Working from home during COVID-19 pandemic: lessons learned and issues

Abstract

During the COVID pandemic, many companies, schools, and public organizations all around the world asked their employees to work from home i.e. to adopt what are called “smart working” modalities. This has and will presumably have a serious impact on both employees and employers, which still needs to be clarified and investigated: indeed, if smart working becomes a common working modality, this may have a significant impact on both organizations and employees. This paper reports the results of an online survey of “smart workers” in Italy during the COVID pandemic, when a great number of employees suddenly moved to working from home with no or little preparation. The study offers interesting indications about the involvement and usefulness perception of smart working by the sampled people and makes it possible to single out different categories of employees based on their attitude towards this modality. Also, it points out the potential impact on socialization among colleagues, and the consequent implications for knowledge sharing and knowledge management. From the collected responses, a fully positive or negative conclusion about working from home was not possible, nor a clear indication about the efficiency and effectiveness of this working modality. The analysis, instead, highlighted the presence of different but numerically similar groups of people, i.e. those who were not satisfied at all with the experience, those who were very satisfied, and those who were “undecided”. Furthermore, respondents underlined the importance and the difficulty to maintain working contacts and the intense use of communication systems made for this purpose. Lastly, collected opinions on positive and negative aspects of working from home provided some practical suggestions about how to successfully implement this solution.

COVID-19 leadership challenges in knowledge work

“…Knowledge workers' tasks in distributed teams largely consist of processing, sharing and/or creating knowledge and information (Bosch-Sijtsema et al, 2009), so knowledge sharing within an organisation becomes challenging when WFH (Van der Lippe & Lippényi, 2020). Moreover, if knowledge workers cannot work autonomously, are unfamiliar with communication technologies, or cannot maintain good social relations with their colleagues, they may be less productive while WFH (Bolisani et al, 2020;Gurstein, 2001;Jackson, 2001).…”

The COVID-19 crisis and telework: a research survey on experiences, expectations and hopes

“…35,36] and quantitative methods [e.g. [27][28][29][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. Empirical papers that employ quantitative research in the context of telework and COVID-19 can differ substantially.…”

Exhaustion while teleworking during COVID-19: a moderated-mediation model of role clarity, self-efficacy, and task interdependence

“…The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19, which brought not only a health crisis, but also an international economic threat (Kniffin et al, 2020;Kufel, 2020;Korzeb & Niedziółka, 2020;Ingusci et al, 2021;Zinecker et al, 2021) has required many of employees to work from home, regardless of their preferences, abilities, and the type of work (Rigotti et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2021). Thus, working from home or teleworking (known also as remote work, telecommuting) that was previously practiced occasionally by a few employees (Allen et al, 2015;Dima et al, 2019), has become the new norm for many of them (Bolisani et al, 2020). This meant that many employees found themselves suddenly working from home with little choice or training (Kniffin et al, 2020).…”