Title: the impact of telework on employees’ perceived productivity – A qualitative study with a Swedish university at the center Level: Student thesis, final assignment for bachelor’s degree in business administration Authors: Rasmus Meller and Elin Sjöberg Supervisor: Jean Claude Mutiganda Date: 2022 - January Background and Purpose: Working from home has not been a widespread phenomenon, but in the spring of 2020 it became increasingly common as the covid-19 pandemic spread around the world. On March 17, 2020, the recommendation came that those who can, should work from home. Many companies then had to change, and employees were forced to work from home. The development of information and telecommunications technology has made teleworking on this scale possible. There are already many studies on how teleworking affects the productivity of employees. However, many of these studies have been carried out under different conditions, which leads to our purpose, which is about how employees' perceived productivity was affected by the shift from office work to telework during the Covid-19 pandemic. Method: The study uses qualitative research that follows an inductive starting point. The data collection method is based on interviews which are then compiled into a result and a subsequent analysis. The interviews were conducted via digital tools with employees at a Swedish university. Results & conclusion: The study shows that employees' perceived productivity is generally the same when they work remotely as when they work in the office. However, the study highlights various factors that have an impact on productivity. The contribution of the degree project: The study contributes to an increased understanding of how employees' perceived productivity is affected by telework and which factors affect. The study also provides advice to organizations on how a strategy or policy can be designed for future work at a distance. Suggestions for further research: We have produced three different proposals for further research in the subject that we think may be interesting. The first is to carry out a multi-case study at several different organizations, the second proposal is to carry out a quantitative study and the third proposal is research that examines the perceived productivity in the long term. Keywords: productivity, Human Resource Management, working from home. / Titel: Distansarbetets påverkan på medarbetares upplevda produktivitet - En kvalitativ studie med en svensk högskola i centrum Nivå: Examensarbete på Grundnivå (kandidatexamen) i ämnet företagsekonomi Författare: Rasmus Meller och Elin Sjöberg Handledare: Jean Claude Mutiganda Datum: 2022 - januari Bakgrund och Syfte: Att arbeta hemifrån har inte varit något utbrett fenomen, under våren 2020 blev det dock allt vanligare då Covid-19 pandemin spred sig över världen. Den 17 mars 2020 kom rekommendationen om att de som kan ska arbeta hemifrån. Det var då många företag som fick ställa om och anställda tvingades arbeta hemifrån. Utvecklingen av informations- och telekommunikationsteknik har gjort att distansarbete i denna skala möjlig. Det finns sedan tidigare många studier på hur distansarbete påverkar produktiviteten hos medarbetare. Många av dessa studier har dock utförts under andra förutsättningen vilket leder till vårt syfte som handlar om hur medarbetarnas upplevda produktivitet påverkats av skiftet från kontorsarbete till distansarbete under Covid-19 pandemin. Metod: Studien använder sig av kvalitativ forskning som följer en induktiv utgångspunkt. Datainsamlingsmetoden bygger på intervjuer som sedan sammanställs till ett resultat och en efterföljande analys. Intervjuerna genomfördes via digitala verktyg med medarbetare vid en svensk högskola. Resultat & slutsats: Studien visar att medarbetares upplevda produktivitet överlag är den samma när de arbetar på distans som när de arbetar på kontoret. Studien belyser dock olika faktorer som har en påverkan på produktiviteten. Examensarbetets bidrag: Studien bidrar till en förståelse ökad förståelse för hur medarbetares upplevda produktivitet påverkas vid distansarbete samt vilka faktorer som påverkar. Studien bidrar även med råd till organisationer kring hur en strategi eller policy kan utformas för framtida arbete på distans. Förslag till fortsatt forskning: Vi har tagit fram tre olika förslag på vidare forskning inom ämnet som vi tror kan vara intressant. Det första är att genomföra en flerfallstudie på flera olika organisationer, det andra förslaget är att genomföra en kvantitativ studie och det tredje förslaget är forskning som undersöker den upplevda produktiviteten på lång sikt. Nyckelord: productivity, Human Resource Management, working from home.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on public and private life. As organizations are forced to transition to remote work to reduce the spread of the virus, there is a need for researching how employees are affected. This study explores how municipal workers have experienced the transition, by conducting a survey involving five different Swedish municipalities. This study shows that, while overall productivity has generally either increased or remained at pre-transition levels, some aspects have suffered as a result of working from home. Social interactions among co-workers, information sharing, and community building are examples of where the employees felt that something has been lost. This study contributes to research being done on this phenomenon, and gives suggestions for practitioners.

