Work From Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak Assignment

Assignment Task

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced most organizations and firms to work remotely from their home. This shift of work process was on very short notice and with limited choice. This research study investigates the various impacts on employee productivity due to various factors like family background, work atmosphere, working schedule, personal responsibilities at home, social isolation, and self-discipline while working from home during the pandemic. Also, for understanding the general perception people have and the impact when it comes to shifting back to the office to work or the hybrid model that is being adopted by many organizations post COVID-19 to have a smooth transition from working remotely to getting back to the office. Most of the population favour working remotely, as it gives them freedom of choice and allows them to stay close to their family. At the same time, another set of the population believes that the lack of in-person communication, that happens at the workplace, which will not happen when working remotely, is going to have a negative impact on having a good bond among colleagues, which in turn will affect the productivity and confidence in future.

This research, with the help of various questionnaires with employees of organizations, aims to study the impact of remote work culture on employee work efficiency and the idea they have on returning to the office, and the effects related to this shift.

1. Overview

The majority of working professionals, especially in the IT sector, have been looked upon in our culture as formally dressed people, going to their offices. Most of the time, an individual spends commuting to and from the office, and this culture has been there since one can remember. Working professionals have always considered that going out to work is going to the office and through this, we can understand the importance of the office in our professional careers. With the advent of the COVID-19 outbreak, working from home became the new working culture for millions of employees around the globe. Organizations had no or very little choice but to ask their employees to come to the office, as the risk of virus spread was very high. The spread of the Novel Coronavirus was so abrupt that a very sudden switch of remote work culture was the demand of the situation, keeping health as the top priority for every nation. This made millions of employees switch, on very short notice, to remote work.

This shift was huge, as suggested by Eurofound ¹ only in Europe itself more than 50% of the workforce shifted to remote work setup as compared to 12% prior to the pandemic. The world was in a state of mixed thoughts as to how will this work out, since the majority of working professionals were not accustomed to working remotely without an office. But no one had any idea that this new work culture will in turn increase ² the productivity of the workers. This increase was majorly found in the IT sector, where remote work was possible through a connected network of computers and cloud technologies. Another reason for this increase in productivity, as suggested by a study, is that working from home has given employees more freedom and creativity in performing tasks and delivering a better piece of work. It also gave an impression to employers as well the employees that this way of work will be the future.

In contrast to this belief, one study ³ found that there was a fall in productivity. This fall was majorly in sectors where the work demanded in-person presence or face-to-face interaction like travel, leisure, retail etc. Other findings also came into notice like work responsibilities, working hours, accountability to others, availability, and demands on the job. Many people felt their accountability has increased along with long working hours compared to working from an office culture. Also, it was expected from employees to be more available during or out of office hours, as with the notion that people are always connected to the internet and have their office set up at home.

Now that it has been more than two years since the pandemic hit, uprooting many businesses and adversely affecting the nation's economy, many organizations are putting various efforts to overcome this loss. Since the majority of the population is now vaccinated and is safe to travel, many organizations like Morgan Stanley ⁴ have asked their employees to return to the office. Keeping in mind that it has many months that people are working from their homes and are mostly gotten used to it, firms are adopting a hybrid or flexible model of work where people are asked to work from the office only on some of the working days depending on the requirements. The adaptation of the “new normal” work culture is suggested ⁵ impact businesses, employees, and even work altogether.

With all the understanding from previous studies and research work that has been carried out, the aim of this study becomes to deep dive into looking at various factors and trends that are impacting the efficiency of professionals working remotely. And what is the impact of flexible/hybrid work practice post COVID-19 outbreak?

2. Background and related research

The IT industry has to deal with rapid growth, adapting to new technologies, and with the changing definitions of the industry’s capability, the workforce needs to have access to their work setup at all times at all places. Also, with the availability of cloud services at effective pricing and access to a virtual network, working remotely has been in practice prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. As per one of the studies ⁶ , in the US, more than 3% of the workforce (4 million workers) were working at least half of the time away from the office (GWA, 2017). The same case was there in Europe, where people working from home or away from the office included 5% of total employed professionals (Eurostat, 2018).

