Influence of Remote Work on the Work Stress of Workers in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The objective of this study was to explore the research carried out and the existing scientific information on remote work and its influence on the work stress of workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The specific objectives were as follows: to determine the factors of remote work that influence the work stress of workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and to analyze the findings obtained in the study (which was achieved by referring to the influence of remote work and the labor stress of the workers in the same context). The research was of a documentary type with a bibliographic design, and was conducted as a systematic review. The articles indexed in the Scopus database were reviewed through the use of the following descriptors and search limits: remote work, work stress, pandemic, as well as those studies published between 1 January 2020 and 27 February 2023. Through this process, 280 publications were obtained. The following inclusion criteria were applied: original articles that addressed the subject in English and/or Spanish, and which were open access. This left a sample of 17 publications, and these are presented via a PRISMA diagram. The main factors of remote work that influenced work stress were the organizational climate, job satisfaction, family–work conflict, social isolation, the use of digital platforms, work autonomy, and changes in the workplace.

A Model for the Acceptance and Use of Online Meeting Tools

“…This study indicated that concerns are grouped under the dimensions of perceived employee barrier, intense technology barrier, working life and work-life balance. Data and technology issues [72], effective communication [67], social interactions and isolation [71], work-related stress [65,68], overworking [67,70,72], family life [74], and video conference fatigue [75,76]-all of which are identified in the literature as cons of working remotely-overlap with the concerns about online meeting tools in this study. In a study [38] investigating the impact of social isolation, technostress, and personality on users' acceptance of online meeting platforms, the similarity of technostress to the intense technology barrier in our study, and the proximity of the social isolation variable to the adaptation to change variable in our study are significant.…”

“…The first step in the quantitative instrument development process was the generation of an item pool. In order to select the best possible items, the items obtained as a result of the coding performed in the qualitative research and the item styles of the technology acceptance models in the literature were used [65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. At the end of this step, a pool of 66 items was generated.…”