Staying Engaged While Working From Home; Reasonable expectations of management and employee interaction during Covid-19
Our Blog will research and analyze to what extent corporations are responsible for how employees stay engaged with work during non-work problems that may arise such as Covid-19.
SOURCES
- Nilakant, V., Walker, B., Kuntz, J., de Vries, H. P., Malinen, S., Näswall, K., & van Heugten, K. (2016). Dynamics of organisational response to a disaster: A study of organisations impacted by earthquakes. In Business and Post-disaster Management (pp. 35-47). Routledge.
This source is from a book I was able to find through Google Scholar. The chapter discusses the adaptive resilience of lifelines organisations in Christchurch following the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. From the abstract and briefly skimming, it identifies four major themes that characterise the post-disaster response of organisations: employee needs wellbeing and engagement; collaboration; leadership; and learning from experience.
- Lapierre, L., van Steenbergen, E., Peeters, M. and Kluwer, E., 2015. Juggling work and family responsibilities when involuntarily working more from home: A multiwave study of financial sales professionals. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(6), pp.804-822.
This research article focuses on the impact of involuntarily working from home and its relation to higher or lower time strain-based work-to-family conflict (WFC) while also considering the effects and influences of employees ‘boundary management strategy (integration vs. segmentation) and work-family balance self-efficacy. Boundary management and self-efficacy are two individual differences that the study used as moderators. With this data presented and by using multi-wave survey data collected among 251 financial sales professionals, the study and researches done to date suggest that self-efficacy is much more promising in helping professionals positively avoid WFC while involuntarily working from home. This information is important to consider especially at this time when the world is facing a pandemic and almost everyone is being forced to involuntarily work from home. This article will be helpful to deepen our knowledge regarding telework and the effects it brings onto the home environment.
- Choudhury, Prithwiraj, et al. “Is It Time to Let Employees Work from Anywhere?” Harvard Business Review, 4 Mar. 2020,
URL: hbr.org/2019/08/is-it-time-to-let-employees-work-from-anywhere.
This is an article from the Harvard Business Review written to answer the question “Is it time to let employees work from anywhere”. This article mainly goes into the logistics of working from home, ie how employers felt about it versus worker productivity. It talked a lot about different studies done on the subject of people working from home and how it affected their work. While it mainly went after the argument that working from anywhere and not just home can be beneficial to employees and employers, we can use this article and its arguments in terms of just working from home. It has a lot of good information about how working from home can be improved upon so that will be very helpful in developing our argument.
- Steel, R., & Yeung, B. (2020). The biggest remote working experiment is now a reality. Asia Insurance Review, 60–61.
This is an article written about how employees respond to working from home during the epidemic. It talks about how employers can keep their employees engaged and how to plan for future work. There has been an influx in the number of remote workers since the start of Covid 19. Sustainable engagement can be the key to keeping employees happy and motivated when they lack a sense of belonging. Not only is sustainable engagement better for the employees but studies have shown that it is associated with better financials and higher productivity.
- Neeley, T. (2020). 15 Questions About Remote Work, Answered. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–7.
URL:
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=6&sid=7b9bc011-d37e-4dfc-b8a2-91cb8de53103%40sessionmgr101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=bth&AN=142483577
Many businesses are forced into remote working. This article has the answers to your questions about what remote working may entail. Employees and management must figure out how to operate efficiently and increase productivity. Psychological health is a priority during these times and there are many things that you can do for yourself to stay happy. Management must also make this a priority as COVID-19 is a time of uncertainty and employees are all going through their own unique difficulties.
- Woodman, P. (2007). Business Continuity Management . Retrieved April 23, 2020, from http://www.wbcoft.org.uk/Attachments/Business Continuity Management/BusinessContinuityManagementreport2007.pdf
This report “Business Continuity Management” is about business continuity management (BCM) during internal and external disruptions. External disruptions include situations such as extreme weather, terrorism, or infectious disease. In the report they discuss a survey they conducted in 2007 which asked businesses about business continuity plans they had set in place. For example, they found that 19% of businesses surveyed had a robust plan in place for an influenza pandemic while 43% had no plan at all. Perhaps the most vital information from this source that pertains to our blog subject is building resilience through alternative offices and remote working. 53% of respondents said that their IT systems support remote working “to a great extent” and that these systems need to be set in place before a disruption due to the fact that it may not be possible to set something up during the disruption. Building resilience to disruptions is an important step in business continuity management and a key to a sustainable business.
- Müller, T., & Niessen, C. (2019). Self‐leadership in the context of part‐time teleworking. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40(8), 883–898. doi: 10.1002/job.2371
On an individual level, it is important for employees to engage in self-set goals. In the study “Self-leadership in the context of part-time teleworking” they found that employees engage in self-set goals more often when working from home compared to working in the office and when an employee engages in self-set goals they increase their job satisfaction. Therefore, it may be beneficial for managers to find ways to encourage self-set goals during times that employees are working from home which will increase job satisfaction and reduce employee turnover (Muller, T., & Niessen, C., 2019).
- Davis, Michelle F, and Jeff Green. “Three Hours Longer, the Pandemic Workday Has Obliterated Work-Life Balance.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 23 Apr. 2020,
Although this from an international-news agency, it gives great perspective on the popular outlook around organizational behaviour and COVID. This article dives into the realities of working from home and the daily challenges of “disconnecting” from work, when your home is now your office. It gives several personal accounts from world-renowned leaders on how they and their companies are coping & the strategies they use. To get an even better idea, the article ends with the quote from an Intel Executive accounting for the meshing of home-life and work-life; “I just sat at the breakfast table… I don’t have a good answer for him.”
By: Sheila Mae Cabiao, Brian Bill, Ethan Norgard, Nick Phillips & Thomas Wicker-Fetzer (*all authors contributed equally to this paper)