scholarly journals Architectural and aesthetic aspects of workspace at home – a new design challenge in the age of pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 1203 (2) ◽  
pp. 022005
Author(s):  
Barbara Uherek-Bradecka
Keyword(s):  
Living Room ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Office Work ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Spatial Changes ◽  
Spatial Aspect ◽  
Open Plan ◽  
At Home

Abstract The article deals with the issues of spatial changes taking place in the office work environment during a pandemic. It also raises issues related to the space intended for work at home or in an apartment. At present, the traditional model of office work is undergoing significant transformations. These transformations include, in particular, the spatial aspect. Large office spaces, especially those of the open-plan type, do not work well during a pandemic, as it is difficult to keep an appropriate social distance in them. Therefore, we spend less and less working time, whether for safety reasons or the sanitary and epidemiological regime, for work in the office. This phenomenon is particularly visible in city centers, where many large office buildings have become deserted. We spend more and more time working remotely (home-office). Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the space of our houses and apartments to the conditions in which we live and work today. The very concept of remote work or work from home is not new, many companies have already introduced it before, but most often for a limited time, which in principle could take place without major changes in private apartments. However, the pandemic has forced office workers to work remotely full-time, and thus to organize a workplace in their own home. This is often associated with the need to introduce additional furniture, equipment or lighting to a private interior. The problem of many people working remotely is the lack of an additional room that can be used as a study or office. Then we are looking for a place for our home office in rooms that have so far performed other functions (most often a bedroom or a living room), trying to introduce a place to work with them as possible. The issue of acoustics is also of great importance here, especially when there are more people working or learning remotely in the house or apartment. Moreover, many, especially young office (corporate) employees, own one-room apartments in the studio type, in which it is not possible to separate such a room. Then we have to add an additional office space to the space that already serves several functions (living room and bedroom). The author is a researcher and designer of this type of space, and the cases presented in the article show the changes taking place in spaces previously perceived as typically private.

scholarly journals Data on an Austrian Company's Productivity in the Pre-Covid-19 Era, During the Lockdown and After Its Easing: To Work Remotely or Not?

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Beno ◽  
Jozef Hvorecky
Keyword(s):  
Home Schooling ◽  
Academic Standards ◽  
Online Surveys ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Working At Home ◽  
Service Employees ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
The Face ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
At Home

The Covid-19 crisis across the world has increased the proportion of e-working. The transition from cubicles to the home office raised many questions in connection with companies adopting the new working conditions. Our paper provides recent evidence on the extent of this move, its impact on workplace evolution, productivity and the future prevalence of the face-to-display workplace after the easing of the lockdown. It uses data from 154 service employees of an Austrian sports and leisure product company obtained using online surveys on employees' opinions on e-working. By a coincidence, we conducted the first of them shortly prior to the epidemic. We decided to modify our planned research goals and decided to study their opinions during different Covid-19 stages. As a result, our findings do not follow all the academic standards. First, they are almost impossible to replicate due to the specific coincidence. Then, the shift in our aims leads us to minor changes in the content of the questionnaire. There are not only significant differences in the proportion of workers in the office and at home during the different periods of the lockdown. After its end, there was a significant increase in the number of those who had started working at home—more than one half. Compared to the period prior to the lockdown, they have a tolerant attitude to their work from home and believe that their productivity might remain the same. For many of them the change was an unavoidable obligation so they would prefer to return to the traditional workplace. The results suggest that more than one fifth want to continue working from home permanently, about one third more frequently than before, more than a quarter sometimes and just one seventh not at all. We studied the issues related to their productivity and its limits during all three stages. There are three important reasons for the fall in productivity related to e-working: (1) Providing childcare/home schooling, pet sitting and/or care for others while working (>one-fourth); (2) Work-from-home routine (>one-fourth); and (3) Having less work to do (>one-fifth).