It has been agreed that it is essential to have a virtual work setup, especially for the IT sector, even before the outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus. (Fargo K.) ⁷ . The study also establishes the fact that many work processes require physical presence and can only be carried out through face-to-face interaction. So all such operations where remote work practice is not at all possible can be excluded from this research, as we are only focusing on the impact due to remote work culture.

Once this is established that remote work culture used to be their way before the COVID-19 pandemic, we move on to the time when the pandemic did hit in early 2020, forcing people to stay at home during the mandatory lockdowns to control the spread of the virus. As we have in past history of emergencies, such situations have always brought a drastic change in how things were carried out, COVID-19 outbreak was no such exception. With the sudden shift from working in an office along with pier group and colleagues to a solitary work culture of operating remotely, companies had no option but to come up with working environment solutions to address this huge shift. Right from providing all the required things to set up a home office to training their employees on technical as well as operational skills to continue delivering with any business loss. Industries like Many global multinational giants Like Accenture ⁸ , and Goldman Sachs that were having cloud technologies backing up their work process architecture and already having a vision and strategy to address the pandemic outbreak, and the telecom industry, were able to move to a completely remote setup for the employees where that was possible (Bick, A.) 

The early days of forced work-from-home practice projected shocking outputs, as per one of the studies done by Thompson. According to his study, it was found that productivity, as well as efficiency of work, increased during this period. The major factor for this increase as per the study was flexible work hours, which allowed the employees to work according to their availability without much pressure of being available on screen as it used to be while working from the office.

One of the studies where a survey was conducted on 278 US employees had interesting outcomes. The survey considered some specific factors like working hours, demand on the job, responsibilities, and accountability to peers in order to understand the impact on the efficiency of workers while working remotely. Around 56% of the respondents said that the shift of work practice from the office to home was a positive experience and 61% of the people agreed that if they are given an option between going to the office or working from home once things get back to normal, they will happily select the latter. The study also looked into various well-being indicators like productivity, creativity, stress, work-life balance, and health. Out of 278 respondents, 70% of them said that the new work culture gave them the freedom to be more creative and nearly 50% of them felt that using online platforms helped them in being more productive, increasing their job satisfaction.

Moving forward to the next phase of the pandemic in the year 2021-2022, some studies ¹² highlighted the downfall in productivity and work-life balance. Lisa Baudot and Khim Kelly ¹³ reported that females had to work more than men (77.81% versus 71.31%). Also, couples worked more than singles before COVID(16.30% versus 24.24%) but post-pandemic results showed that it was the opposite (76.07% versus 72.46%).

From results highlighted by Baudot, L., and Kelly, K in their studies showed that from 2020 to 2021 the trend for productivity is decreasing. And this is where the zoom ¹⁴ fatigue kicks in, Hadar and Wilken tell us that extended remote work has caused a new kind of problem, zoom fatigue.

The study established that richer media interaction during a virtual meeting in the like in the form of video conferences led to more exhaustion among the employees. Various hypotheses were taken up by Hadar and Wilken in order to understand the relationship between video conferences and exhaustion. Some of the major vectors which were looked upon in the study were i) the duration of the conference call, ii)meeting size/participant’s size, and iii) the level of interaction during a meeting.

So to boost the economy again, companies like BP oil ⁵ came up with a solution of a hybrid work model, where employees as asked to visit the office only 2 days a week. This will allow people to have face-to-face interaction and will help them in having a better work-life balance. But this work practice had some challenges as well, as it would be difficult for people staying far away from their work location to return just to go to the office 2 days a week.

Therefore, through this research, we need to find what is the best and the most optimum solution for maintaining positive work efficiency considering all the challenges.

3. Research Questions and Hypothesis

The following research questions are suggested for each of the research objectives, as highlighted follows

• How does remote work culture impact the efficiency of employees?
• Which type of activity (IT Employees) is better for Home, and which is better for Office setup?
• Does hybrid/flexible work practice leads to an increase in employee work efficiency?

