How Working from Home Strategy Adopted during COVID-19 Era Affected Performance of Organizations in Harare, Zimbabwe

This paper was written because organizations in Zimbabwe have been affected by COVID-19. Many organizations resorted to ICT, allowing employees from procurement, human resources, information technology, marketing, finance, procurement, and all managers to work from home. Some occupations and tasks such as data capturing done by information technology, procurement and finance employees for some organizations were not practical or feasible within the home setup because of the way the organizational system is designed which needs support of a server which is only located at work premises. Some organization has encountered numerous challenges in embracing various forms of ICT that have necessitated working from home. The author had to come up with objectives such as to investigate the impact of working from home on staff performance, to explore the challenges that employees face by working from home, to ascertain the benefits of working from home, to examine how working from affect staff productivity at workplace and to establish strategies that can be adopted to reduce the impact of working from home on productivity. In this paper the researcher adopted ADKAR model of change. This study adopted a mixed strategy. It was noted that the majority of workers in organizations have been working from home for almost a year, they have not been trained to use new systems, how to work from home. The employees were given MiFi devices, however there were issues of connectivity with the device as; reception was poor in some of the areas. This paper also established that many organizations when they adopt working from home strategies workers who work from home face a number of challenges which include having many distractions, sometimes they face communication challenges, at home they end up losing focus, lack of motivation and time management was noted to be hard to follow at home. Working from home has some benefits despite the challenges which they face. The benefits of WFH include saving time from commuting to work which is stressful.