Home-based telework and worker health and well-being across service occupations: A critical interpretive synthesis

The rapid expansion of home-based telework since COVID-19 has diversified the remote workforce to include service occupations centered on real-time interaction with patients, clients, and customers. Yet the literature on telework and health remains largely oriented toward the experiences of knowledge workers, obscuring how home-based telework shapes the health and well-being of interaction-intensive service workers. We conducted a Critical Interpretive Synthesis of 69 peer-reviewed studies (2000 to 2025) to develop a theoretical account of how home-based telework is experienced across service occupations. The evidence base was profoundly skewed: 64 studies examined healthcare and social work professionals, while only three focused on scripted, routinized, and monitored service roles such as call and contact center work. The synthesis identified two divergent narratives, each reflecting a distinct labor process through which home-based telework shapes worker health and well-being. For healthcare and social work professionals, home-based telework eroded the institutional boundaries that had contained clinical distress within the workplace, transforming the home into a "contaminated sanctuary" as the emotional and psychological demands of care work increasingly spilled into private life. For call and contact center workers, while home-based telework initially appeared to reduce direct physical surveillance, control was reconstituted through digital technologies, producing a "digital panopticon" marked by algorithmic monitoring, enforced immobility, and the collapse of work-home boundaries. These findings suggest that the health consequences of home-based telework are shaped as much by the organization and demands of the work being performed as by the domestic setting.