The Great Employee Divide: Clustering Employee « Well-being » Challenge during Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered unprecedented levels of disruption and stress for workers. Still, little is relatively known about the state of mind of the workforce, even if its well-being is increasingly recognized as a driver of productivity. This paper encompasses multiple forms of stress - health, economic, social, and psychological – faced by the workforce, and demonstrates that not only have workers been facing large levels of stress during the Covid-19 pandemic beyond health issues, but that stress is not uniformly distributed among workers. While it is known that Covid-19 has been building a divide between remote and on-site workers, we uncover a much larger divide than the ones induced by work location alone, with the divide being due to different perceptions of mix and level of worries. Human resources practices may have to be much more personalized and include all forms of stress to diagnose the level of workers’ state of fragility if they wish to create a much more resilient and productive workforce.