For security, economic, and efficiency reasons, many businesses supply mobile devices to employees to use both in the workplace and remotely, accompanied by policies governing their appropriate use. Extant research has shown that work-issued mobile devices can disrupt employees’ perceptions of work-life balance (WLB) and, indeed, WLB can impact employees’ job satisfaction and performance. The global COVID-19 pandemic meant that more employees than usual performed their work remotely, but this situation may have not fit the preferred WLB for some. Did this encroachment mean that appropriate use policies were forgotten? We conducted two rounds of surveys, one pre-pandemic and the other mid-pandemic, to determine whether those workplace changes led some employees astray. In other words, which type of WLB perceptions are more likely to lead to policy violations and how does the WLB mismatch cause deviant behaviors before and during the pandemic? The results from cluster analysis and the comparison between the pre and mid-pandemic suggest that policy violators were present in both time periods, but before the pandemic violators were in more compartmentalized work settings and mid-pandemic violators dominated all work settings.

出于安全、经济和效率的原因，许多企业向员工提供移动设备，以便在工作场所和远程使用，并附有管理其适当使用的政策。现有研究表明，工作中使用的移动设备会扰乱员工对工作与生活平衡 (WLB) 的看法，事实上，WLB 会影响员工的工作满意度和绩效。全球 COVID-19 大流行意味着比平常更多的员工远程工作，但这种情况可能不适合某些人首选的 WLB。这种侵犯是否意味着适当的使用政策被遗忘了？我们进行了两轮调查，一轮是大流行前，另一轮是大流行中期，以确定这些工作场所的变化是否导致一些员工误入歧途。换句话说，哪种类型的 WLB 认知更有可能导致政策违规，以及 WLB 不匹配如何导致大流行之前和期间的异常行为？聚类分析以及大流行前和大流行中期之间的比较结果表明，这两个时期都存在政策违规者，但在大流行之前，违规者处于更加分散的工作环境中，而大流行中期的违规者则主导了所有工作环境。