Changes and Adaptations in the Workplace due to Covid-19
Over the span of the beginning of the pandemic, to quarantine, and into the process of coming back into work, work functions have drastically changed and evolved. There. Are many different obstacles and struggles coming back into the workplace after the pandemic. The readjustment in terms of communication, conflict management, work ethic/preformance, organization, and more, were all things that required adjustment in workspaces. Every workplace has had to change the patterns they work within. Dynamics in the workplace have changed because everyone has been working remotely, and for some, working remotely is all they know thus far. Entrepreneurs have gone from face-to-face to work, to remote work, to social distanced work. There are many different adjustments that each worker has been challenged with and have needed to adjust to.
Carnelvale, J. B. (2020). Employee adjustment and well-being in the era of COVID-19: Implications for human resource management. N.p.: Journal of Business Research. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296320303301
This article explains the challenges that businesses have been faced with due to covid, and specifically on how human resource management can help navigate their workforce. HRM have discovered new ways to help adjust the altered work environment, and keep a productive and motivating space for workers. This article is spot on with our project, because it focuses on the adaptation in the workplace post-covid. It talks about the transition into quarantine, as well as what workers were faced with while stay at home orders were in place. There were new challenges that we had never seen before, as people tried to navigate new ways to simply just get outside and work somewhere other than inside their home. There was no separation between work and private life, as whole families had no other choice than to be with each other all day at home. The overall challenge that the pandemic has brought to the workplace has brought great learning and research opportunities to support workers in one of the most challenging times in modern history.
Gonzales, K. (2022). Disposition activation during organizational change: A meta‐analysis. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/peps.12513
This article is based around examining the employees’ adjustments to organizational change. This applies to our research because Covid-19 brought on so many unexpected changes to the workplace. They conducted multiple different analyses on workers who underwent organizational change, and examined how these changes affected them. The pros and cons of these changes are associated with the type of change, type of outcome, the state of change, and more. This article gives us a closer insight on the physiological effects of organizational change as well as other types of change in the workplace, so that we can better understand what types of effects the pandemic had on workers. We want to look at how these changes have altered team dynamics, communication, work ethic and more. Taking the challenges that organizations were faced with, and examining what they did and how they adjusted in the adaptation process is the prime factor in our presentation.
SCHLEY, M. (2021). The Hybrid Workplace. Facility Management Journal / FMJ, 31(5), 75–79.
This publication discusses how the workplace adjusted in order to fit the needs for employees working from home and how a hybrid workplace has become a highly preferred method. It addresses how workers will adapt and learn how to combine an in-person and online workspace to create cohesive, collaborative work as 68% of employees advocate for working digitally. This information is important to our group research as we are exploring how workers will adapt to returning to the workplace after primarily working from home and how COVID-19 impacted the way workplaces will function after the pandemic. Understanding how hybrid contributions will be integrated into businesses and why employees value hybrid working as opposed to traditional in-person working is important to researching how people will resume back into their normal working routine, remote or otherwise, as a result of COVID-19.
Brammer, S., Branicki, L., & Linnenluecke, M. K. (2020). Covid-19, societalization, and the future of business in society. Academy of Management Perspectives, 34(4), 493–507. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2019.0053
This article focuses on how COVID-19 affected the business world and how it will change as things settle in more to adjust to this new lifestyle within the pandemic. In addition to discussing how the business environment itself will change, it also notes the change in relationship between businesses and society. As we are researching about workers returning to a possible in-person work environment, it is also important to take into consideration the type of business environment they are in – when the business has to adjust its relationship with the outside world, the workers have to adjust their ways of working as well. This article will help widen the group’s understanding on how COVID-19 will not be the only variable affecting workplace behavior, but also how COVID-19’s impact on businesses will alter that behavior too.
Sako, M. (2021 April) From Remote Work to Working From Anywhere: Tracing Temporary Work Modifications Resulting in Permanent Organizational Changes. http://ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=149459786&site=ehost-live
This particular article covers the trajectory that remote work has taken. What constitutes working remotely now is very different from what it looked like even just a few years ago. There is also mention of the transition from just freelancers working from home to a large percentage of the working population doing so. There has been a shift in expectations regarding what a working day looks like among office workers and many want to continue having the option to work from home. This article was chosen because of the descriptions of how remote work has changed over time. To be able to accurately gauge how the pandemic and an increase in remote work has changed the team dynamic within businesses, we need a baseline for how the process worked pre-pandemic. Having this breakdown is useful when making comparisons and tracking changes.
Fest, S et al. (2021 December) How (not) to motivate online workers: Two controlled field experiments on leadership in the gig economy. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984321000199
This article covers how leaders work to motivate and increase the performance of remote workers. In the case of this article, they are discussing gig workers that are picking up jobs on an online platform. This does, however, lend some ideas as to how managers in office environments can maintain motivation among employees that are spread out around an area rather than working in one office. By incentivising engagement and working to increase productivity within the team, managers can continue to have a well working team despite the difficulties that can arise as a result of remote work. These measures are important when discussing the changing team environment as workers have rapidly changing expectations for work. They may not be content with the structure an organization previously had. And, while there is more engagement between employees and their employers in an office environment than in a gig job, there is still more of a disconnect than anyone has encountered before. Managers will need to find mechanisms to keep the team together and working smoothly.
Biron, M., de Cieri, H., Fulmer, I., Lin, C. H. V., Mayrhofer, W., Nyfoudi, M., Sanders, K., Shipton, H., & Sun, J. M. J. (2021). Structuring for innovative responses to human resource challenges: A skunk works approach. Human Resource Management Review, 31(2), 100768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2020.100768
All of us contributed in the research and finding these articles. We all wrote different parts of the bibliography for the articles that we all found. We communicated about our different topics that we were going to focus on during the research.
Olivia Secord
Benjamin Sehayek
Destiny Ulanoff
Victoria Bentley