakker et al., 2020). The understanding of these underlying issues is important to this research as it would help assess the key issues associated with home working and its impact on employee motivation.

To create useful narratives on the research area two theories would be studies which are Maslow's theory of needs (El Sayed et al., 2019; Jesumoroti and Draai, 2021) and Herzberg’s two-factor theory (Thant and Chang, 2021). These theories would be tested on their relatedness to the context of home working in the UK construction industry and how it could affect employee motivation across the sector. While the needs theory helps to analyse the very essence of workers attachment to their actual work environment and their need for accomplishment, the two-factor theory looks to focus on those elements that sustain an employee's motivation to work.

This piece of study would seek to adopt a deductive method. Furthermore, the essence of using a deductive method of this research is because it enables the author to provide a line of thought that is underpinned by relevant theories and backed up with a range of relevant academic sources (Harding, 2018; Saunders et al., 2019). Similarly, adopting a deductive research design method would allow for a thorough investigation and testing of existing theoretical perspectives which eliminates all forms of speculative assertions (Saunders et al., 2019). Thus, the researcher can then come up with the assumption that could help justify if the data gathered during the research are true or false (Harding, 2018; Saunders et al., 2019).

The context of this research focuses on home working and its impact on employee motivation. The special focus is on the construction industry in the UK and this study attempts to critically analyse how the current approach of organizations within the sector to adopt home working affects the motivational level of employees. Furthermore, the employees in the construction industry would be studied given the factors that contribute to their motivation and demotivation and its overbearing impact from an industry-wide perspective.

The sampling method would be utilized during this research to explore the impact of home working on employees and the data would be sourced from primary (questionnaires and surveys) and secondary sources such as journal articles, publications, textbooks, and industry reports (Saunders et al., 2019).

The method for sourcing the samples to be investigated for this research would be carried out using primary and secondary sources. For ethical considerations, all sample data collected from secondary sources would be properly acknowledged and cited to prevent any form of academic misconduct. Furthermore, all secondary sources must be correctly imputed without any data falsification as this would ensure research integrity and justification.

However, it is important to point out that sample data from secondary sources may not be verifiable as most of the information’s may be sourced from web pages and non-academic publications which could pose some form of research limitation.

The data gathering method for this research would be done using the quantitative data collection approach that comprises information sourced from surveys and questionnaires. The quantitative method of data collection provides a useful tool for compiling and computing numerical and statistical data that would help to justify an existing research hypothesis (Saunders et al., 2019).

Here, the method that would be used to analyse data for this research would be the quantitative data analysis (Saunders et al., 2019). However, data sourced using the quantitative method of data collection cannot make a complete or logical sense from an analytical standpoint. Hence, it is imperative to make use of quantitative data analysis tools such as charts, graphs and statistical variable quantities that justify the assumptions in literature against those data obtained from primary and secondary sources (Harding, 2018). Furthermore, the quantitative data collected in this research would be analysed using data analysis tools such as the excel spreadsheet and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) (Saunders et al., 2019).

This study reviews the impact of home working on employee’s motivation in the UK construction industry, and from the findings realized in the research reasonable recommendations are put forward to organizations within the sector on ways to sustain the level of motivation of the entire workforce. In particular, the improvements are targeted towards inspiring home working as a means of employee engagement.

Based on the findings obtained from this research, future academic contributions could expand on other ways through which organizations could make home working more inspiring for employees especially those who are motivated to work in an actual work environment.

Like any research, this research faces several limitations. For instance, since the study sets out to investigate the impact of home working on employee motivation, there would be some adoption of secondary data which would be sourced from several academic and non-academic authors. The assumptions and hypothesis would need to be verified and justify using existing theoretical contexts and their practicability in the real world of works.