XLIV ENCONTRO DA ANPAD - EnANPAD 2020 Evento on-line - 14 ...

XLIV ENCONTRO DA ANPAD - EnANPAD 2020Evento on-line - 14 a 16 de outubro de 2020 - 2177-2576 versão onlineXLIV ENCONTRO DA ANPAD - EnANPAD 2020

Evento on-line - 14 a 16 de outubro de 2020

2177-2576 versão online

Teleworking Pre, During, and Post-Pandemic: Organizational Adherence andProfessionals Preferences in Times of COVID-19

AutoriaFernando Filardi - [email protected]

Mestrado em Administração/IBMEC

Graduação em Administração/Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro UNIRIO

Thiago da Costa Schmitz - [email protected] Internacional/Rennes School of Business

Doutorado Internacionl/FGV/EBAPE - Fundação Getulio Vargas/Esc Brasileira de Admin Pública e de Empresas

Denise Daleva Costa Leal - [email protected] em Admin/FGV/EBAPE - Fundação Getulio Vargas/Esc Brasileira de Admin Pública e de Empresas

ResumoIn times of COVID-19, teleworking has become a necessity for businesses? andadministration?s survival. Both private and public sectors migrate forcibly theirprofessionals to home office under disruptive conditions of social isolation to avoidcontamination from a new, unknown, and pandemic disease. Suddenly almost all companieswere challenged in their work dynamics and management, and social isolation becomes themain challenge (Ahmed et al., 2020). This exploratory quali-quantitative empiric researchfocused on understanding how organizations are dealing with telework, investigating keyelements of teleworking pre, during, and post-pandemic in professionals point of view. Toachieve this, a literature review was carried out in Portuguese and English, which generatedthe theoretical basis that supported the elaboration of a questionnaire that was applied onlineusing the Google Forms tool. There were 183 valid responses from professionals from eightdifferent countries and the results show a 93% adoption of telework during a pandemic, witha tendency to increase between pre- and post-pandemic in all economic sectors, part-time orfull-time, led by the public sector and the services segment. But in professionals view thereare issues related to infrastructure, costs, company support that should be fixed to reach awin-win situation.

XLIV ENCONTRO DA ANPAD - EnANPAD 2020Evento on-line - 14 a 16 de outubro de 2020 - 2177-2576 versão online

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Teleworking Pre, During, and Post-Pandemic: Organizational Adherence and Professionals Preferences in Times of COVID-19

Abstract In times of COVID-19, teleworking has become a necessity for businesses’ and administration’s survival. Both private and public sectors migrate forcibly their professionals to home office under disruptive conditions of social isolation to avoid contamination from a new, unknown, and pandemic disease. Suddenly almost all companies were challenged in their work dynamics and management, and social isolation becomes the main challenge (Ahmed et al., 2020). This exploratory quali-quantitative empiric research focused on understanding how organizations are dealing with telework, investigating key elements of teleworking pre, during, and post-pandemic in professionals point of view. To achieve this, a literature review was carried out in Portuguese and English, which generated the theoretical basis that supported the elaboration of a questionnaire that was applied online using the Google Forms tool. There were 183 valid responses from professionals from eight different countries and the results show a 93% adoption of telework during a pandemic, with a tendency to increase between pre- and post-pandemic in all economic sectors, part-time or full-time, led by the public sector and the services segment. But in professionals view there are issues related to infrastructure, costs, company support that should be fixed to reach a win-win situation.

Keywords: Teleworking, Home Office, People Management, Professionals, COVID-19.

1. INTRODUCTION

COVID-19 is not the first pandemic the world lives, and won’t be the last. In the past, some dangerous diseases had a high impact on the global population, like Black Death/Bubonic Plague, Cholera, Tuberculosis, Smallpox, and HIV/AIDS (still without available cure), among others (see Table 1). Some of them persist nowadays, and the world population still needs the vaccine (when it exists) to avoid getting it back.

Table 1: Pandemics/Epidemics details

Disease as popularly known Major Damage and Period

Black Death 50 million dead (Europe and Asia) – 1333 to 1351

Cholera Hundreds of thousands of dead – 1817 to 1824

Tuberculosis 1 billion dead – 1850 to 1950

Smallpox 300 million dead – 1896 to 1980

Spanish Flu 20 million dead – 1918 to 1919

Typhus 3 million dead (Eastern Europe and Russia) – 1918 to 1922

Yellow fever 30,000 dead (Ethiopia) – 1960 to 1962

Measles 6 million dead per year – Until 1963

HIV/AIDS 22 million dead – Since 1981 Note Source 1: Editora Abril (2004). Note Source 2: The World Health Organization. Retrieved April 10, 2020, from https://www.who.int/health-topics/plague#tab=tab_1 . Note Source 3: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Retrieved April 9, 2020, from https://periodicos.fiocruz.br/pt-br/content/novo-coronav%C3%ADrus-desperta-o-interesse-pela-hist%C3%B3ria-das-grandes-epidemias .

