Remote work mindsets predict emotions and productivity in home office: A longitudinal study of knowledge workers during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Over the past decades, developments in information and communication technologies have enabled more and more employees to work from locations other than the office (Stiles & Smart, 2021; ter Hoeven & van Zoonen, 2015) in what has come to be interchangeably called remote work, telecommuting, or distributed work (Allen et al., 2015). This trend has attracted much scholarly attention, in particular the question of how remote work can be implemented in optimal ways for employees and organizations (Golden, 2009; Messenger & Gschwind, 2016; Shin et al., 2000). A new urgency was brought to the study of remote work when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted organizations across the world to shift their workforce unexpectedly and rapidly to home office (Hickman & Saad, 2020). In light of the crisis, many organizations have planned to increase the amount of remote work available to employees, including “tech giants” such as Twitter that announced employees can work remotely forever if they desire (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2020; Dwoskin, 2020). Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike predict that in the aftermath of the global crisis, remote work will be part of the “new normal” (EY Belgium, 2020; DeArmas, 2020; Leonardi, Leonardi, 2021; Lueck, 2020), prompting a call for more research on factors that increase employee well-being and productivity when working in remote environments and using technology to work remotely (Dwivedi et al., 2020). An increase in remote work would strongly impact the careers of knowledge workers, given that knowledge-intensive jobs tend to be especially well-suited to remote work (Desilver, 2020). For example, computer and mathematical occupations have a high share of tasks that can be done from home, as do jobs in the information and communication industry (e.g., software developers and publishers can both complete an estimated 89% of their tasks at home) (Adams-Prassl et al., 2020). Many knowledge workers expect that remote work will increase in their industry in the future (Slack, 2020). Indeed, the shift toward remote work during the COVID-19 crisis was particularly pronounced among knowledge workers, with over one quarter of all knowledge workers in the U.S. (amounting to over 16 million people) estimated to have shifted to remote work in the first weeks after the pandemic was officially declared (Slack, 2020). Helping knowledge workers to transition effectively to remote work is thus an important goal in a future that involves increased remote work. In particular, how transitions to remote work affect productivity has long been a practical interest for organizations contemplating increased remote work (Karnowski & White, 2002). Productivity during remote work has also been a key theoretical interest for a variety of academic fields, including human-computer interaction (Olson & Olson, 2000), computer science and engineering (Ruth & Chaudhry, 2008; Turetken et al., 2011), information systems (Neufeld & Fang, 2005), management (Choudhury et al., 2021; Staples et al., 1999), psychology (Allen et al., 2015), economics (Bloom et al.,