<p dir="ltr">This mixed-method grounded theory study developed and tested a new framework for leading geographically dispersed teams. With the dramatic shift to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders now face new challenges in developing corporate strategies and approaches to leadership without proximity to their teams. However, existing leadership literature has yet to catch up to this new reality.</p><p dir="ltr">Grounded in interviews with business leaders and a quantitative survey of 100 leaders and 100 employees, this study identified communication frequency and trust-building as vital for reducing uncertainty. It also found that promoting employee well-being requires relationship-centered leadership and constructing inclusive cultures. Ultimately, leading at a distance requires adapting leadership development and reevaluating organizational design to focus on alignment, transparency, and culture-building.</p><p dir="ltr">The resulting framework identifies specific leader competencies needed for remote management. It emphasizes the importance of leader visibility, constructive feedback practices, and crisis readiness. The framework highlights new imperatives in meeting design, goal-setting, professional development, and performance management. Finally, it calls for policies that promote work-life balance through comprehensive flexibility.</p><p dir="ltr">This study provides theoretical and practical guidance with hybrid and remote work arrangements likely to persist post-pandemic. It demonstrates the effectiveness of grounded theory methodology in new research contexts. The framework presented lays the foundation for leadership approaches that empower productivity and well-being across distributed teams.</p>

Organizations have traditionally accomplished connectivity among their workers by co-locating them in shared organizational workplaces. However, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are offering alternative ways to accomplish this kind of connection. This change raises important questions about what it is possible to accomplish through such mediated communicative connections, and if there are work activities that are best accomplished face-to-face. Practitioners and researchers have historically identified informal communication as a process essential to organizational success that is difficult or impossible to accomplish outside of shared physical environments. This study documents the ways full-time teleworkers are accomplishing informal communication without being in shared work environments. In doing this, this work also identifies for what purposes these participants find shared organizational workplaces important and/or essential for successful informal communication. To complete this study required that two additional questions needed to be addressed: 1) defining full-time telework in the context of modern ICT-mediated corporate work environments, and 2) a re-examination of the parameters of telework to define them for modern workplace environments, so as be able to use effectively to examine past and present telework research efforts. In order to document the context of each of the participants as fully as possible, a narrative case study based research protocol was used. Participants were engaged through two active interviews and a journaling exercise so as to identify and document instances of informal communication and their purposes or roles in their workdays. This study’s key finding is that among this group of full-time teleworkers, all were engaging in informal communication to accomplish bonding and learning, both in ways that paralleled those communicative practices commonly accomplished in shared environments, but also in new ways that were made possible because of emergent sociomaterial practices supported by new information and communication technology affordances. While all the study’s participants indicated that their work processes, including informal communication, could be entirely accomplished virtually, nearly all noted the importance of face-to-face communication for key aspects of bonding and learning. Additionally, the successful work practices of these teleworkers were strongly dependent on the ubiquitous adoption of ICT tools and platforms throughout these participants’ organizations, and by the distribution and mobility of increasing numbers of workers, in these organizations and others, that are using these technologies as a routine part of their daily work practices.

Building a useful and usable website for international users requires more than translating the content of an existing site to other languages. It should be designed in a way to meet the needs of these users. In order to build a usable website, we need to use a methodology that has a focus on usability. One methodology that is considered essential for designing and developing usable systems is “User-Centered System Design” (UCSD). UCSD has the focus on understanding users’ goals and needs, involving them in participatory design, and evaluating the design with them. However, how can we use UCSD while the users are geographically spread out? To address this question I have studied and employed different approaches to perform UCSD remotely. As a case study, I have used these approaches to design a new international website for Uppsala Kommun (Municipality). The results show that it is possible to perform the UCSD remotely. However, special consideration should be taken for finding representative users. Remote UCSD is not a substitute for UCSD. It can be considered as a methodology for situations where users are geographically spread out. It can also be used as a complementary approach to UCSD.

Remote work has become a popular topic within organizations and the popular press. However, academic research has been inconclusive as to whether remote work is related to benefits of increased job performance and lessened work-family conflict. This study examined remote work resources to gain an in-depth understanding of how remote work relates to job performance and work-family conflict. One hundred fifty-one salespeople participated in two time-lagged surveys regarding remote work resources (autonomy, feedback, access to information and interaction with one’s supervisor), outcomes (subjective and objective job performance and work family-conflict) and demographics. Remote work resources were not significantly related to job performance. Contrary to hypotheses, more control over work schedule and control over work process were related to more FIW. In support of hypotheses, more interaction with one’s supervisor was related to less FIW and more access to information was related to less WIF. There was no support for hypothesized mediation or moderation but exploratory analyses revealed that proactive personality moderated the relationship between interaction with one’s supervisor and objective job performance such that the relationship was stronger for less proactive employees than for more proactive employees. Overall, findings support the value of fine-grained analysis of remote work’s resources to provide a nuanced look into their relationships with outcomes.