In the 21st Century, it is not different: even under the advances of medicine and

sanitation, new epidemics with the chance to become (or that effectively became) a pandemic emerged, as we can see in Table 2:


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Table 2: Pandemics/Epidemics of 21st Century

Diseases as popularly known Period and Geography

SARS 2002 to 2003 - China and other parts of the world

Bird Flu 2005 - Southeast Asia

Swine Flu 2009 to 2010 - North America, Europe, Oceania, and then other parts of the world

MERS 2012 to 2016 - Middle East, Tunisia and the Philippines

Ebola 2014 to 2016 - Western Africa

Covid-19 2019 to the present (may/2020) - from China to the other inhabited continents Note Source 1: Brazil Ministry of Health. Retrieved April 14, 2020, from https://coronavirus.saude.gov.br/sobre-a-doenca#o-que-e-covid. Note Source 2: The World Health Organization. Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/ebola-6-months/myths/en/, https://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_03_16/en/, https://www.who.int/emergencies/mers-cov/en/, https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(avian-and-other-zoonotic), and https://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_questions/about_disease/en/.

In recent times, people and health entities predicted the eminence of an epidemic coming and suggested actions to minimize its effects. Gates (2015) and Zhang and Webster (2017) were some of them, and their focus was on how to save lives and provide logistics, medicine, and other aspects of human health and safety. In another direction, Taylor and Metzler (2009) brought a sample of the discussion led by professionals from the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) along the years of 2007 to 2009. They were worried about the preparedness of organizations to continue their job and business in the context of a possible pandemic outbreak. The World Health Organization (WHO) Public Health Research Agenda for Influenza (2015) in face of the risk of a new pandemic comes from the same decade and supports their concerns.

The impact of an epidemic/pandemic is such that markets and finance are affected worldwide. At the example of the COVID-19 outbreak, stock market indexes go downhill (see Charts 1-4), while organizations try hard to alternatively continue their businesses or public services to attend, at least, the population’s basic needs – recalling Maslow (1943).

Chart 1. Dow Jones

Chart 2. Ibovespa

Chart 3. FTSE

Chart 4. Nikkei

Source: Investing.com. Retrieved April 4, 2020, from https://br.investing.com/indices/.


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For sure, at the time of Black Death or the first Cholera outbreaks, there was not teleworking. Although, there is a register of productive work from home of Isaac Newton during the bubonic plague quarantine. As per Editora Globo (2020), it was by 1665, while the bubonic plague spread to London and Newton was recluse at the Woolsthorpe mansion, that he observed apples fallen under a tree and first thought of the law of universal gravitation.

Since then, a lot of findings on nature happened and lots of technology were created. On the computational sciences, not only equipment and materials (hardware) were developed, but software as well. Connecting the world through cheap and wide communication systems became true with the Internet, and now telecommunication enters the 5G era (fifth-generation wireless connection) (Chen, 2020), allowing a high-speed response of machines to human commands. IoT (Internet of Things) connects multi-equipments through the Internet (https://www.oracle.com/br/internet-of-things/what-is-iot.html, retrieved April 20, 2020), with no need for cabling anymore. Optical fiber and satellites connect countries and continents, and this is not only for big enterprises but also at home! Surely high-technology isn’t available everywhere, but this is a glimpse of the power and capillarity of technology with its expanding availability at an increasingly lower cost.

Technology helps companies to improve and survive. Teleworking, or working out of the main workplace, is today a reality carried out by hi-tech telecommunication and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at feasible costs. AI benefits the telework of several businesses and public assistance areas, from human health like hospital pre-online triage by AI to diagnose COVID-19 symptoms, and epidemic tracking like global count of people infected by the new coronavirus using Big Data in the Google Coronavirus Map (2020) to the support of negotiation processes between distant stakeholders through efficient video-conference systems like Whatsapp, Skype, WebEx, and many others.

It’s true that not the entire population could work remotely, but pandemic has made people and organizations exercise their flexibility to migrate rapidly to new ways of performing their jobs, using tools that, indeed, were already there, but not under full usage. In this context, the research question arises: How is the organization's teleworking adoption taking place, and what are the positive and negative effects of teleworking before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic and what improvements are necessary to have desirable conditions Teleworking in the professionals point of view?