scholarly journals Benefits and Challenges of Telework During The Covid-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-135
Author(s):  
Susanti Saragih ◽  
◽  
Santy Setiawan ◽  
Teddy Markus ◽  
Peter Rhian ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Flexible Work ◽  
Work Arrangements ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Total Respondent ◽  
Hr Managers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Work Arrangement ◽  
At Home

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the term work from home (WFH) has been introduced to refer to a work arrangement in which individual can complete their duties while they are at home. While most flexible work arrangements are a preference, work from home is mandatory. Therefore, the impact of WFH during the Covid-19 pandemic needs to be studied. The total respondent of this study is 337 employees, who are works at home during the pandemic. The results showed that the three main benefits employees might gain during WFH are flexibility, more time with family, and less travel time. On the other side, employees struggle to balance their personal and work life, access to websites or software, and limited devices and workspace. Most of the companies are not ready for the WFH scheme though some of them gave support to employees (e.g., quota subsidy). This research gave some essential suggestions for HR managers in designing remote work for the future.

scholarly journals The Impact of Telework and Closure of Educational and Childcare Facilities on Working People During COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 202-214
Author(s):  
Michèle Rieth ◽  
Vera Hagemann
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Conservation Of Resources ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Working From Home ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Impact ◽  
At Home

Abstract. This study examines the impact of telework and closure of educational and childcare facilities on working people during COVID-19. We compare telework versus nontelework conditions and people with and without stay-at-home children. Data from 465 working people in Germany were collected via an online survey. People who do not work from home experience more stress, more negative and less positive affect, less life satisfaction and trust in government, and less loss of control over career success than those working from home. Concerning the conservation of resources theory, working from home can thus be seen as a resource gain, representing, in accordance with the self-regulation theory, a way to deal with pandemic threats. However, home office only seems to be beneficial if working conditions at home are supportive; otherwise, it is experienced as a resource threat or loss, especially with stay-at-home children.

scholarly journals Gender Differences in Telecommuting and Implications for Inequality at Home and Work

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lyttelton ◽  
Emma Zang ◽  
Kelly Musick
Keyword(s):  
Gender Gap ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Work Family Conflict ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Working At Home ◽  
American Time Use Survey ◽  
Quasi Experimental ◽  
At Home

The global pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift to remote work that will likely persist to some degree into the future. Telecommuting’s impact on flexibility and work family conflict is a critical question for researchers and policy-makers. Our study addresses this question with data collected before and during the COVID-19 crisis: the 2003-2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS, N = 19,179) and the April and May 2020 COVID Impact Survey (N = 784). Comparing mothers and fathers who work exclusively at the workplace, exclusively from home, and part-day from home, we describe differences in time spent on housework, childcare, and leisure; the nature of time worked at home; and the subjective experiences of telecommuting. In addition to a broad descriptive portrait, we take advantage of a quasi-experimental design in the ATUS leave supplements to examine time working at home among those who report ever telecommuting, providing estimates of telecommuting’s effect on other uses of time that better approximate causal relationships than prior studies. We find that gender gaps in housework are larger for telecommuters, and, among telecommuters, larger on telecommuting days. Conversely, telecommuting may shrink the gender gap in childcare, particularly among couples with two full time earners, although childcare more frequently impinges upon mothers’ work time. Survey data collected following the March COVID19 stay-at-home orders show that telecommuting mothers more frequently report feelings of anxiety, loneliness and depression than telecommuting fathers. Early estimates of responses to the COVID19 pandemic offer insights into future implications of telecommuting for gender equality at work.

scholarly journals “Tele-everything” world and hybrid office model – new global trends after the COVID-19 pandemic

Upravlenie ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-136
Author(s):  
E. V. Vasilieva
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Culture ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Employee Performance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Shared Vision ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
Work From Home