During times of crisis, such as when the world is going through a pandemic. Many companies get affected and need to change their way of working. Our purpose is to study how the abrupt transition to remote work effects different aspects of work and to see whether, and in what ways, the involuntary nature of the current remote work situation changes how remote work is perceived by employees and managers. We choose to do a qualitative study, in order to get a deeper understanding from both employees’ perspective and managers perspective. The managers and employees participating in our interview are from banking, insurance, and staffing agencies. These interviews will be supplemented with secondary sources from news and statistical surveys. By comparing the results from our study with earlier research and recommendations from industry experts, we concluded that organizational members are handling the transition to remote work well despite the ongoing situation. Similar pros and cons of remote work that are present in previous research are also present in our interviews. However, there are some distinct differences as well. Our thesis is intended to help other organizations learn and gain knowledge about how different organizations are managing remote work in a crisis and the challenges that it brings.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards remote working, an area that was exponentially expanding pre-pandemic. As the working conditions shift, the previous reliance on face-to-face interactions becomes obsolete. Furthermore, the importance of this issue becomes significant as global companies have expressed their interest in adopting a hybrid way of working post-pandemic. Therefore, understanding how to manage and motivate employees while working remotely becomes crucial in order to operate in highly competitive markets successfully.  This study aims to investigate how the experience and motivation of managers and their subordinates have been influenced following the shift to remote work. A qualitative design is employed in this study where literature, theories, and empirical data in the form of semi-structured interviews are utilized. The findings were analyzed according to a thematic analysis approach. Following an abductive approach, the researchers build upon exiting management theories.  The authors identify the different elements that influence experience and motivation in a remote work setting, as follows: Experiential Knowledge, Drivers of Motivation, Organizational Structure, Tasks and Roles, Formal Communication, Informal communication, Productivity, and Flexibility. Derived from the empirical data, a dimension of motivation was integrated into Cook’s (2019) view on Managing Remotely. The results display both hinders and motivators, which could be mitigated and incorporated, respectively, in future remote work strategies.

“The flight from neighborhoods, the flight from local communities, into networking, it erodes democracy. It is in the local meetings where civic virtue and democratic discourse are practiced.” Christopher Lash writes this in his book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.  Encounters between people of different backgrounds, experiences, and ideologies are on the verge of extinction in a society where community has been replaced with networking. The neighborhood is just a container for our home, but we go elsewhere to work and socialize. We are to a lesser extent tied to a specific place. With locality as a point of departure, I chose my hometown as the base for my project. Tranås is a small town in southern Sweden with about 15.000 inhabitants. There, anonymity is not an option. Encounters take place. Whether you like it or not, people are united by the mere fact of physical proximity. I wanted to favor locality by making it easier to stay in the local community and enable for more people to settle outside the big cities. My answer to this is a remote working place. An office where you can work remotely full time, or as a complement to your regular workplace. The user group is people in Tranås that usually commutes to other cities, and people that would like to move to Tranås. Through contact with local actors, I got introduced to a building in the very central part of Tranås that I decided to adapt and reuse. The building was originally built as a nursing home during the first half of the 20th century but has now been empty for some years. The size and location of the building opened up new possibilities. In addition to the offices, the building will also house studio space, exhibition space, and a café. With a few interventions and modifications, the building becomes a new meeting place, where the courtyard gets an important role in the public space.