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

Teleworking can be understood as work done remotely, through Information and Communication Technologies (Rocha & Amador, 2018). Sakuda and Vasconcelos (2005) adopt the definition of telework as the use of computers and telecommunications to change the accepted geography of work, referring to the displacement out of the organizational workplace.

2.1. Teleworking in the World

Two main and also disparate readings on telework seem to guide the predominance of academic studies on the subject, one of which is optimistic, which focuses on the benefits of telework for professionals, companies, and society (improving environmental conditions by reducing traffic jams), and another, more pessimistic, focused on the losses of individualization of work, which leads to the social, professional and political isolation of professionals (Rocha & Amador, 2018).

Tremblay (2002), in pioneering research, studied teleworking from the perspective of teleworkers in Canada, and identified a high level of satisfaction among teleworkers, although, at that time, she identified gender differences in the type of work performed among men (linked to information technologies) and women (accounting, translation, and secretariat). The author


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raised the benefits perceived by companies (reducing urban traffic, increasing their presence in different parts of the national territory and guaranteeing professionals satisfaction to increase productivity and quality), the benefits perceived by professionals (greater freedom and autonomy, flexible hours, avoided commuting, greater productivity, proximity to the family and improvement in the quality of work) and disadvantages (technological support to be desired, less prestige for teleworkers in the company, need for better definition of tasks, distance from co-workers and social isolation, the potential increase in workload, difficulties in self-motivation or self-discipline and conflict between work and family life). The author noted that there were convergences between the benefits observed by professionals and companies.

2.2. Teleworking in Brazil

Costa (2007), in another study about teleworking from the perspective of professionals, but under the aspect of the relationship between power (contractor) and knowledge (teleworker contracted), realized that the identity of teleworkers with teleworking appears as a self-narrative for teleworkers as self-entrepreneurs, and it has less to do with the identification of the teleworker with his role in the organization or with the organization itself – in addition to verifying the same benefits and difficulties raised by Tremblay (2002). Nohara, Acevedo, Ribeiro, and Silva (2010) also researched teleworking under the perception of teleworkers, identifying the same order of perceived benefits and difficulties.

In turn, focusing on the perspective of teleworkers managers, Nogueira and Patini (2012) reported communication problems as the main difficulty in the remote management of professionals, especially in recruitment and selection processes and in motivation, since the interaction is a key factor to the generation of subjective aspects of work relations such as the generation of trust, which will be the basis for feedback processes, performance evaluation and control of goals and results for companies.

Villarinho and Paschoal (2016), researching teleworkers, their heads and non-teleworkers colleagues from a Brazilian federal public company (Serpro) identified that teleworkers reported better professional performance and well-being at work than non-teleworkers, although this does not mean that there were no negative points observed by teleworkers themselves in this type of work. The authors also reported differences in perception about teleworking among teleworkers, their bosses, and their non-teleworkers colleagues, which shows that organizations have not yet managed to level out understandings and, in summary, the modality still needs to mature in the organizational scope.

Filardi, Castro, and Zanini (2020) investigated the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking in the Public Administration of Brazil in the perception of professionals and managers of two federal agencies that adopt the work system, addressing structural, physical, personal, professional and psychological issues, and concluded that teleworking needs a management model that makes it more adherent to the public sphere. A similar conclusion had been reached by Aderaldo, Aderaldo, and Lima (2017) for private initiative, in a study with interns from a multinational company that used telework as a human resources policy - there is a need to develop it as a strategically oriented practice in the organizational environment.

Teleworking is not something new, although its right beginning is not known. By the year 1988, F. International Group PLC had 1,100 teleworkers, as per Pinel (1998), but nowadays it has become popular with more technology and possibilities, even reaching informal professionals and businesses, as we can see in OLX services offers. In the State of Rio de Janeiro, as per Torres (2020), the government moved the classes to the online platform of Google Classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies continued their projects, training, and board meetings by tele/videoconference and other free or low-cost communication tools, taking important decisions remotely. The government tried to avoid any kind of crowding


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and provided ways for the population to request financial assistance via the Internet, what in the recent past was only possible to be taken in person.

2.3. Teleworking During COVID-19

The outbreak of avian influenza in 2005 was responsible for generating the first pandemic outlook in the 21st century (new outbreaks would come in 2013 and 2020), but it was swine flu that became the first pandemic of the century recognized by WHO (Cumming-Bruce & Jacobs, 2009). A search in databases of the global scientific literature that lists the conjugated terms of telework and epidemic/pandemic shows that scientific publications on the matter began to appear because of avian influenza outbreak and were related to the preparation of countries and organizations for conditions of teleworking during a period of social coexistence restrictions.

