Remote work in times of a pandemic: Do the Same Rules Count?

Over time, managers and employees move from a stage of inability and insecurity to a stage of control and confidence to work remotely.

Although the infrastructures for remote work have been around for a long time, many organizations were hesitant to allow employees to work remotely until the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the crisis, many organizations refrained from allowing employees to work remotely due to fear of negative organizational and social consequences [1]. Among other things, organizations were afraid that remote work would lead to a decrease in managerial control [2] and cause social tensions between remote workers and their in-office counterparts [3]. An interesting opportunity to challenge and extend the research on remote work arose when COVID-19 suddenly forced entire organizations to work remotely.

My thesis engaged with how the views and experiences of managers and employees on remote work evolved amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of ten weeks, I conducted three sets of interviews with six employees and four managers of three different organizations in the travel industry. I captured the situations of the interviewees in three interesting phases:

1. Week 1: being new to remote working, having worked from home for just over a week.
2. Week 5: becoming used to remote working, having worked from home for over a month.
3. Week 10: adopting remote work as the new normal, having worked from home for ten weeks.

The findings indicate a couple of interesting patterns over time that challenge and extend research thus far into remote work. The graph below illustrates how the three main patterns evolved over time. Overall, I concluded that managers and employees move from a stage of inability and insecurity to a stage of control and confidence to work remotely over time.

Pattern 1: From resistance toward acceptance > reinventing (social) contact with colleagues

My research showed that people move from resistance towards acceptance to use digital technologies as the sole means of communication for work and social contact with colleagues. The following quotes of an employee who works as a sales production coordinator in a team of four shows this shift:

Week 1: “I get a bit lonely in this situation, but I am really happy that we can work remotely…I miss my colleagues. I even miss the tiny things like the annoying colleague who would always put on a Dutch radio station…”

Week 5: “I must say that I am a bit frustrated at the moment. We have just started a new project, which involves different opinions of people saying A, saying B, saying C, and then you notice that remote work is not ideal communication-wise. Other than that I have gotten used to the situation and have created a routine that works for me. I notice that the social contact with colleagues is less because we have gotten used to the situation, but work-wise we are all very active in Skype…What I miss most is our talkative office. I feel a little less connected now to everyone, more like I am doing it individually.”

Week 10: “I have sort of accepted this remote working situation as it is right now and I am not really bothered anymore by the communication challenges I encountered at the start. Of course, it would be nice to work from the office again to have the social chit chat with colleagues, but I must say that we have come up with innovative ways to have social contact through Skype and Google Meets. We now regularly also video call for lunch meetings and have other social initiatives such as pub quizzes.”

These findings are surprising because previous research indicates that remote work leads to a decrease of social ties among colleagues [4]. While this seemed to be the case at first, my thesis indicates that over time the social ties increased again as managers and employees engaged in social contact through digital technology more naturally. This is congruent with the idea that remote workers can adapt surprisingly well to managing the constraints of digital technologies over time [5].

Pattern 2: The blurring of work and private lives > do two become one?

Although the boundaries between work and private life first seemingly blurred working from home, the managers and employees learned to gain control to keep the balance between work and private life over time. The quotes below show how the views on the blurring of work and private life shifted over time of an employee who works as a project manager in a team of six:

Week 1: “I have to say that I don’t like this blend between my private and work life. When I finish work, I am still at home. I would prefer to have a distance between the two, because now I cannot mentally distance myself from work. I am more likely now to finish something for work at night that I would otherwise leave at the office for the next day because everything is there.”

Week 5: “I do have difficulty closing off the day when my laptop remains in the living room staring at me. As such, I often find myself continuing working outside working times whereas in the office I would leave things for the next day…”

Week 10: “I have really gotten used to the situation and experience more rest than ever because I am in charge of my planning. The flexibility and productivity are two major pluses of remote working. I am also not bothered anymore by my laptop staring at me outside of work times because it’s there all the time, you just get used to it.”

The above shows that over time managers and employees learned to mentally separate work and private life over time. That is, during work times they would be mentally and physically occupied with work whereas when they would close-off work, they would be able to enjoy their free time.

Previous research had suggested that working from home could lead to the collapsing of the boundaries between work and private life, reducing the restorative effects of home [6]. However, other studies stated that remote work is a skill that will be perceived more pleasantly over time as more experience is gained [7]. My findings found that the literal blurring of boundaries between work and private life becomes less of a problem over time as experience and practice gives people the ability to mentally split the two.

Pattern 3: Fear of exile makes way for trust among teams

My thesis offers evidence that the fear to be exiled in a remote work context decreases over time and makes way for trust among teams. At the beginning, especially employees were afraid that their colleagues would think that they were slacking, simply because their colleagues did not see them work. As such, they felt the need to show their colleagues digitally that they were doing their work. The below quotes show how the experiences of the employees at the various organizations interviewed evolved throughout the pandemic.

Employee at company B, Week 1: “We stay connected through Slack throughout the day. I do have to say that I am a bit afraid that my colleagues might think that I am slacking. It is strange because I don’t think that they are slacking, but I am afraid that they think that about me while I often find myself working even more from home”

Employee at company A, Week 5: “ I do always reply swiftly to colleagues’ questions in Slack and make sure I am online at nine precisely albeit when I have just woken up, because then I feel sort of visible.”

Employee at company C, Week 10: “I have noticed that I am not occupied anymore with letting my colleagues know that I am doing my work through messaging. There is general trust now that everybody’s doing their work. I guess we have proven that over the past two months.”

