Top Research Papers on Remote Working

The impact of COVID-19 on the way that we work arguably represents the most drastic and rapid shift to the global workforce that we have seen since World War II. This paper investigates the long term impacts of this remote work experiment and what we can anticipate in the future, based on the direct impact that COVID has had on hiring, sentiments around remote work, and plans moving forward. The analysis uses two waves of survey data: one fielded prior to the pandemic in November 2019, and the other fielded during the pandemic in April 2020. The surveys polled a combined 1,500 hiring managers ...

Study of work-from-home practices of neurodivergent professionals who have Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, learning disabilities, and psychosocial disabilities reveals that while working from home, neurod divergent professionals create accessible physical and digital workspaces, negotiate accessible communication practices, and reconcile tensions between productivity and wellbeing.

Purpose This paper aims to consider enforced working from home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how it may differ from working from home through choice. In particular, the authors discuss how lockdown may be affecting work-family arrangements. Design/methodology/approach This is a thought piece. Findings The paper briefly examines the extant research on remote working. It is argued that as many of the (beneficial) outcomes found for both employees and employers are associated with feelings of greater autonomy and gratitude on the part of employees for being able to exercise choice over...

In the context of weak institutional support for parenting, telecommuting may offer mothers a mechanism for maintaining work hours and reducing gender gaps in childcare, while exacerbating inequalities in housework and disruptions to paid work.

Findings highlight how both work and personal digital platforms induce technostress during the enforced remote work period, which in turn increases psychological strains such as technology exhaustion and decreases subjective wellbeing.

It is found that virtual work characteristics linked to worker's performance and well‐being via the experienced challenges, and self‐discipline was a significant moderator of several of these relationships.

Abstract This paper investigates the impact of job control and work‐related loneliness on employee work behaviors and well‐being during the massive and abrupt move to remote work amid the COVID‐19 pandemic. We draw on job‐demands control and social baseline theory to link employee perceived job control and work‐related loneliness to emotional exhaustion and work‐life balance and posit direct and indirect effects on employee minor counterproductive work behaviors, depression, and insomnia. Using a two‐wave data collection with a sample of U.S. working adults to test our predictions, we find tha...

Companies around the world have extended their remote-working policies, implemented due to COVID, through 2021 and beyond, and are starting to consider a broader shift towards remote (or hybrid) workforce models as a means for reducing overhead costs while supporting employee productivity and wellbeing.

Using a large dataset of workers’ technology use from before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Yang et al. find that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration networks of information workers to become more static and siloed and communication to shift to more asynchronous media.

We analyze the supply-side disruptions associated with Covid-19 across firms and workers.To do so, we exploit differences in the ability of workers across industries to work remotely using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS).We find that sectors in which a higher fraction of the workforce is not able to work remotely experienced significantly greater declines in employment, significantly more reductions in expected revenue growth, worse stock market performance, and higher expected likelihood of default.In terms of individual employment outcomes, lower-paid workers, especially female...

Abstract We analyze the supply-side disruptions associated with COVID-19. We find that sectors in which a higher fraction of the workforce is not able to work remotely experienced greater declines in employment and expected revenue growth, worse stock market performance, and higher likelihood of default. The stock market overweights low-exposure industries. Thus, our findings cast light on the disconnect between stock market indices and aggregate outcomes. We combine these ex ante heterogeneous industry exposures with daily financial market data to create a stock return portfolio that tracks n...

Abstract Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has seen a shift in remote work from being a discretionary flexible work policy to a mandatory requirement for several workplaces. This ‘forced flexibility’ has meant that organisations and their employees have had to adapt swiftly to new requirements and arrangements for how work is done. Working remotely, often at home in ‘virtual workspaces’, has become commonplace for many employees across Australia and globally. Drawing on findings from two qualitative phases of research in an Australian resources company, we use conservation of resources theor...

We report the results of a nationally-representative sample of the US population during the COVID-19 pandemic.The survey ran in two waves from April 1-5, 2020 and May 2-8, 2020.Of those employed pre-COVID-19, we find that about half are now working from home, including 35.2% who report they were commuting and recently switched to working from home.In addition, 10.1% report being laid-off or furloughed since the start of COVID-19.There is a strong negative relationship between the fraction in a state still commuting to work and the fraction working from home.We find that the share of people swi...

Regression results based on a sector‐level gravity model show that the negative trade effects induced by COVID‐19 shocks varied widely across sectors, and participation in global value chains increased traders’ vulnerability to shocks suffered by trading partners, but it also reduced their vulnerability to domestic shocks.

Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, many employees have been strongly encouraged or mandated to work from home. The present study sought to understand the attitudes and experiences of the general public toward remote work by analyzing Twitter data from March 30 to July 5 of 2020. We web scraped over 1 million tweets using keywords such as "telework," "work from home," "remote work," and so forth, and analyzed the content using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Sentiment analysis results show generally positive attitudes expressed by remote work-related tweets, ...

This paper reviews scientific literature and draws on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork to create an updated classification of contemporary digital Nomadism that acknowledges the broad spectrum of individuals, groups, communities, identities, and imaginaries labelled with the term digital nomad.

The COVID-19 pandemic has established remote work as the new normal. However, the factors that influence the effectiveness of remote work are unexplored. Moreover, the relationships between remote work and job performance and emotional exhaustion are under-investigated. This study addresses these gaps by investigating the factors that influence the effectiveness and outcomes of remote work. The technology-organisation-environment (TOE) framework and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) are used as a theoretical lens to examine the internal and external factors that affect remote work and work...

A massive shift towards remote work practices has presented many organizations and employees with acute challenges associated with multi-locational work. This shift underscores the need to reconsider isolation as one of the focal challenges of organizations in an era of increasingly dispersed and mediated work practices. This study relies on a three-wave survey among Finnish workers to investigate how remote work practices and the use of information and communication technology (ICT) have impacted perceptions of isolation during the global health pandemic, and whether these relationships have ...

The relationship between remote e-working and employee flow experiences is explored by introducing two key stressors; technostress and loneliness by collecting data from a survey of 202 employees from the financial services sector in Turkey.

The Self-Determination Theory is discussed within the context of this paper and it has been found that the theory could provide an explanation of the efficient and rapid adaptation of the technology be employees.