InformationWeek (2007) reported the results of a CDW Corp. survey that nearly half of U.S. Federal Government professionals declared to have the option to do their jobs from outside the main office, by telecommuting, while only 15% of the professionals of the private sector declared they could do it. According to the same survey, 62% of the federal agencies had written IT policies for telecommuting, up from 46% the previous year, while only 40% of the private companies had it.

Other numbers from the same survey are impressive. Eighty-seven percent of federal telecommuting respondents said they could continue to work in the event of a disaster or other situation that displaced employees, and 66% of non-telecommuting said they could. Meanwhile, in the private sector, 74% of telecommuting said that they could, while only 28% of non-telecommuting respondents could continue. CDW said that, since fewer private-sector employees telecommute, just 33% would be able to do so if their office were closed.

As a conclusion of the survey, a representative of CDW stated that executive decision-makers need to better understand the importance of having a telecommuting program to operate during situations like disasters or pandemics, to ensure government and/or business continuity – adding to it the benefits of employee availability and retention, and potential cost savings, not to mention the contribution to decrease traffic and pollution in congested cities.

Taylor and Metzler (2009), for the Network World, reported that April 2009 outbreak of H1N1 flu in the US and the northern hemisphere as a whole highlighted lack of preparation for business continuity, being most business woefully unprepared for dealing with the business impact of a medical epidemic or pandemic. They conducted a survey to determine both the extent to which organizations had a plan in place to address business continuity during a severe medical emergency and, if such a plan existed, the extent to which key business functions would survive. Their key findings showed that for over half the respondents the Business Continuity Plans (BCP) addressed a medical epidemic/pandemic either minimally (36%) or not at all (23%) and that the 2008 economic crisis decreased their ability to plan/implement/support BCP in case of an epidemic/pandemic. The companies would also have an impact after the 2009 flu outbreak to review their plans. The authors also state that business continuity and disaster recovery are areas that are easily overlooked until the calamity strikes (when it’s too late) and that the capabilities to teleworking have not been implemented to their fullest extent – especially for situations of workplace closure due to infections, or schools closures when parents need to telecommute.

Taking the example of a BCP as the one developed by Language Services Associated (LSA) for a potential 2009-2010 flu season (Biotech Week, 2009), a BCP could consist of two stages, being the first the preventive stage (with measures like giving employees the option to telecommute, handing out masks for those working on-site, encouraging internet-based meetings, offering a flu shot incentive program), and the second, the full implementation of the plan, when the effectiveness of an epidemic should include a natural increase of the


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communication services provided by the company. These two steps indicate that a BCP must contemplate, at a minimum, a vision both for the company's internal environment and the company's business market.

However, there is little published on telework related to pandemic situations in the scientific literature. From the series of articles published in IT weekly journals along 2007-2009 years, we have a jump to Ahmed, Zviedrite, and Uzicanin (2018) when they published a systematic review of the literature on the effectiveness of workplace social distancing measures in reducing influenza transmission. At that time, the authors excluded from their review studies that considered workplace closure (or social isolation), by arguing that it was not the United States neither the WHO public health recommendation for a swine (H1N1) flu outbreak.

Their results are worthy to be highlighted. The modeling studies they found estimated that workplace social distancing measures alone produced a median reduction of 23% in the cumulative influenza attack rate in the general population and that action also delayed and reduced the peak influenza attack rate. According to the authors, the models showed that the reduction in the cumulative attack rate was more pronounced when workplace social distancing was combined with other nonpharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions. However, the effectiveness was estimated to decline with higher basic reproduction number values, delayed triggering of workplace social distancing, or lower compliance.

Ahmed et al. (2020), following their studies on telework in the context of the Influenza pandemic, found that people that experience severe symptoms and need to get away from the workplace have better chances to produce working from home when having access to telework than people that only use paid leave, and that the chances of lowing flu transmission at the workplace result in more days worked for both employee working from home and healthy employees working at the workplace.

3. METHODOLOGY

This exploratory quali-quantitative empiric research focuses on identifying and understanding key elements of teleworking pre, during, and post-pandemic. To get it, we endured a search of scientific literature on Portal Capes with terms in Portuguese and English and had the findings described below.

