Have a Good Night's Sleep!” Juggling Between Work and Home Demands During Emergency Remote Working in Italy and in France

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic outbreaks the organization of work, especially when the public authorities decided to confine the population. In this context, the psychosocial issues of the health crisis and the reorganization of work deserve to be studied (Kniffin et al., 2020, Rudolph et al., 2020), paying attention to the remote workers’ health and the management of their work-family balance. Within the framework of the Work-Home Resources model (Ten Brummelhuis and Bakker, 2012) and the Effort-Recovery model (Meijman and Mulder, 1998), the present study considers the role of leadership, the frequency of receiving emails or phone calls outside of working hours and the presence of children at home, focusing on the following outcomes: recovery, work-family conflict and insomnia. Method: The study has been conducted during the first lockdown in Italy and in France. A convenience sample of 1084 employees, of which 553 remote workers in France and 531 in Italy (68% female), from different working sectors filled in an on-line questionnaire. The half of the total sample spent the lockdown with their children (8% of cases without a partner), the remaining 50% cohabited with a partner (37%), or with parents (11%) or with roommates (2%). Two separate multi-group structural equation models were tested to examine gender and countries differences in predictors of recovery, work-family conflict and insomnia symptoms. Results: Results showed that for both women and men as well as for both remote workers in Italy and in France, a leadership characterized by high quality exchanges with their followers was indirectly and negatively related to insomnia symptoms through the mediation of recovery experiences, which were in turn negatively related to work-family conflict. Moreover, the invasion of technologies outside of working hours was directly related to recovery experiences and to work-family conflict and indirectly to insomnia. Finally, as assumed the presence of children at home during lockdown was negatively related to recovery experiences and indirectly to insomnia symptoms through the mediation of recovery and work-family conflict. Finally, the first model [X2 (610) = 2087.030 p < .000; RMSEA = .07 (.06, .07); CFI = .90; TLI = .90; SRMR = .06] showed that teleworking in the Italian context was negatively related to recovery, but also to work-family conflict and insomnia symptoms. The second model [X2 (609) = 1914.671 p < .000; RMSEA = .06 (.06, .07); CFI = .91; TLI = .91; SRMR = .06] showed that the female gender was negatively related to recovery experiences and positively to insomnia. Discussion: Results could be useful for management of potential future lockdown and also to support the empirical understanding of the critical role of a positive leadership as well as the negative and generalizable consequences of a pervasive use of technologies on remote workers’ well-being and their work-family balance beyond the COVID-19 crisis. Results seem to point out some differences between Italy and France and confirmed the importance of deepening the issues related to gender inequalities and family paradigms. Main limitations: cross-sectional research and use of self-reported data.