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Top1. Introduction
Telework facilitates flexibility and a strong work-family balance while reducing the environmental impacts of mobility (Demerouti et al., 2014; Palumbo et al., 2021; Akter et al., 2021). Although it has benefits, the implementation of teleworking practices across Europe, particularly in home-based telework, is moving more slowly than expected (Shockley & Allen, 2010). The economic crisis is considered to justify this delay, although teleworking was initially attributed to the oil crisis of the 1970s (Allen, Golden, & Shockley, 2015).
In this context, telework has suddenly experienced a rebound due to the measures to protect citizens from the COVID-19 (Lamprinou et al., 2021). At the beginning of 2020, several governments recommended that companies facilitate teleworking to avoid employees gathering together in the same place (Segbena et al., 2021). This pushed the incidence of telework to an unprecedented tipping point. In the United States, 65% of the workforce were teleworking full-time in early May 2020 (Gallup, 2020), which is a multifold increase from the 11% who had access to partial telework pre-COVID-19 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). All other regions, including Europe (Lomas, 2020) and Asia (Liang, 2020; Tay, 2020), saw record telework rates in the period, too. This study argues that this form of mandatory telework is fundamentally distinct from the aforementioned partial telework offered as a flexible work arrangement. This is because employees now have little or no volition to decide whether and when to telework. This work arrangement also severely restricts their ability to access physical infrastructure, tools, and resources in their workplaces.
The COVID-19 crisis has far-reaching impacts on diverse occupations because effective responses to COVID-19 require joint and collective efforts across nations, governments, industries, and communities (Naor et al., 2021). The evolving and volatile nature of the COVID-19 situation and the adaptive countermeasures creates new and unfamiliar problems that disrupt the original job scopes of many telework employees working in diverse fields (Borg, 2021; Christopher, 2021). For example, public sector employees must now deal with pressing issues such as health care provision, abrupt and rapidly rising unemployment, and trade disruptions due to restrained international mobility (Evans, 2020). Educators have to conduct classes virtually (Lim-Lange, 2020). Hospitality staff needs to devise creative ways to maintain revenue while observing social distancing guidelines and travel bans (Djeebet, 2020).
This study examined attitudes towards teleworking among information technology (IT) professionals in the Republic of Korea. IT personnel represent a dynamic workforce in a new and high-growth industry of the future. In fact, with the increasing use of IT by both developing and industrialized countries, IT personnel constitute an important component of the workforce that can aid companies and governments in leveraging IT to improve efficiency and compete effectively in the global markets.