Background: The global pandemic caused by the virus Covid-19 provided an exogenic chock to the world’s businesses. Governments all over the globe issued various restrictions or requests for all inhabitants that can, to work from home. Due to this, many companies ordered their employees to work from home. Working from home and working virtually became the new normal for many, including their newly hired staff. Objectives: The study examines how the adaptations Swedish engineering companies made to cope with Covid-19 have affected their onboarding processes and the time to productivity. Methodology: Through a survey sent to 327 Swedish engineering businesses asking questions about how their onboarding process and the results thereof has changed due to the adaptations to the pandemic. On top of this, ten interviews with company representatives from the invitation list was performed to try and deepen the understanding of the survey results and to find out if there are any specific onboarding processes or activities that are of extra significance during and after the pandemic to ensure an effective onboarding process. Results: In total, 74 responses for the survey were collected. The study finds that working from home and the use of digital tools and ways of working for onboarding have increased significantly during the pandemic and is expected to remain at an increased level after the pandemic as well. Working from home is expected to be lower than during the pandemic, but higher than before. The change to virtual onboarding appears to have had little or no prolonging effect on time to productivity. Due to the fact that the evidence points towards time to productivity not being very affected by the changes made by the companies during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard to know if the themes and actions identified in the interviews as being the most important for an effective onboarding actually have an effect on time to productivity. The most common activities that the interviewees identified as important was mentoring time, structure, information transfer methods and follow ups. Conclusions: The Covid-19 provided an exogen chock to the Swedish engineering businesses that caused them to change their way of working and way of onboarding. Days working from home increased, and so did the use of digital tools and ways of working for onboarding. The results regarding which onboarding activities that affected time to productivity, our results are inconclusive. Recommendations for future research: Several of the interviewed mentions that a part of their staff seems to suffer significantly more than the general staff from working from home and being isolated socially. Further studies into this area could focus on why this group suffers so much more, and how to mitigate this issue. Further studies could also look further into which mechanisms or activities that has the most effect on time to productivity. Our findings were not conclusive on this point.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more companies are allowing their employees to work from home and consequently, impacts leadership. The purpose of this study is to investigate how managers in IT consultancies have experienced distance management during COVID-19 and what their key takeaways for the post-COVID-19 era are. The thesis has used a case study consisting of seven case companies, to answer the research question where the focus is on carefully selected managers as interview persons. Furthermore, with the help of a systematic literature review we have identified five main areas which are the basis for our theoretical framework. Throughout the study, the collected data is related to five main areas, which are: leadership, communication, trust, collaboration, and meetings. The key takeaways are the difficulties of leading a team over distance. Communication is more important than ever. How you best create a trustworthy workplace where the staff stands firm, trusts each other as well as maintain their cooperation at a distance are important and what approaches should be taken when it comes to virtual meetings. Lastly, this thesis contributes to the theoretical knowledge with the new framework and to the practical knowledge by providing guidelines for managers of virtual teams.

The aim of this study was to investigate management and leadership at a distance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. Eight managers from a large industrial company in Sweden currently working full time from home participated in the study, of which six were women. Semi structured interviews were carried out and the data was analyzed through thematic analysis which yielded 7 themes accompanied by 5 subthemes. Not being in the same physical space removes informal interactions, and to combat this, formalization has increased. Tasks that do not lend themselves well to formalization, such as getting a feel for co-worker’s emotional state or creative work, were found to be more difficult. The managers workdays had a high number of digital meetings, and their way of working was changed through digital adaptations. While the availability of quality social interactions with co-workers was down, digital meetings were used to keep interactions up within the work group. While work environment management was harder, work requiring heavy focus was described as more efficient when teleworking. Overall, the situation surrounding COVID-19 has been challenging for managers, but the digital space has evolved quickly, and work has still been able to function surprisingly well.