For isolated terms in Portuguese, they were found for the term “Teletrabalho” 152 articles, being 110 of peer-reviewed journals. For the last five years, (2015-2020), 46 of peer-reviewed journals. For “Home Office”, it is worth explaining that, although in English, the term is used as a synonym for telework in Latin languages such as Portuguese, Spanish and French, while in English the term appears in two conditions: it designates only one room in the house intended for work at home, not work at home itself, or it corresponds to the name of something like the British Ministry of the Interior / Household Business. Thus, after filtering only for publications in Portuguese, publications were found in which the term application corresponds to work from home. It reduced the results from 1,261,413 to 1,544 publications found, and from 470,935 peer-reviewed journals to just 1,476. There was no more in-depth conference to identify if the home office was mentioned as an architectural environment (room in a residence) or a work activity at home. For the last 5 years (2015-2020), peer-reviewed journals: 615.

For isolated terms in English, they were found for the term “Teleworking” 4,074 publications, 2,367 of which were peer-reviewed journals. For the last 5 years (2015-2020), peer-reviewed journals: 491. For “Telecommute” 2,678 publications, with 874 peer-reviewed journals. For the last 5 years (2015-2020), peer-reviewed journals: 140. For “Work from home” 3,009,609 publications, 1,410,834 of which are peer-reviewed journals. It seems that the term fell out of use after 2016, because, for the last 5 years, there are only records of publications from the years 2015 and 2016.


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For combined search terms in Portuguese, we had the following results: For “Teletrabalho, epidemia”, no papers. For “Teletrabalho, pandemia”, no papers. For “Home Office, epidemia”, no papers. For “Home Office, pandemia”, no papers.

For the combined search terms in English “Teleworking, epidemic”, 26 publications, 14 peer-reviewed journals, from 1994. From 2015 to 2020, 5 publications, 4 peer-reviewed journals. Only one of them deals with telework related to the epidemic, notably that of influenza. For “Teleworking, pandemic”, 59 publications, 16 of which were peer-reviewed, from 1997. From 2015 to 2020, 9 publications, 5 of which were peer-reviewed journals. Some of the publications are repetitions of the previous combined search, for having both the term "epidemic" and "pandemic" in their text. For “Work from home, epidemic”, 70,777 publications, 54,610 of which were peer-reviewed journals. From 2015 to 2020, 20,544 publications, of which 16,873 were peer-reviewed journals. For ““Work from home”, epidemic”, 85 publications, 32 of which were peer-reviewed journals. For ““Work from home”, pandemic”, 141 publications, 48 of which were peer-reviewed journals. For “Telecommute, epidemic”, 29 publications, including 15 peer-reviewed journals, from 1999 to 2019. From 2015 to 2020: 4 publications, 2 of which were peer-reviewed. The latter two are linked to obesity and sedentary "epidemics". For “Telecommute, pandemic”, the same results for the epidemic.

The literature review allowed us to find out works to subside the composition of a semi-structured questionnaire with 29 questions written in English and Portuguese to be answered online using the Google Forms tool. The questions were about characteristics of the respondents (table 3), characteristics of the organizations/companies of the respondents (table 4), organization teleworking adoption, providing teleworking conditions, positive and negative effects of teleworking pre-during-post Covid-19 pandemic, and the improvements needed to have desirable teleworking conditions. The respondents' selection occurred at random (Creswell, 2014) among the members of LinkedIn, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and the invitation to answer was shared creating snowball sampling. The response period was from April 6, 2020, to April 17, 2020.

Were obtained 188 responses, of which 5 duplicated records were identified and eliminated (100% equal responses, including free text – it is believed that there was an involuntary resubmission by the respondent or some bug in the tool). In the end, totalizing 183 valid unique answers. The responses were tabulated and statistically treated and then organized in tables and charts to ease interpretation. The results were compared to the literature review to track convergences or points of divergence.

4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The findings and arguments are described in detail in this section. The main outcomes concerned with three dimensions: respondents profile, the use of teleworking in pre, during, and post-pandemic by organizations, and professionals teleworking preferences. 4.1. Respondents Profile

Table 3: Characteristics of the respondents:

• Country: o Brazil => 89.62% o Germany => 2.73% o USA => 2.19% o Argentina => 2.19% o Canada => 1.09% o Switzerland => 0.55%

• Gender: o Male => 59.56% o Female => 40,44%


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o Poland => 0.55% o Portugal => 0.55% o Not found in the list => 0.55%

• Education level: o High school => 5.46% o Associate/Bachelor's degree => 42.08% o Postgraduation/Specialization => 33.88% o Master's degree => 15.85% o Doctoral degree => 2.73%