As a result of forced social distancing and nationwide blockages, the habit of doing everything remotely has rapidly developed in society. The majority of work and household activities have been transferred to the Internet, and this has naturally led to the emergence of a new trend – “TV-everything” world.The rapid shift to a remote format and accelerated automation of processes have also changed attitudes to the previous management rules. The vast majority of companies decided during the pandemic to move some categories of staff to full-time remote work. One of the most debated topics today is the hybrid office model, where some employees work from home.The aim of the study is to show the consequences of the pandemic, which will determine the growth points in technology and management for the future, and to highlight the important challenges that the new norm of organisational management brings with it.The article presents the results of a survey of managers from various sectors carried out between March and April 2021. A review of the use of new technologies to improve the quality of the hybrid office was carried out. The importance of reinforcing the corporate culture in a remote working environment is highlighted and some guidelines for building communication in a remote working team environment are listed.These include: fostering corporate spirit, establishing a shared vision of the situation, mentoring, a culture of continuous feedback, informal communication, and newcomer adaptation.In a changing work environment, companies need to be extremely attentive to the well-being and productivity of teams and the mental health of employees. A number of measures have been proposed to monitor and improve the resource status of staff in organisations, including the use of computer systems that can conduct real-time assessments of employee performance and engagement based on artificial intelligence technologies.

scholarly journals Is working from home the new workplace panacea? Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for the future world of work

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremias J. De Klerk ◽  
Mandi Joubert ◽  
Hendrikjan F. Mosca
Keyword(s):  
Employee Engagement ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Office Work ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Working From Home ◽  
Managerial Implications ◽  
Value Add ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

Orientation: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions of employees to work from home as governments implemented lockdowns.Research purpose: This study examined the impact of working exclusively from home on employee engagement and experience, and determined beneficial and distracting factors.Motivation for the study: Remote working trends have risen steeply since the onset of COVID-19 and are unlikely to taper off soon. Organisations need to understand the impact of remote work when reconsidering working arrangements.Research approach/design and method: A dual-approach qualitative design was followed. The sample comprised 25 employees (N = 25) who were forced to work exclusively from home during COVID-19. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews.Main findings: Working from home for protracted periods rendered paradoxical outcomes. Employees could work effectively with improved employee engagement and experience, but there were challenges rendering adverse effects. The experienced benefits of working from home created expectations that this practice would continue in future, along with some office work.Practical/managerial implications: Organisations need to continue, though not exclusively, with work-from-home arrangements. The ideal ratio of remote work to office work was seen as two to three days per week. However, support and cultural practices would have to be put in place.Contribution/value-add: The COVID-19 lockdown provided a unique environment to study remote work. For the first time, employees and organisations were placed in a situation where they could experience working from home in a stark and compulsory form, devoid of idealistic fantasies or romanticism.

scholarly journals MANAGING BOUNDARIES WHILE WORKING FROM HOME, 1960-PRESENT

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Zeavin
Keyword(s):  
Third Space ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Public Employees ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Working From Home ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Worker Experience

