Benefits and Risks of Teleworking from Home: The Teleworkers’ Point of View

Abstract

Using a qualitative research-based approach, this study aimed to understand (i) the way home-based teleworkers in France perceive and organize their professional activities and workspaces, (ii) their teleworking conditions, (iii) the way they characterize the modalities and the nature of their interactions with their professional circle, and more broadly (iv) their quality of life ‘at work’. We performed a lexical and morphosyntactic analysis of interviews conducted with 28 teleworkers (working part-time or full-time from home) before the COVID-19 crisis and the associated establishment of emergency telework. Our results confirm and complement findings in the literature. Participant discourses underlined the beneficial effects of teleworking in terms of professional autonomy, flexibility, concentration, efficiency, performance, productivity, and being able to balance their professional and private lives. Nevertheless, they also highlighted the deleterious effects of teleworking on temporal workload, setting boundaries for work, work-based relationships and socio-professional integration. Despite the study limitations, our findings highlight the need for specific research-based and practical strategies to support the implementation of a sustainable telework organization in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era.

A Model for the Acceptance and Use of Online Meeting Tools

“…This study found that expectations influencing the intention to use online meeting tools in companies are grouped under the dimensions of employee-employee interaction, technological contribution, and adaptation to social and organizational changes. The benefits of working from home, such as increased productivity, fewer interruptions, convenience, flexibility, and time and money savings, have been identified by respondents in two related studies [67,72] and align with the expectations for online meeting tools in this study. Additionally, the performance and well-being [66], productivity [69], and socioeconomic impacts [73] associated with remote work, which have been extensively studied in the literature, also match the expectations.…”

“…The first step in the quantitative instrument development process was the generation of an item pool. In order to select the best possible items, the items obtained as a result of the coding performed in the qualitative research and the item styles of the technology acceptance models in the literature were used [65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. At the end of this step, a pool of 66 items was generated.…”

Negative Impact of Telework, Job Insecurity, and Work–Life Conflict on Employee Behaviour

“…The existence of some positive influences between working from home and the feeling of professional isolation felt daily by fully remote employees (β = 0.423; T-value = 3.184; p < 0.01) was demonstrated, but also for those working partially from home (β = 0.283; T-value = 2.364; p < 0.05) [38]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations that adopted teleworking provided a large variety of technological tools for maintaining good communication, but this was not enough to avoid professional isolation [50], social isolation, marginalisation, and other forms of deterioration in the quality of relationships between co-workers and employees [124]. Therefore, professional isolation becomes a negative outcome of telework (see H4).…”

Opportunity to Use New Ways of Working: Do Sectors and Organizational Characteristics Shape Employee Perceptions?

“…In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Ways of Working (NWW) became a central issue for organizations. Although the topic has been studied for many years, it gained increasing attention from both academics and practitioners during the COVID-19related lockdowns which affected most employers and employees worldwide [1,2]. NWW may be defined as new forms of work, facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT), that allow workers to choose when and where they work [3][4][5].…”