Purpose: The aim of the study was to analyze the effect of work environment and workload on employee performance mediated by work motivation along Work From Home during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Department of Manpower and Transmigration, North Musi Rawas Regency, North Sumatra, South Indonesia Theoretical framework: Recent literature has reported there are three dimensions of implementing or realizing work from home including, the dimensions of transformation space, time, and social roles. Employees who do not have clear boundaries between roles at home and work will create more work-life conflicts (Kinman, 2016) and (Putnik et al., 2018) from the results of research (Sheikh, 2010) stated that doing work and family tasks concurrently makes employees face multiple conflicts and roles, apart from having to divide work space and family life space Design/methodology/approach: The sample of the study was all employees and partners of the Manpower and Transmigration Office of North Musi Rawas Regency as many as 109 people. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis is used to analyze the data which is run through the AMOS 24 program Findings:The results of the research carried out prove simultaneously that workload, work motivation and work environment have a significant and positive effect on performance, which partially each variable workload, work motivation and work environment affect the performance, but work motivation variables have a very dominant impact on the employee performance, while the work environment and also workload have a significant and positive effect on the work motivation. This proves that work motivation is a very important mediating variable in improving the performance of the employee during the COVID-19 pandemic by working at home.
Research, Practical & Social implications: The theoretical implication is that this research is expected to be a reference for further researchers, especially in terms of increasing employee productivity during the pandemic, especially for those who wish to conduct research in the public and business service sectors. The practical implication of this research is that research can be done on work supervision variables, in addition to workload, work environment, work motivation during this pandemic so that a comparison can be seen on the achievement of the results. While the supervision of work during Work From Home.
Originality/value: The results of this study prove that work motivation is a very important mediating variable in improving employee performance while working at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic