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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more firms than ever before have enabled their employees to work from home. Based on a representative firm survey in Germany, surveying 2.000 firms per month throughout the course of the pandemic (October 2020 until June 2022), this paper provides suggestive evidence concerning the effects of working from home...
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The sudden adoption of working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic has required the reconfiguration of home spaces to fit space for remote work into existing spaces already filled with other domestic functions. This resulted in blurring of home and work boundaries, the potential lack of space for telecommuting from home, and telecommuters'...
Citations
... Scholars have argued that remote work will continue in some form (Dua et al. 2022;Ozimek 2020), whether that is fully remote or in a hybrid model, and we contribute to this literature by shedding light on workers' experiences and preferences during the pandemic, in order to frame their goals, expectations, and preferences for the future. We expect that most workers will prefer remote work arrangements (Kossek et al. 2021;Neeley 2020), especially hybrid work models that leverage the flexibility of remote work while retaining the advantages of on-site collaboration (Kagerl and Starzetz 2023;Smite et al. 2023). It is equally important to analyze patterns when remote workers preferred to return to on-site roles, and we theorize that these preferences may occur in three distinct ways: first, some individuals may work in jobs that were poorly suited to remote work. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity for many American workers to work from home. Did the rapid and widespread adoption of remote work arrangements influence workers’ preferences? This study analyzes the early pandemic work experiences of 52 participants (20 men and 32 women) in dual-earner households with children through in-depth interviews conducted in 2021 and 2022 via Zoom. The study explores respondents’ desire for remote and hybrid work, considering job satisfaction as well as job characteristics, family structure, and household organization. Unless their jobs were poorly suited to remote work, most workers with pandemic-era remote work opportunities—and even some who had not worked remotely—wished to keep remote access in their post-pandemic work arrangements. Respondents reported enhanced job satisfaction and productivity from remote work, as a result of greater schedule control and flexibility. We found that some workers were willing to change jobs to maintain their preferred work arrangement, while others acquiesced to employers’ return-to-work policies. The study highlights the need to understand workers’ preferences in supporting flexible work arrangements and contributes to the understanding of remote work on family dynamics during the pandemic and afterwards.
... WFH mitigates the COVID-19-induced shock by increasing employees' probability of performing their jobs (Alipour, Fadinger, & Schymik, 2021). In addition, WFH practice is positively associated with success during the pandemic period (Kagerl & Starzetz, 2023). Given that the pandemic-induced uncertainty provides disproportionate growth opportunities to the firms that are amenable to working from home, we posit that: ...
Purpose
In this study, we examine whether work from home (WFH) had an impact on firm productivity during the COVID-19 period.
Design/methodology/approach
We employ a panel fixed-effect model using 79,201 firm-quarter observations in a cross-country setting of 68 countries.
Findings
First, we find that firms that employed WFH contributed to real sector growth during the pandemic due to greater capital expenditure compared to otherwise. Second, we find that WFH amenable firms turned over assets better than less WFH amenable firms.
Originality/value
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of WFH on firms’ investment and efficiency using a cross-country setting.
... Several studies [6][7][8], maintain that the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many organizations to rapidly move to remote and online working, converting their staff from on-premises to remote workforces. The authors in [8] argue that in Germany alone, more firms than ever made provision for their employees to work from home in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
... Several studies [6][7][8], maintain that the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many organizations to rapidly move to remote and online working, converting their staff from on-premises to remote workforces. The authors in [8] argue that in Germany alone, more firms than ever made provision for their employees to work from home in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey carried out between October 2020 to June 2022 established that 2000 German businesses switched from office to home working per month throughout the pandemic. ...
Cyber security threats, including risks to remote workers, are varied and diverse, with the number of scams and business email compromise breaches increasing. Firms and their staff are experiencing mass phishing attacks, several typical precursors to more sinister attacks like cyber-enabled fraud, ransomware, and denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Threat actors are leveraging new technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver sophisticated scam and phishing messages that are challenging for users to identify as malicious. Several businesses are increasing technical efforts in critical areas, including network hardening, robust patching, anti-malware, ransomware detection applications, and multi-factor authentication to detect, prevent, and recover from potential threats. Despite that, these measures provide only a partial solution if the users who access the systems do not have good security awareness training. In this study, we review some cyber risks related to remote working and detail how they can be remediated through regular security awareness education campaigns (SAECs). The study presents the results of a proof of concept (PoC) experiment conducted to establish the value of regular SAECs in the fight against scams and phishing attacks against remote workers. The pilot results confirm that securing the remote office requires a robust SAEC. It argues that to be successful and help staff protect business systems and data, SAECs must be regular and varied, providing opportunities for staff to understand what to look for in suspicious scams and phishing emails. Moreover, they must provide opportunities for staff to practice their knowledge and understanding through practical exercises such as spam and phishing simulation exercises, which could help users avoid falling victim to spam and phishing emails.
... Christian Kagerl and Julia Starzetz are able to draw on a large-scale and representative survey of German production sites in their paper "Working from home for good? Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and what this means for the future of work" (Kagerl and Starzetz 2023). Their investigation identifies the home office potential of the German private economy to comprise 25-30% of the workplaces. ...
... The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly shown the value of information systems for rethinking and virtualizing work arrangements to counter the consequences of the virus (e.g., Hirsch et al. 2023, Kagerl andStarzetz 2023). But information systems have also been instrumental in fighting the virus itself. ...