Sedan december 2019 sprids ett nytt virus i världen, sjukdomen som viruset orsakar har fått namnet Covid-19 och effekterna av viruset har varit dramatiska för organisationer och anställda över hela världen. I och med det nya viruset har många organisationer tvingas till förändring för att försöka förhindra ytterligare spridning, vilket har lett till att många idag arbetar hemifrån. Vi har därför valt att göra en kvalitativ studie i ett företag där de anställda tvingas arbeta på distans sedan våren 2020. I studien har vi undersökt hur de anställdas work-life balance upplevs i det tvingande distansarbetet, som uppstått på grund av Covid-19. Hittills är det oklart om distansarbete underlättar eller snarare komplicerar kombinationen av arbete och hem. Distansarbete kan bidra till positiva effekter som flexibilitet och självstyre men de kan även medföra negativa aspekter som stress och obalans i livet. Tillsammans med informationen från empirin som kommer från semistrukturerade intervjuer där sex personer medverkat samt tidigare forskning har vi analyserat och sett över hur det tvingade distansarbetet påverkar denna organisations work-life balance. Studiens resultat visar på att medarbetarna arbetar längre arbetsdagar, gränsen mellan arbetsliv och privatliv har suddats ut och den sociala kontakten med kollegor har minskat. Vår slutsats från studien är att de anställda upplever en sämre balans mellan privatliv och arbetsliv när de arbetar på distans. / Since December 2019, a new virus has spread around the world, the disease caused by the virus has been named Covid-19 and the effects of the virus have been dramatic for organizations and employees around the world. Due to the new virus, a lot of organizations have been forced to change to try to prevent further spread, which has led to compulsory teleworking. We have therefore chosen to conduct a qualitative study in a company where employees are forced to work at home since the spring of 2020. In the study, we examined how the employees' work-life balance is experienced in the mandatory telework, which has arisen due to Covid-19. So far, it is unclear whether teleworking facilitates or rather complicates the combination of work and home. Teleworking can contribute to positive effects such as flexibility and self-control, but they can also lead to negative aspects such as stress and imbalance in life. Together with the information from the empirical data that comes from semi-structured interviews in which six people participated and previous research, we have analyzed and reviewed how the forced telework affects this organization's work-life balance. The results of our study shows that employees work longer working days, the boundary between work and private life has been blurred and social contact with colleagues has decreased since they started working from home. Our conclusion from the study is that employees experience a poorer balance between private life and working life when they work remotely.

Since start of pandemic of Covid-19 in March 2020 (in Europe) employees are facing challenges seeing their workplaces and home being merged, resulting in limitation of social contacts and face-to-face interaction with colleagues. Newcomers most probably don’t get introduced to and work with their colleagues face-to-face at start of their work. This may affect their performance, which in turn may result in leaving the organization. A quantitative descriptive study of the effects of working from home (WFH) on the process and effectiveness of onboarding of new employees by organizations is presented in this research.The purpose of this study is to explore the relation between the newcomers’ onboarding success and their intention in leaving or staying at the organization through factors such as job satisfaction and the relation between the newcomers and their colleagues considering the WFH effect. In this study a quantitative approach for collecting data and data analysis is conducted using a SEM model. The model consists of questions from cross sectional survey. The survey’s questions are based on five-point Likert scale structure and it is conducted online. The survey’s populations are consisting of 152 samples from different job positions and with different field of technologies. The survey’s results have been analyzed in quantitative method using IMB SPSS software for statistical analysis, considering only online onboarding samples.All the eight defined hypotheses of the model are supported. Onboarding activities (orientation, training, and support) shows relatively the same level of correlation with the onboarding success while workplace relationship quality and job satisfaction are having the strongest relation with the onboarding success. The findings conclude that the newcomers’ workplace relationship quality and job satisfaction mediate the relation between onboarding success and turnover intention. The result shows the importance of workplace relationship quality and job satisfaction in the process of onboarding and its effect on leaving or staying in the organization. Although these two long-term factors have got the highest score, authors believe that it is also necessary that the organizations give an extra care on the onboarding activities as they have the short-term effect on whether the new hire stay or leave the firm.As a result of this study, some implications for organizations and suggestions for further work have been discussed. Keywords: Online On boarding, Working from Home, Onboarding activities, Organizational fit, Survey.

