Deriving the Current Sentiments and Issues Being Encountered by Work-From-Home (WFH) Employees in the Philippines

Abstract

The influx of job seekers who have applied for work-from-home (WFH) jobs after the pandemic has shifted the expectations and needs of employees involved with online and freelance work. To better understand the shift within the industry, this study aimed to determine the current sentiments and issues being encountered by people involved in the post-pandemic WFH market with the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. A total of 11,868 posts and comments were collected from the social media platform Reddit for analysis. Sentiment analysis was first conducted using the NLTK VADER model. It was found that the overall sentiment of users towards WFH jobs was slightly positive, with a compounded score of 0.1905, showing that many employees still feel that the benefits of WFH jobs still outweigh the issues that they have been encountering in recent years. Topic modeling was then conducted using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and it was found that the biggest concerns users had towards WFH jobs were “salary and compensation”, “time management”, “company policies and culture”, “job stability”, and “skills management”. These issues highlight the need for better policies and government regulations towards WFH jobs, to ensure employees who do remote jobs will be protected by the same laws and regulations as traditional employees. The findings also highlight the need for better platforms for WFH employees to engage in personal and professional development, so that they can keep up with the ever-growing needs and requirements of remote jobs.