Background. The pandemic outbreak commenced a large migration of employees from all kinds of industries from previously working in an industrial or office environment to working from home. The remote migration allowed many kinds of work to continue as usual even during a pandemic. A common tool to use when working remotely is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that allows remote workers to connect to a Local Area Network (LAN) at the company office. Which further grants the remote worker secure access to organizations resources and services. This remote work setup has increased the complexity of the company networks and therefore also magnified the attack surface for cyber threat actors. Objectives. The objective of this thesis involves studying how the VPN security landscape looks like after the pandemic outbreak. Answering questions related to how the attacks on VPNs changed in numbers, which techniques and tactics the adversaries use against VPN security systems and then, for the thesis to “bite itself in the tail”, investigate countermeasures that can further improve the VPN security. Methods. One research method is used in two different fashions to satisfy the objectives. The research method is a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The first SLR involves research on secondary data reports, published by cyber companies, cyber experts, or cyber departments of large IT organizations. The second SLR involves qualitative research by reading research papers related to how VPN security can be improved.  Results. In direct consequence of the remote work migration the number of VPN attacks have increased. The vulnerabilities found in VPN systems have been used extensively where even national cybersecurity organizations have urged companies to patch systems. Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups have leveraged the published vulnerabilities by exploiting unpatched systems and established persistent and defense-evasive access to networks that remote workers connect to with VPNs. To counter these threats and to harden the VPN systems and private networks, there are recommendations involving countermeasures such as enforced Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) and adding multiple defense layers in private networks. Conclusions. This thesis concludes that the covid-19 pandemic outbreak was the root cause to the huge remote work transition which in turn caught 99% of all organizations and home networks off guard when it comes to VPN security for remote workers. This caused huge opportunities for threat actors and state sponsored adversaries which is the main reason for the increased number of cyberattacks post covid-19 outbreak. Cyber adversaries exploited every vulnerability, bug, and misconfiguration they could find by conducting tactics and techniques like phishing, ransomware, exploiting VPN vulnerabilities and performing DDoS-attacks to the best of their abilities. This caused huge damage to organizations, governments, healthcare, and militaries all around the world. In order to increase VPN security for remote workers, small, medium or big organizations, we have developed a new VPN hardening framework.

When Covid-19 arrived, the rapidly accelerating transformation in the commercial sector faced a significant challenge. The circumstances of the pandemic helped to further show that it is possible for many employees to work remotely. The outcome of this transition is now obvious because more people than ever before work remotely or in hybrid arrangements. There has not been immensely much research completed on the remote working environments, which leaves questions to be asked. For example, whether employees are provided with the tools they need to efficiently perform their work? More importantly, is there a risk that people get distanced from their employer and lose their loyalty towards the company? If so, there is a big responsibility to be had as a leader and manager to maintain the employees loyalty and to keep them feeling as an important part of the company. Furthermore, in a remote working environment there is a bigger gap in social interaction between colleagues and towards the company overall, this in turn makes a great risk for forgetting, or missing the brands values, vision and culture. Can that gap lead to employees feeling even more disconnected from their employer?The relevance of managers' presence and their capacity to keep staff motivated when they are working remotely has been emphasized in prior research on the topic. Additionally, it has been discovered that self-leadership plays a crucial role in maintaining motivation and productivity while working remotely. Studies have also shown that working remotely improves job satisfaction, flexibility, and work-life balance, which all lower stress. We observed that the relationship between empowering leadership, self-leadership, and internal branding was absent from earlier study. What we saw missing from previous research is the connection between empowering leadership, self-leadership and internal branding. Therefore, the purpose of our study is to develop a deeper understanding of the influence empowering leadership has on self-leadership and internal branding in remote working environments.To answer this we develop our research question which reads; "How does empowering leadership impact self-leadership and internal branding in remote environments?". We decided to carry out qualitative research in order to be able to respond to our inquiry. Eight employees who work remotely roughly half the time participated in semi-structured interviews.According to the study's findings, employees saw remote work as beneficial, and working from home had no negative effects on their productivity. Remote work produced positive results, for example less stress. Additionally, the study showed how employees attitude and loyalty to the company could be benefitted by granting them more autonomy and control over their work. However, the study also found that the coherence to coworkers was thought to be the most negative aspect of remote work. However, it could potentially be avoided by applying concepts from empowering leadership and internal brandingtheories.

Studiens syfte var att undersöka hur arbetstagarna vid en statlig organisation i Mellansverige upplevde ledarskap under distansarbete. Åtta semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes och analyserades med en induktiv tematisk analysmetod för att uppnå syftet. Resultatet visade tre huvudteman som representerade respondenternas subjektiva upplevelse av distansledarskap. Enligt respondenterna krävdes en ledare med personlig mognad för att kunna leda på ett önskvärt sätt. Tydlighet i kommunikationen och förmågan att skapa förtroende ansågs också vara avgörande egenskaper, särskilt vid distansarbete för att upprätthålla medarbetarnas välbefinnande. Sammanfattningsvis framkom det att bra kommunikation och förtroende var nyckelfaktorer för att skapa ett positivt ledarskap. En kommunikativ och empatisk ledare inkluderade och engagerade sina anställda, särskilt vid distansarbete. / The purpose of the study was to examine how employees in a state organization in central Sweden experienced leadership during remote work. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed using an inductive thematic analysis method to achieve the objective. The results revealed three main themes representing the respondents' subjective experience of remote leadership. According tothe respondents, a leader with personal maturity was required to effectively lead. Clarity in communication and the ability to build trust were also considered crucial qualities, especially in remote work, to maintain employee well-being. In summary, effective communication and trust were key factors in creating positive leadership. A communicative and empathetic leader included and engaged their employees, particularly in remote work settings.