Being forced to work from home : A focus on how having to work from home followingthe covid-19 pandemic has affected the employee’s performance and social work-life

Abstract: Title: Being forced to work from home – A focus on how having to work from home following the covid-19 pandemic has affected the employee’s performance and social work life Authors: Ivan Cavar and Malin Jansert Supervisor: Aliaksei Kazlou Background: Because of the recent Covid-19 pandemic many employers had to make the decision to recommend or even force employees to work from home. For some it was an easy transition, for others a real challenge not only by the means of whether one can actually perform their work at home, but also concerning what happens to us when we remove all the necessary social interactions we experience everyday with colleagues and other people connected to the workplace. Aim: The purpose of our research is to understand how the forced shift in working remotely has affected the employees’ attitude towards the professional and social aspects of the workplace. It aims to determine crucial personal and external factors influencing the attitude of said employees, and why (and if) their opinion about their workplace has changed.This paper aims to contribute to the field of external shock in organizations and sudden organizational change. Having waited with the theoretical framework until we had good overview of what the results looked like, we have found the research by Lee and Mitchell (1994) about employee turnover to be relevant to our findings. Although most research about employee turnover concerns itself with turnover per se, we still find the theories discussed relevant as the prerequisite to turnover is attitude changes among employees which is exactly what we want to look at and contribute to. The main contribution of this paper will be to look at how the changes in working routines have affected the specific employee, and how this in turn has affected the employee’s opinion about their workplace. We hope to give a glimpse of how these specific workplaces have been affected and find reasons as to why this might have happened to better understand what factors influence the opinion about the workplace.Completion: To gather information about the perceived changes by employees, a qualitative study has been conducted through 13 interviews among two companies with jobs being based in government administration and academia. The different types of work give us good insight in how the same process has affected professions differently.Conclusion: The professors were affected by the change to a larger extent than the administration employees. Different employees were affected in different ways, but what affected everybody was a loss of social interactions as well as a new outlook on how to perform work.