• Age range: o 16-24 => 4.92% o 25-34 => 24.04% o 35-49 => 50.27% o 50-64 => 19.67% o 65-79 => 1.09%

• Living (Multi-options): o Live alone => 11.81% o Live with other adult(s) => 45.99% o Live with kid(s) or teen(s) 18+ years => 32.49% o Live with independent elderly => 6.75% o Live with dependent disabled people => 2.95%

• Employment status: o Employed => 83.61% o Entrepreneur (own business) => 14.75% o Unemployed => 1.64%

Source: Elaborated by the authors In summary, almost 90% of the respondents were from Brazil and the others were

distributed in countries in Europe and the Americas. There were around 59.5% male and 40.5% female. Close to 94% were between 25-64 years old, 94.5% are college graduated or above. Around 88% live with someone else (dependent, or independent people), and 98.36% are employed or own a business.

Table 4: Characteristics of the organizations/companies of the respondents:

Organization sector: Respondents role in the organization: Organization/Company size:

o Primary Sector: Agriculture, livestock and extractivism (vegetable, animal, and mineral) => 2.19%

o Secondary Sector: Industry => 7.10%

o Services Sector: Trade, services and third sector => 55.19%

o Public sector => 35.52%

o Operational Staff => 48.63% o Supervision / Coordination or

equivalent => 23.50% o Management / Administration =>

14.75% o Director or equivalent => 7.65% o President or equivalent => 5.46%

o 1-2 => 9.84% o 2-20 => 7.10% o 21-99 => 12.02% o 100-499 => 18.03% o 500+ => 53.01%

Source: Elaborated by the authors Concerning the Organizations, ~55% are from the services sector and ~35.5% are from

the public sector. Approximately 53% were from big companies and the other 47% distributed into micro, small and medium companies. The role of the respondents was almost half (48.63%) of operation staff, by 38% supervisor or manager level, and around 13% director or president level or equivalent. 4.2. The use of teleworking in pre, during and post-pandemic by organizations

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the expression "New Normal" comes up and refers to a new reality against the way society is dealing with pandemics, which includes the increased use of technology to assist organizations and their teams. McNamee and Diamond (2004) and Hinssen and Chellam (2010) have used the expression previously to the COVID-19 pandemic to speak about digital businesses.


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“New Normal” is a challenge to organizations and people in general. As to organizations, it is timely to evoke Teece, Pisano, and Shuen (1997) seminal paper on dynamic capabilities for such situations of changing preparedness and management (Easterby-Smith, Lyles, & Peteraf, 2009), considering the surprising need for social isolation that previous papers on pandemics couldn’t assess as probable or even feasible. Private or public organizations would differ from one another in their dynamic capabilities framework, that would favor or not their conditions of business/civil service continuity in subtle or disruptive changing conditions of work and production.

From the first papers at the beginning of 21st Century (2007 to 2009) to the last ones (from 2018 on), it is possible to realize the movement of organizations towards improving their capacity to work from out of the organizational workplace, considering not only working from home but also other public/paid co-work spaces.

Data from Brazilian Society of Teleworking and Teleactivities (Sobratt) for the year of 2017 inform that there were 15 millions of Brazilian teleworkers at that time, including public and private organizations, and that 70% of private firms in Brazil already adopted teleworking, with public agencies inaugurating also the modality (Moraes, 2017). According to a survey conducted by Spaces (Brasil Econômico, 2017), a company that rents coworking spaces, with 20.000 professionals around the world, 7% of the interviewees declared to choose coworking spaces for teleworking, but in Brazil, this number increases to 13%. These data show that teleworking is not necessarily synonymous of “working from home”, but that teleworking includes working from home.

Chart 5. Organization Teleworking Adoption Chart 6. Number of Weekdays of Teleworking

Chart 7. Organization Providing Teleworking Conditions

Source: Elaborated by the authors

43,17%

24,59%

62,30%

48,09%

7,10%

24,59%

0,00%

10,00%

20,00%

30,00%

40,00%

50,00%

60,00%

70,00%

80,00%

Pre-Pandemic During

Pandemic

Post-Pandemic

(feeling)

Totally Partially No

42,08%

5,47%

30,05%21,31%

78,14%

15,30%

0,00%

20,00%

40,00%

60,00%

80,00%

100,00%

Pre-Pandemic During

Pandemic

Post-Pandemic

(feeling)

0 1 2 3 4 5

38,80%43,71% 44,81%

24,59%

35,52%32,24%36,61%

20,77%22,95%

0,00%

10,00%

20,00%

30,00%

40,00%

50,00%

Pre-Pandemic During Pandemic Post-Pandemic

(feeling)

Yes Partially No


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However, this survey captured that the whole sample considered teleworking as a work from home activity, because of the specific conditions of workplace closure and social isolation imposed by COVID-19 safety measures. Pandemic took people home, and also co-work spaces were closed as well as other public or collective spaces.

