How does working from home influence individual well-being, work-life conflict,
commitment, and stress?
▪How does working from home produce new inequalities or reproduce or exacerbate existing social inequalities – for instance those of gender, disability, ethnicity or class?
How can greater equality be produced in working from home?
Where do workers choose to develop boundaries between work and home and how is this consistent between new (Covid-19) home-workers and previous analyses?
How do employees deal with the phenomenon of professional isolation?
Which employees show resilience to the negative effects of working at home?
What role do an affinity for technology and technical skills play?
How does the leadership of virtual teams working from home and the coordination of work function?
How do teams find new ways to interact under forced digitalisation?
To what extent are managers attempting to, or successful in, institutionalising new mechanisms and spaces of surveillance?
What are the learning effects from managers’ and teams’ engagement in interactive practices?
What role does support from superiors or corporate culture play in the feasibility of remote work?
What impact does working from home have on established HR practices? How can performance be assessed, what working time arrangements are necessary, how are
employees and careers developed?
What new possibilities for individual resistance are identified amongst remote workers?
How does the organization of collective resistance operate among remote workers?
What consequences does remote work have for the productivity of workers and teams?
Are there ways to design work and workplaces so that they are suitable for remote work?
How are new online routines emerging and how do informal and formal social interactions develop within these routines?
What is the role of contextual factors that are particularly evident in the Covid-19 pandemic,such as increased caring responsibilities or social isolation?
What differences do current studies of the Covid-19 as an extreme situation show in comparison to previous studies?
How do managers and their teams make sense of Covid-19 as an extreme situation and how does their sense-making impact on their work-related involvement?
This is a really interesting topic area.
Whilst it might not feel like it at the moment, Covid will - eventually - become a historical event.
Therefore, I assume you'll look at a good number of the issues you raise over time (pre, during and post)?
Also, trying to determine what would have happened anyway (regardless), what was speeded up, would never have happened (but did) and what didn't happen as a consequence/reaction to Covid, might be a useful set of perspectives?
You have a lot of questions, which I guess you'll need to whittle down to a manageable number (or share). They all have value, although some might be more challenging to measure / analyze?
For what it's worth, your questions around the implications for leading and managing a team remotely strike a chord, as does the impact on culture (as so many things related to culture are impacted).
I enjoyed reading your question - good luck with your work
These topics are varied and interesting and are certainly reflective of our current situation.
However to corral them into clusters via interrogation of the underpinning theoretical perspectives embedded within each, in part begins to clarify them.
What do the questions reflect in terms of Ontology; Epistemology; positionality; relationality?
Consideration of those philosophical assumptions and researcher/questioner/discusser positionality and relationality are crucial.
Consider the following:
Work as a noun:
“Where do workers choose to develop boundaries between work and home and how is this consistent between new (Covid-19) home-workers and previous analyses?”
And Work as a verb:
“How can greater equality be produced in working from home?”
This leads to the questions: what is work, and what does the assumption implicit in its use in the previous questions suggest about the ontology and epistemology?
What meanings have been given to work – in other societies and other eras? Casey’s (1995) brief history of the meaning of work reveals the wide range of meanings given to work over time, from its lowly status in the ancient world – where only slaves, artisans and women worked – to being a social obligation today. Where did the work ethic come from? “How did paid work come to be so central to our lives? Why is it that so many people wouldn’t know what to do with themselves or who they were if they did not have their jobs?” (Beder 2000:1) Beder (2000) argues that the work ethic originated as the heart of capitalist culture from 16th century Calvinism – later to be taken up by Methodism in Britain – but was transformed into a generalised secular ethic (“hard work leads to success”) in the 19th century and is still the dominant value in our society:
When you are employed, how is the employment relationship constituted? How does this impact on your identity/sense of self? Consider the range of employment relations that are possible.
For each of these there is a corresponding impact on the “worker” and their identity. In the case of slaves, the workforce was a commodity/chattel that belonged to the owner, to use as he/she wished; they were, however, fed and housed by the owners – as a sensible protection for their investment, rather than out of goodwill.
Similarly, serfs were ‘owned’ by the landowner but had rights of access to housing and pasture (the commons) to ensure their survival. [Indenture – as in traditional apprenticeships – was a similar arrangement but for a limited term, usually 7 years]. In all of these, being ‘owned’ by another person produces a lasting sense of dependence and servitude in the mind of the workers:
The master-servant relationship is somewhat different, in that although the servant is subject to the orders of the employer, he/she is not that person’s property – and can (at least in theory) choose to leave that person’s employment.
Wage labour – the system which many of us are more familiar – involves a qualitatively different arrangement. In theory the wage/labour exchange relationship should enhance the worker’s sense of power, autonomy, and identity. In practice, however, the parties’ relative power depends on the state of the labour market. [Householders lack this power when they must wait weeks before a plumber can fix a leaking tap, and both skilled and “unskilled” workers lack power when they line up with a hundred others for a casual retail job.
In short, the straightforward explanation of the theoretical underpinning informs the reader and determines and shapes the interpretation and findings of a question or study