To free ride or contribute? The effects of enforced working from home on employees’ engagement in the corporate online forum

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally transformed workplace dynamics, compelling organizations to transition employees to work from home abruptly. Since corporate online forums played an important role as an online communication channel during the shift, this paper aimed to investigate the effect of enforced working from home (WFH) on employee engagement behaviors in such forums during COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach Leveraging the Wuhan lockdown as a natural experiment, this study employed a year-to-year difference-in-differences approach to analyze a unique panel dataset from a large company. Findings We found that enforced WFH increased passive engagement but significantly reduced active contributions. We also found an interesting recovery effect: while the drop in contributions subsided within a month of adaptation, elevated login and free-riding behaviors persisted. Further heterogeneity analyses uncovered critical disparities: male employees contributed less, senior employees participated less in low-cost activities, while employees under a stricter containment policy exhibited a smaller decrease in contributions. Practical implications Our findings provide insights for organizations to design equitable engagement incentives, recalibrate forum management strategies, and prioritize mental health support in future WFH policies. Our results also inform policymakers on tailoring containment measures to mitigate unintended workforce online disengagement. Originality/value Our study advances WFH research by analyzing enforced remote work’s impact on corporate forum engagement during COVID-19. It also enriches pandemic-related literature by incorporating crisis-specific factors and highlighting recovery patterns and policy-driven heterogeneity.