It is possible to see in Chart 5 a huge adoption of teleworking during pandemic (almost 93% when summing Totally and Partially adoptions). If going a little further, Chart 6 shows that more than 78% of the companies adopted 5 days a week during pandemics. Back to Chart 5, looking at pre and post-pandemic, the numbers of no teleworking adoption diminish from 48.09% to 24.59% and partial adoptions increase from 43.17% to 62.30%. The number of weekdays follows it: if summing-up 1-4 days pre-pandemic, just 36.61% of the respondents worked partially against 54.65% shall work in post-pandemic. This study goes in line with the “Global Work-from-Home Experience Survey” published in May 2020 (Global Workplace Analytics, 2020). Their findings show 31% of teleworking adoption before the pandemic, 88% during the pandemic, and 76% as a forecast of post-pandemic. Results were similar to the most frequent number of days for the post-pandemic period where the preferable number of days was 2-3 per week across the subgroups, converging with this study findings.

There appears to be a slight tendency to increase the organization's support to provide teleworking conditions as seen in Chart 7 (all values are plotted in Table 5). Table 5: Telework adoption in Pre, During, and Post-Pandemic


In general, it seems that part-time and full-time telework will increase in the post-

pandemic by 24% on average, against the shy increase of 6.01% in the organizational support for providing teleworking conditions. This mismatch should raise an alert for organizations regarding the process of implementing telework and the organizational response to the adaptation of teleworkers.

Drilling down by sector, it is possible to see an increase of teleworking adoption in all sectors (during and post-pandemic), but it looks like the Public Sector will face the biggest change in this area, followed by Services Sector (see Table 6).

Table 6: Drill-down by Sector Pre-During-Post Pandemics



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Considering the subtle nature of telework adoption in the context of COVID-19, we can see that the Public Sector was the most flexible to adapt to Teleworking, followed by the Services Sector – which shows an increasing capability to work in more technological conditions. It’s necessary to remark that the representativeness of the Primary Sector answers is only less than 2.19%, while that of the Secondary Sector is 7.10%, from a sample of 183 valid responses. However, it’s remarkable that bureaucratic services from Public Sector tend to be even more digital and can be made far from a fixed workplace. The jump from pre-pandemic access to telework of 27.69% to a pandemic 96.92% shows that there is considerable available infrastructure and capability that allow the public work continuity far from the workplace to be a reality. The feeling that the situation post-pandemic will not return to the previous mark of 27.69% of teleworkers, but goes to an upper mark of 61,54% of them seems also to confirm this scenario, and reduction maybe exposes the need for in situ actings, as public attendance and fieldwork.

4.3. Professionals Teleworking preferences

The last part of the survey approached the professionals' preferences about teleworking.

In this subject, the survey posed seven closed questions and one open question. A list of the top 20 positive and negative effects of teleworking extracted from the survey is shown in Table 7.

Table 7: Top 20 Positive and Negative Effects of Teleworking

Source: Elaborated by the authors The respondents could choose more than one answer for the available options, and the column “Number of Respondents” reproduces the number of times each option was selected. The most frequent positive responses were “Travel time reduction” with 83.61% of the respondents' choice, followed by “Cost Reduction to the organization/company” with 78.14%, and “Security / Less exposition to violence” with 65.03%. When looking at the negative effects, the respondents’ most frequent responses were “Distraction with home activities” with 61.75%, followed by “Professional/social isolation” with 59.02%, and “Lack of facilities” with 49.18%. These results go in the same direction as the finds of Tremblay (2002), Rocha and Amador (2018), Costa (2007), and Filardi at el. (2020). After ranking the answers, it was applied a SWOT analysis based on Humphrey (2005) to the positive and negative effects of teleworking (from the respondent perspective). The answers were also distributed into internal and external factors to identify strengths and weaknesses (internally) and opportunities and threats (externally) (see Chart 8).