Over time, employees felt less of an urge to “show” their colleagues that they were working because they felt like their colleagues trusted them that they were doing their job (read our related blog, Managing visibility in a digital world). My findings challenge issues of control and surveillance for employees [8]. The first and second set of interviews exhibited the fear of exile put forward by previous research. That is, employees felt the need to show themselves digitally because they were afraid that their colleagues thought that they were slacking (read our related blog, Would you rather be watched or forgotten at work?). However, the need for visibility seemed to diminish over time and make room for trust.

This pattern may be explained by the fact that it had not occurred before that everyone in the organization was forced to work remotely full-time. Subsequently, managers and employees realized that everyone could continue business as usual. Employees felt like they gained colleagues’ trust over time and were not afraid anymore that their colleagues would think that they were slacking. These findings challenge previous research claims that the fear of exile that pushes employees to show themselves digitally remains relevant over time as organizations fully adopt remote work on an unprecedented scale.

Is remote work the answer?

The findings of my thesis are not meant to suggest that full-time remote work is the way to go for the future. On the contrary, both managers and employees continue to see the added value of being co-located for informal social contact and sensitive talks such as client meetings and feedback sessions. Besides, managers realize that some people have more social needs than others and also different home situations (e.g., households with children). As such, managers advised offering employees the possibility to work from the office as much as they want.

For the way forward, managers advised to create two or three fixed office days for the whole team to have important meetings and maintain informal social contact. The above illustrates that as companies have fully adopted digital tech for work and social contact, managers have opened their previously closed stance toward remote work [9] (read our related blog, The Future of Work, post-Corona).

I recommend future research to explore the extent to which the managerial and employee perspectives on remote work evolve in a similar fashion in other contexts over time. Besides, this thesis has wholly relied on the retrospective judgments of interviewees. Further ethnographic studies on remote work over time must include direct observations of remote managers and employees to explore any differences between what participants of the study say they experience and what they actually experience in the practice of remote work.

About Eveline Rudolphy

Eveline is currently finishing up her Master’s in Business Administration at the Vrije Universiteit (Read more about education at KIN Center for Digital Innovation). With a specialization in Digital Business & Innovation and a passion for people and planet, she is convinced that she can help businesses do better. She has Sales, Marketing, and Consulting experience and thrives in international, informal, and dynamic environments. Should you know about any interesting opportunities for her, do not hesitate to contact her via LinkedIn.

References

[1] e.g., Mazmanian, M., W. J. Orlikowski, and J. Yates. (2013). “The autonomy paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals.” organisation science, 24 (5), 1337–1357. ; Rockmann, K., and M. Pratt. (2015). “Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office?: The Unintended Consequences of Distributed Work.” Academy of Management Discoveries. ; Hafermalz, E. (2020). Out of the Panopticon and into Exile: Visibility and Control in Distributed New Culture organisations. organisation Studies, 017084062090996. doi: 10.1177/0170840620909962.

[2] e.g., Sewell, G., and L. Taskin. (2015). “Out of Sight, Out of Mind in a New World of Work? Autonomy,Control, and Spatio temporal Scaling in Telework.” organisation Studies, 36 (11), 1507–1529. ; Rockmann, K., and M. Pratt. (2015). “Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office?: The Unintended Consequences of Distributed Work.” Academy of Management Discoveries.

[3] Golden, A.G. and C. Geisler (2007), ‘Work-Life Boundary Management and the Personal Digital Assistant’, Human Relations 60, 3, 519–551. ; Aroles, J., Mitev, N., & Vaujany, F. (2019). Mapping themes in the study of new work practices. New Technology, Work And Employment, 34(3), 285–299.

[4] Rockmann, K., and M. Pratt. (2015). “Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office?: The Unintended Consequences of Distributed Work.” Academy of Management Discoveries.

[5] e.g., Leonardi, P., Treem, J., & Jackson, M. (2010). The Connectivity Paradox: Using Technology to Both Decrease and Increase Perceptions of Distance in Distributed Work Arrangements. Journal Of Applied Communication Research, 38(1), 85–105. ; Boudreau, M.-C., & Robey, D. (2005). Enacting integrated information technology: A human agency perspective. organisation Science, 16(1), 3–18.

[6] Hartig, T., Kylin, C. and Johansson, G. (2007), “The telework tradeoff: stress mitigation vs constrained restoration”, Applied Psychology: An International Review, Vol. 56 №2, pp. 231–253. ; Allvin, M., Aronsson, G., Hagstrom, T., Johansson, G. and Lundberg, U. (2011), Work Without Boundaries, Psychological Perspectives on the New Working Life, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester.

[7] Hafermalz, E. (2020). Remote working — LODcast — Podcast. Retrieved 9 June 2020, from https://podtail.nl/podcast/lodcast/remote-working/

[8] Brivot and Gendron, 2011; Sewell, G. (2012), ‘Employees, organisations and Surveillance’ in K. Ball, K.D. Haggerty and D. Lyon (eds) The Handbook of Surveillance Studies (London: Routledge), pp. 303–312. ; Curchod, C., Patriotta, G., Cohen, L., Neysen, N. (2019). “Working for an Algorithm: Power Asymmetries and Agency in Online Work Settings.” Administrative Science Quarterly 1–33.

[9] e.g., Kurland, N., & Egan, T. (1999). Telecommuting: Justice and Control in the Virtual organisation. organisation Science, 10(4), 500–513. ; Aroles, J., Mitev, N., & Vaujany, F. (2019). Mapping themes in the study of new work practices. New Technology, Work And Employment, 34(3), 285–299.