Working from Home - the new Office : Communication and Leadership for a Stay-at-home Workforce

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to discover what if any changes have occurred to communication and leadership due to COVID-19. The recent pandemic caused home-office to become the new standard for desk job workers but what if the home-office environment impacted communication and leadership. Seven middle managers of two large MNC’s based in Germany were interviewed to gain an understanding of the issue at hand. This paper focuses specifically on home-office caused by COVID-19 as all respondents of the study were employees formerly working in an office environment. To understand the implications of communication and leadership at the workplace relevant scientific literature was reviewed. The findings of the interviews were then compared with findings from said literature to develop new insights about communication and leadership at the home-office. Several changes to communication and leadership were identified from the data collected. Based on the perspectives of middle managers the identified changes appear to have had a negative affect on both communication and leadership. The cause of these negative effects is explained, and speculations are drawn as to how these effects will impact organizations in the long run.