The COVID-19 pandemic has been heralded as a watershed moment for remote work, an exodus of the American workforce that will never fully reverse. As major corporations debate returning to the office full-time, and other workers press or are pressed into returning to the office, this panel situates the present realities of remote work within telework’s long history. From the paperless office to the electronic cottage, much of the focus in mainstream discourses surrounding telework has been on demonstrating the technological feasibility of leaving workers at home and workforce adaptability, with secondary celebrations of ecological soundness and potential for employment growth. Discourses around the benefit of telework also frequently draw on blanket statements about what remote work affords workers—from wellness and eschewing commute times, to increasing flexibility—but do not directly take up the lived quotidian experiences of doing labor in this configuration. This panel intervenes by yoking the politics and fantasies of remote work with worker experience during work from home, especially of self-management of both individual affect, group and power dynamics, and environment. Within this frame, this collection of papers suggests that, while remote work suggests a dislocation of office and home and the creation of a third space, the overlays of work and home are always top of mind for individual workers, whether in their homes with children or while traveling as “digital nomads.” The panel suggests that navigating this collapse creates a “third space,” and is a site of ever-present negotiation for workers, both individually and in social dynamics across organizations. This panel works across a number of methods including ethnography, archival research of both born-digital and traditional objects and draws on interviews and survey data. The panel points to not only how workers act in front of the screen, but what is supporting remote work off and behind it: domestic architectures, impression management, and paid and unpaid forms of domestic labor. The panel opens with a pair of papers that look at the historical development of work from home in order to situate the COVID-19 pandemic and its use of remote work as both a form of rupture and as a continuation of the logics, fantasies, and environments that pre-date this massive and rapid expansion into remote work. In “Home/Work: The Long History of the Future of Work,” Devon Powers reads the history of progress and futural narratives attached to telework, and the renovations both material and ideological to the spaces that are enfolded into remote work: home and the office. Powers pays special attention to the collapse of work and home, and the creation of a third space that is actually only an expansion of an existing one—the everywhere office. In “Make It Work: Hiding Children in Telework,” Hannah Zeavin takes up the feminization of remote work, which is subtended by the fantasy that, by working from home, women might “have it all”: they can do childcare and paid labor at once. Zeavin examines how workers have negotiated this collapse of waged and unwaged labor by disappearing and hiding the visual and sonic evidence of children during work from home. Nancy Baym et al look to the management of the worker’s own visibility in “Video On/Off: Managing Visibility in Remote Videoconferencing” with 44% of American workers suddenly home in the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors ran a five-month longitudinal diary study of meetings at a large technology company between April and August 2020, comprised of 849 employees. The paper looks at reasons for (dis)comfort with appearing on camera during work and how workers negotiate the contradictions of on and off. In “Abruptly Online: Public Employees’ Adaptation to Virtual Communication in Times of Crisis," Sierra Bray and Cynthia Barboza-Wilkes consider the special category of public employees and the challenges and benefits of work from home in a group of workers who had a novel relationship to working online. Andrea Alarcon, in “Outsourcing the Home: the Digital Nomad Tactic ” looks at the apotheosis of work from home in the rise of the “digital nomad.” Alarcon intervenes by pointing to the unacknowledged support and costs of “nomadic life” in the city of Medellin and the workers who travel and collapse the identities of tourist and laborer, and vacation with work.

scholarly journals Vélemények a home office-ról – előnyök, hátrányok

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Éva Irén Kis
Keyword(s):  
Multinational Companies ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Labour Shortage ◽  
Talented People ◽  
Company Group ◽  
Work At Home ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Near Future ◽  
At Home

A home office, amely a távmunka otthonról végzett verziója, és egyre elterjedtebb nem csak a multinacionális, de a kisebb cégeknél is, mint foglalkoztatási forma. Alkalmazását az informatika fejlődése teszi lehetővé, népszerűségét az egyén oldaláról az otthoni munkavégzés kényelmi elemei, a munkába járás idejének megtakarítása indokolja. A munkáltatóknak költségmegtakarítást tesz lehetővé, és meghatározott tevékenységi körökben előnyös lehet a munkaerőhiány kezelésében, a tehetségekért folytatott konkurenciaharcban. Elvileg egyik eszköze lehet a foglalkoztatottság további növelésének is Ugyanakkor pozitívumok mellett negatív tulajdonságokkal, hatásokkal is jellemezhető mind a munkavállalók, mind a munkáltatók oldaláról. A preferenciák, illetve a home office alkalmazás körülményeinek feltárására cikk szerzője kérdőíves kutatást végzett az ország vezető távközlési vállalatcsoportjának munkatársai körében. A felmérés alapján kialakult kép akár már a közeljövő hazai tendenciáit is tükrözheti. Opinions about home office – advantages and disadvantagesHome office is a version of remote work done at home, and it is a form of employment more and more widely used not only by multinational companies but smaller ones, as well. Its application is enabled by the development of informatics, and its popularity is rooted in the comfort elements of doing work at home and sparing the time of travelling to and from work. It allows the employers to save costs and in certain activity fields, it can be useful in managing labour shortage and in the competition for talented people. In principle, it can be a tool of increasing employment, as well. At the same time, besides the positive factors, it has negative features and impacts, too, on both the employees’ and the employers’ side. In order to explore the preferences and the circumstances of applying home office, the author implemented a query-based survey involving the employees of Hungary’s leading telecommunications company group. The picture gained from the survey might even reflect the domestic trends of the near future.  

