A Novel Job Stress Scale for Employees in the Midst of Post Covid Work Environment: Empirical Evidence from Indian IT Sector

Abstract

Work from home has become a norm to support business continuity during pandemic. Covid-19 has forced many businesses to shift to remote working. Though remote working brings many comforts to employees in terms of being available close to family, discomfort and time wastage of travelling, it breaks the barriers of work timings introducing work life imbalance. This in-addition to other factors like safety perception, contagion risk, social alienation, job loss fears, and work coordination failures due to technological glitches etc pandemic brought an increase in psychological stress and depression for employees. The effect is more pronounced in Information Technology (IT) sectors. Human resource management in IT sectors needed a better means to quantize stress and reduce the stress induced attritions. Towards this need, this work proposes a novel job stress scale for pandemic created stressors to quantize the stress level of employees. The job stress scale is designed based on factors identified through analysis on questionnaire responses from employees. The job stress scale is very adaptive to gender, employment level etc. The effectiveness of the proposed job stress scale is tested as case study in a corporate company and the results were found to highly correlate to the most standard PSS-10 stress results.