Organizations need to think from an employee perspective while refining work practice, moving towards a direction of mutual growth, and implementing work strategies by analyzing their technological competency. Also, all the aspects like work-life balance, mental well-being, freedom of creativity, and growth in all dimensions of life must be considered.

The below hypotheses can be assumed -

• Freedom of being flexible allows employees to be more efficient.
• Hybrid work culture will be the “new normal” for the IT

4. Aim and Objectives

To study the impact of remote work culture on employee efficiency

The research objectives are formulated based on the aim of this study, which are as follows:

• To analyze the factors that need to be considered in order to understand the impact on work efficiency of employee
• To highlight the challenges faced in remote work
• To see whether the hybrid model of work will help to overcome these

5. Scope of Study

This study will help in understanding the impact on the efficiency of IT employees while working in a remote work setup.

It will try to highlight what all strategies work best in order to achieve higher work productivity. The remote work culture has been practiced for more than a decade now, and the pandemic has now made a larger population practice a similar work setup, which is something no one had imagined.

The world has gone through some worse times in the last few years, putting many under psychological stress, anxiety, and depression. It is a very crucial time and organizations must be mindful while implementing any new working norms.

Through this study, we will analyze all the possible causes that affect employee work experience in a positive as well as negative manner.

The research objectives are formulated based on the aim of this study, which is as follows:

• To look for the various factors and KPIs that impact IT employee work
• To analyze if the hybrid/flexible work culture is the best
• To see if this hybrid model of work is suited for

6. Research Methodology

The research will be carried out through surveys, questionnaires, and interviews, following a similar approach as done by previous researchers. Using this method of collecting insights from employees working in IT firms will help us in understanding employees’ perceptions while following the remote as well as a hybrid working model.

Collection of Primary data

Primary data will be collected from IT companies, mainly developing organizations and SMEs, through a survey and interview to assess the below-mentioned areas -

• Analysing the current workspace strategy and its impact on performance(productivity, satisfaction with working from home, and work-life balance)
• Understanding the preferred workspace strategy and the reason for the The projected impact on performance from some results obtained if possible from organizations that shifted to work from office work culture post Covid-19.
• Understanding the impact on work performance by other alternatives of work culture, like the hybrid/flexible model adopted by some organizations that could work better than the existing options

The questionnaire that will be shared, covers the current workspace strategy and the level of flexibility allowed in choosing the strategy, what is the best strategy as per their perceptive productivity, what is the best strategy that contributes directly to the positive or negative impact on work performance.

Collection of Secondary data

A systemic literature review from online libraries, including the university's libraries, Google Scholar, and other sources, would be conducted to meet the requirements for CRAAP (Current, Reliable, Authoritative, Accurate, and Purposeful).

Data Analysis

The preferred method is a quantitative one where analysis will be done on the responses received from the questionnaires using different analysis tools and methodologies like python data analysis libraries (Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib).

Steps involved in the Data Analysis process:

• Collection of raw data.
• Data will be collected using surveys and questionnaires targeting the required
• Processing of raw data to generate curated data layer
• Perform data transformations to clear the noise from the raw data and generalize the data format for future analysis.
• Use of data transformation techniques available in python libraries like Pandas, NumPy, etc. for data cleaning.
• Performing data quality checks to avoid null or missing data points.
• Performing EDA on the curated data layer

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is an approach to analyze the data using visual techniques. It is used to discover trends, and patterns, or to check assumptions with the help of statistical summaries and graphical representations.

7. Expected Results

After the analysis of the collected data, the expected outcome of the study is as mentioned below:

• The impact of remote work culture on employees is positive or negative.
• Is The hybrid/flexible work model beneficial or not for a larger set of IT population?

8. Risks Involved and Solutions

Though all the necessary planning is made for conducting the research, there are some risks that need to be highlighted and worked upon to reduce or mitigate the issues and lay backs that may occur.

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