scholarly journals P642 Effects of Covid-19 on employment in IBD patients

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S575-S575
Author(s):  
M Sciberras ◽  
C Nascimento ◽  
T Tabone ◽  
K Karmiris ◽  
P Nikolaou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Demographic Data ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
International Study ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Psychosocial Effects ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Female Smoker ◽  
Previous Medication ◽  
The Impact ◽  
At Home

Abstract Background There is an ongoing concern over the impact of COVID-19 on IBD patients. A significant proportion of IBD patients are treated with immunosuppressive medications and their effects on COVID-19 susceptibility and outcomes remain of concern to patients and physicians alike. Apart from the clinical outcome, the pandemic may have other psychosocial effects on this vulnerable cohort such as employment stability. The primary aim of this study was to analyze the percentage of COVID-19 patients who tested themselves for COVID-19 and the outcome of those who tested positive. A secondary aim was to assess their employment status. Methods This was a multicentre international study whereby IBD patients (>18 years) in clinical remission over the last year, were asked to answer an anonymous questionnaire. Demographic data, type of IBD, current and previous medication, admissions to hospital, were collected. Exclusion criteria included patients with IBD flares requiring corticosteroids in the previous 12 months. Results 573 patients (CD: 55.5%) from 8 European Centres and Israel participated in the study. The mean patient age was 39.9 years (SD+/- 13.0). 21.6% were current smokers and 48.5% were non-smokers. The rest were ex-smokers. 44.5% (n=255 ) of patients were tested for Covid-19 and 5.1% (n=13) were positive. The majority were treated at home (92.3%) with only one patient requiring hospital admission. This was a 33 year old female smoker with UC (E3 disease activity) on anti-TNF therapy. 66.7% of positive cases were on anti-TNF medication and 22.2% were on thiopurines. None of the positive cases were on dual antiTNF/thiopurine therapy. 7.2% of patients had family members who also tested positive for Covid-19. Almost half of all patients (45.2%) had their job affected during the pandemic and this was more prevalent in the UC cohort (P<0.05). 70% of patients switched to remote work from home and 21.4% became unemployed. The average age of patients becoming unemployed was 39.3years (SD+/- 11.9). Conclusion Nearly half of our cohort (45.2%) underwent testing and the majority (92.3%) were treated at home even though two thirds of them were on Anti-TNF medication. Unemployment rates affected 1 in 5 individuals and measures promoting remote work have been taken up wisely by IBD patients. Though the clinical outcomes were excellent, the psychological effects of unemployment have yet to be considered.

scholarly journals Distance Work Changes Strategy of HR Management

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 92-102
Author(s):  
M. V. Milenin
Keyword(s):  
Business Processes ◽  
Office Work ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Ip Telephony ◽  
Subsequent Investigation ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Business Change ◽  
Hr Management ◽  
Distance Work

The development of new means of telecommunications, such as IP-telephony, messengers, applications for videoconferencing, platforms for distance work with documents (for example, googleapps) and others have been promoting recently the change-over of employees to distance (remote) work. The article analyzes findings of the survey dealing with distance work. Two hypotheses were put forward for the research: 1) work from home would be more productive for many people; 2) a lot of people would assess distance work positively and would prefer it to office work. Both hypotheses were confirmed by survey findings. Another goal of the research was to identify positive and negative sides of distance work with subsequent investigation of possibilities to eliminate minuses and of impact of pluses on employees’ motivation. Recommendations for companies’ executives and HR-divisions were prepared dealing with possibility and usefulness of full and partial change-over to remote work. In view of business, change-over of employees to distance work may have the following advantages: cut costs for rent of offices; upgrade business processes and communications; introduce advanced work technologies; raise efficiency, motivation and satisfaction of employees.

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