More public and private organisations offer working from home as an alternative way of working for their employees. Working from home (WFH) has both benefits and drawbacks for the employees when it is compared to the office working. While some of the researchers, such as Shafizadeh et al. (2000) claim that working from home increases the productivity of the employees, other researchers, such as Monteiro et al. (2019) claim the opposite. This study analysed five research articles published in year 2000 and five research articles published in years 2019 and 2020 to discover the factors having an influence on the productivity of the employees who work from home, whether the influence of these factors have on the productivity is positive or negative and whether the factors have changed from year 2000 to the recent years (2019 and 2020). The study results indicate that working from home has an influence on productivity of the employees. While influences of some of the factors are either positive or negative, the influence of some of the factors depend on the characteristics and attitude of the employees and the circumstances.

Background: Working from home (WFH) has become a new tendency thanks to the improvement of technological communications that enable new flexible ways of working. Before 2020 and the Covid19 pandemic, some companies had already started implementing this approach. However, the pandemic drove a widespread implementation of remote work, leading to the appearance of new problems previously not considered by most companies and individuals. Among these problems is the effect of WFH on the employee’s career perspective as well as the lower visibility in the workplace which could have an impact in future promotions. Objectives: The main research phenomenon to be studied is the impact of WFH on career prospects for engineers and in particular the paradox between visibility at work and the career progress of the employees. Methodology: The contribution of this thesis is a fourfold. First, it analyses the effect of visibility when WFH on engineers’ career perspectives. Second, it proposes a framework that relates WFH, visibility and career. Thirdly, it contributes to the existing literature on WFH, visibility and career. Lastly, it uses the innovative method of questerview, involving twelve engineers working on R&D department of an aeronautical company, to finally develop a thematic analysis and generate a new framework to be discussed with the first, according to the grounded theory method. Results: The results showed that WFH has an impact on career progression with a decrease invisibility, affecting it through personal relationships. WFH also affects other factors (such as networking and soft-skills) and these have a connection with visibility that, all together, will have a high impact in the career promotion rate. Other findings include the necessity to work on visibility by prioritizing the meetings with the right people in order to become more allegeable for promotion. Visibility affects the trust between manager and employee, due to the fact that the latter becomes much more dependable on deliverables when comparing to working in the office. WFH doesn’t affect visibility for career promotion if credibility with managers has been achieved, this being connected with job quality. Conclusions: WFH and visibility have both a high impact on the engineer’s career progression. The first reduces direct contact with peers and superiors, which in turn decreases visibility. Visibility has been found to be an essential tool for promotion. Its effect on career promotion works as the enabler to promotion, making superiors notice your work and keeping the employee in their minds to consider when a promotion is proposed. Visibility has not solely an impact on career promotion, but it has a connection between networking and soft-skills, and these three factors are directly related to one another when considering the influence on career promotion. Recommendations for future research: The relationships between factors in the literature review framework need to be studied further, in line with the cross connections found in the new framework. Also, during the elaboration of the thematic maps, it was also found that WFH has an impact on daily work (affecting autonomy, networking, and productivity) and additional research would enrich the final framework. Lastly, it was found during the questerview analysis that other factors not considered in the present study are also relevant for career promotion such as age, education level and experience. Future research could focus on studying the impact these factors have on career promotion.

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, many Swedish auditors have been forced to work fulltime from home. If auditors are negatively impacted working from home, it could result in auditors engaging in reduced audit quality (RAQ) behavior and negatively impact overall audit quality. Working from home to this extent is a new phenomenon, and thus, there is a need to further research the effects on auditors.  In this thesis, the factors influencing RAQ behavior are theorized based on the Job Demand-Control-Support (JDCS) model. This thesis examines how auditors with high home demands perceive time pressure, workload, and work-life balance to be affected when working from home and how it affects their propensity to engage in RAQ behavior. Furthermore, this thesis aims to examine if there are gender differences in auditors’ perceptions regarding these factors. In this thesis, high home demands mean having at least one child under the age of twelve. Data was collected using a qualitative method and conducting 14 interviews on how the auditors perceive the factors influencing RAQ behavior have been affected while working from home. The result of the thesis indicates that the propensity of auditors engaging in RAQ behavior is decreased when auditors with high home demands are working from home. Also, the results indicate that both male and female auditors with high home demands enjoy working from home and that there has been a decreased propensity to engage in RAQ behavior. This thesis highlights how the propensity of auditors with high home demands engaging in RAQ can be reduced, contributing to overall higher audit quality.