Social Media and Ubiquitous Technologies for Remote Worker Wellbeing and Productivity in a Post-Pandemic World

Abstract

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, remote work styles have become the norm. However, these work settings introduce new intricacies in worker behaviors. The overlap between work and home can disrupt performance. The lack of social interaction can affect motivation. This elicits a need to implement novel methods to evaluate and enhance remote worker functioning. The potential to unobtrusively and automatically assess such workers can be fulfilled by social media and ubiquitous technologies. This paper situates recent research in the new context by extending our insights for increased remote interaction and online presence. We present implications for proactive assessment of remote workers by understanding day-level activities, coordination, role awareness, and organizational culture. Additionally, we discuss the ethics of privacy-preserving deployment, employer surveillance, and digital inequity. This paper aims to inspire pervasive technologies for the new future of work.

Teleworker’s Perception of Technology Use for Collaborative and Social During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…When the camera is not turned on, teleworkers' effort and progress were invisible to their peers and supervisors. These mixed attitudes support prior work stating that there is only a thin line of difference in perceiving the same technology for surveillance or for assessment (Das Swain et al 2020). How to balance the support and surveillance of teleworkers should be evaluated further.…”

“…Teleworking limits interactions with co-workers, and also makes it difficult to self-evaluate their performance and be aware of other co-workers' expectations during team collaboration (Das Swain et al 2020). Nicholas Bloom (2020) suggests that an effective "performance review system" to evaluate teleworkers' output is essential to make teleworking succeed.…”

Social Media and Students’ Wellbeing: An Empirical Analysis during the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…All the more interesting is the research by Neal, Wood, and Quinn, who found that people tend to perform up to 45% of the activities they perform constantly and out of habit during the day, i.e., in the same context. For example, reading a newspaper on the bus on the way to school, or visiting a fast food restaurant [75]. A pandemic represents a significant intervention in this "everyday life", which affects, among other things, the motivation of an individual in performing daily tasks, and an increase in negative emotions, including the perception of (un)wellbeing [76][77][78].…”

Reinterpreting excellence for sustainable competitive advantage: the role of entrepreneurial culture under information technological turbulence

“…The COVID-19 has brought a dramatic business environment by disrupting the business networks that imply the flow of knowledge and technological capital, which call for quick reform (Aghion et al , 2021). Moreover, the pandemic has disrupted the business environment in multiple ways, including the changes in work settings that encourage firms to change the entrepreneurial culture to adopt social media and ubiquitous technologies (Swain et al , 2020). It appears that many firms experience excellent performance during the pandemic by adopting the information technology that generates various innovative solutions, whilst others suffer from the lockdown economy.…”