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Chart 8. SWOT Analysis of Teleworking under the respondent’s point of view

Source: Based on Humphrey (2005)

The companies could work with the questions and SWOT to make planning to minimize the weaknesses and threats as well as use better the positive impacts of the strengths and opportunities. The SWOT matrix built from the responses of the survey, and the survey itself proved to be usable and easy interpretation tools to support the review of the strategic planning under times of rapid change. The survey also asked respondents in a qualitative open question what are the improvements needed to have desirable teleworking conditions. The answers were descriptively coded, as shown in Table 8. The majority of respondents said that teleworking is good in any conditions. In sequence, there was a highlight of the nature of the job, then if done partially, and if for extraordinary reasons. Finally, answers raised issues related to infrastructure, costs, company support, and so on, until the point to say that teleworking is not desirable in any condition (this last opinion was not statistically representative).

Table 8: What conditions teleworking would be desirable?

Descriptive Coding Number of times the context appeared

Teleworking is good in any conditions 109 Teleworking is good depending on the nature of the job 18 Teleworking is good when done partially 12 Extraordinary reasons / Force majeure 10 If the organization provides infra 8 If have Infra 6 Provides Flexibility 4 Organization bearing the costs 4 If the organization provides training 4 Career suitable for Teleworking 2 A suitable place to work 2 Saving travel time 2 Not desirable 2 Greater concentration 1 Family proximity 1


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Discipline 1 Source: Elaborated by the authors

When asked to respondents if, considering positive and negative points, they prefer to

telework or not, the result was that most of them prefer it in part-time (54.10%), followed by full-time with 28.42%, and the last position was for respondents that don’t prefer teleworking at any time, with 17.49%.

The responses also exposed an alarming situation regarding performance measurement. If comparing the situation before and during the pandemic, organizations’ performance measurement had a huge drop (see Chart 9). This picture indicates that organizations are reasonably prepared for technological challenges, but weakly prepared for processes management changes.

Chart 9. Teleworking performance measurement

Chart 10. Teleworking Productivity

Source: Elaborated by the authors Nevertheless, when asked about productivity, the majority think it is the same or more

productive than face-to-face work, and when comparing the respondent's perception versus respondent's own experience they feel even more productive (see Chart 10).

To close the questionnaire, the last question came on the scene to check whether the respondent confirms previous favorable manifestations towards teleworking. By putting him/her as the president of an organization, the respondent was asked if he/she authorizes teleworking out of the pandemic period. Respondents gave impressive 86.89% of yes, while only 13.11% said they wouldn’t allow it in a post-pandemic situation.

5. CONCLUSION

This study shows that there is a tendency to the adoption of teleworking in the organizations after the experience of workplace closure and social isolation caused by COVID-19 pandemic. The post-pandemic “New Normal” brings within part of the routine changes that include organizations’ dynamic capabilities proved and approved – or not: while technological issues showed not to be a problem for migrating from the conventional work to the teleworking, managerial questions as performance measurement and technological remote support seemed to be challenges to overcome in the adoption of this new modality of work – and maybe it is only the “tip of the iceberg”: further researches could explore the conditions of cybersecurity, systems integration, communication protocols, and documents signatures, among others.

Although there is a geographic limit in the sample of respondents (about 90% of them were from Brazil), the results had synergy with the one from Global Workplace Analytics (2020), in which 69% of the respondents were from Americas, 17% Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and 14% Asia Pacific from a total of 2,865 respondents.


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At this moment, it is expected a review of the way the organizations work. There is a good probability of an increase of 24% in the teleworking adoption, considering that the barrier of the teleworking performance was forced to be broken during the COVID-19 mandatory conditions of social isolation. As shown in the discussion, this is not applicable for all kinds of businesses and depends on the nature of the job, but it now can be considered as part of the daily routine without the fear of not performing and can also be a benefit in the company-employee relation. Performance can even be better than face-to-face, but it is important to have indicators that measure it. It is also necessary to create parameters to guarantee that the employee won’t have an increased workload, because it would impact the professional and personal life quality.

According to the survey and SWOT analysis, there are many more advantages than disadvantages of teleworking and the pandemic was a proofing time for employees and organizations of its feasibility. There is a need to work on the weaknesses and threats to minimize the negative impacts. It is important to consider the voluntary character of teleworking, as there are also people who do not fit remote work.

Some questions emerged during the conclusion of this research and some of them are propositions for future research, such as: How to improve teleworking performance? How to reduce the impacts of negative points on teleworking like professional/social isolation, cost transfer, and difficulties to deal with technologies from the part of the employees? (Mapping professions that better adapt to teleworking would be useful to the organizations.) How to adopt a “non-teleworking” job to teleworking conditions maximizing the benefits of it? How does telework apply to a specific sector, or industry (to check its adherence)? Are organizations considering from now on the risk of a new epidemic/pandemic as a threat to business continuity in their strategic planning and management?

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