Proceeding: 2nd International Conference on Economy, Education, Engineering, Business, Technology and Social Sciences 2020 (ICEBTS2020) ISBN: 978-967-17937-9-4 73 Copyright © 2020 ACADEMIA INDUSTRY NETWORKS. All rights reserved IMPACT AND CHALLENGES TOWARDS EMPLOYEES WORK FROM HOME DURING COVID-19 (MCO) PERIOD Manimegalai Ambikapathy 1* and Asiah Ali 2 1 Faculty Communication and Media Studies, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Selangor, MALAYSIA 2 Faculty Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Selangor, MALAYSIA *Corresponding author: megla_21@yahoo.com Abstract: Malaysian citizens were in panic due to spreading of covid-19 disease (corona virus) since December 2019. The Malaysian Prime Minister has enforced a movement control order (MCO) on 18th March 2020 as a mitigation effort to reduce community spread and the overburdening of the country's health system. In obeying MCO order, majority of the Malaysian citizens was requested to stay indoor in avoiding outside activities. Few industries in Malaysia were requested to work from home (WFH) such as telecommunication, human resource, academic, insurance, marketing sectors and many more. Generally, work from home can provide advantages and disadvantages to the workers especially during a severe pandemic situation. Malaysian publics are in varied of feelings and emotions due to covid-19 impact. On top of this, they are requested to comply job duties from home. Thus, this study is mainly to examine the impact of working from home and to identify the challenges faced by employees those working from home. The result showed that, working from home give positive impact on saving cost and time, productivity, finished task on time and work life balance. Keywords: Work from home, impact, challenges, cost saving, productivity, self-discipline. 1. Introduction Malaysian citizens were in panic due to spreading of COVID-19 disease (Corona Virus) since December 2019. It’s started from Wuhan, China and spread to almost 200 countries and has been addressed as a global outbreak pandemic disease by World Health Organization (WHO). The Malaysian Prime Minister has enforced a movement control order (MCO) on 18th March 2020 as a mitigation effort to reduce community spread and the overburdening of the country's health system. In obeying MCO order, majority of the Malaysian citizens were requested to stayed indoor in avoiding outside activities. Few industries in Malaysia were requested to work from home (WFH) such as telecommunication, human resource, academic, insurance, marketing sectors and many more. WFH is defined as a situation of the working environment when employees are transforming from physical appearance to a state of mind using laptop and technology in completing their jobs. It is also referred as the ideas of workers do not need to present to their working place. The advancement of information technology has made WFH as an effective and convenient method to produce a productive working environment without attending to physical job place (Shareena & Mahammad Shahid, 2020).