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The ongoing Corona Virus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to wreak mayhem on private, public, and non-profit organizations by forcing employees to work remotely due to shelter-in-place and quarantines (Brynjolfsson et al., 2020). A Gallup (2020) study reported that the number of U.S. employees working remotely increased from 31% to 65% from March to May in 2020, equating to over 100 million workers. The COVID-19 outbreak brought the international community to a screeching halt; consequently, forcing many employees to transition to remote work (Prasad, Rao, Vaidya, & Muralidhar, 2020). Prasad et al. (2020) define remote work as a schema or practice allowing employees to perform work functions external to the traditional office setting. An existing gap is the paucity of scholarly research on the positive and negative aspects of working remotely in the U.S., primarily due to many states still executing some form of quarantine. The study uses qualitative research to capture employees’ experiences and viewpoints of remote working during COVID-19 in the U.S. This research was driven by the following central questions: How do remote workers during COVID-19 explain their virtual experiences? How do remote workers classify the positive, negative, and neutral factors of virtual work during COVID-19?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. is experiencing an exponential uptick in remote work arrangements. A Gallup (2020) study indicates that the remote workforce increased from 31% to 65% during the pandemic. Organizations struggle to transform from conventional operations to work remotely and expand their information technology capabilities to provide them with technological connections (Bick, Chang, Wang, & Tianwen, 2020). At this time, there is a paucity of research on the impacts of remote work during COVID-19. This qualitative study used journaling to capture the remote workers' experiences based on three research questions. First, the remote workers wrote daily journal entries for 60 days to answer the research questions based on their everyday experiences. Second, the researcher used qualitative content analysis to identify the major themes of the interview questions, journal entries, and existing literature. The findings could provide insight into shaping remote working strategies for the betterment of employees and organizations.
Problem Statement
Researchers noted that COVID-19 is devastating and disrupts the normalcy of daily business operations and how organizations conduct work. Lister and Harnisch (2019) highlighted that 79% of private-sector employees and 87% of public sector workers desire to work remotely (Dahik et al., 2020). A recent study revealed 80% of U.S. survey participants' dissatisfaction with social connectivity and its impact on maintaining virtual workers’ production requirements (Dahik et al., 2020). Ninety-four percent of workers in the U.S. have access to the Internet (Lister & Hanisch, 2019); internet access enables business organizations to transition to remote working strategies during the onset of the pandemic. The general business problem is that organizations are unaware of the necessary factors and requirements to maintain remote workers’ production. Due to pandemics, the lack of business models indicating the needs and strategies to increase positive remote working experiences are mainly underexplored.