Remote work for all: Implications of motivation and job recovery for work-related health and performance in the context of home-office

As a measure to limit the corona pandemic, remote working arrangements have drastically changed the work life as we know it. Organizations now plan for long-term use of remote work, and both employers and employees navigate a complex and evolving landscape. Understanding how this new way of organizing work affects employees, in relation to both their performance and work-related well-being, is essential to enable remote work that is sustainable and productive for organizations and society as a whole. REMOTE aims to increase understanding of the opportunities and challenges for employees in remote working arrangements to secure employees’ occupational health and continuing work performance over time. In particular, REMOTE will focus on three highly relevant topics: (1) Work characteristics –What characterizes the workday at the home-office? How are employees ensured adequate work resources and manageable challenges/obstacles to foster healthy and sustained motivation in this context? (2) Management – How is management perceived from the home-office? How can managers facilitate employee motivation from a distance? (3) Job recovery - What are the consequences of the new dynamic between work and home? What implications do the home-office have for the ability to recover from work? In addition, REMOTE aims to get a better understanding of how these phenomena are experienced by subpopulations of workers, in particular employees with caregiving responsibilities for children. To explore these relations, REMOTE will be undertaken based on rigorous methodological approaches that enables the examination of both long-term and short-term effects. By coupling the perspectives on important factors in work characteristics and management with job recovery strategies, REMOTE will provide increased insight in conditions of the workplace needed to ensure and facilitate healthy and productive remote work. Web: https://www.usn.no/research/our-research/economy-management-and-politics/organizing-and-leadership/remote-work-for-all/

The global outbreak of Covid-19 rapidly and drastically has changed how and where work is done. This sudden practice with widespread use of home-office has led to thinking of it as a more permanent way of organizing work and researchers have estimated that about 40% of jobs can be conducted from home. Expectations are therefore that many organizations will continue to allow, and even encourage, working from home also after the pandemic. The new reality with more extensive use of home-office has led to a debate about its implications for both employees’ performance and work-related health. In this project, we propose that one way to get a common understanding of the opportunities and challenges of remote work is by looking at the underlying psychological and motivational processes of it. Indeed, we know quite a lot about what motivates employees at work and the role of work motivation for employee performance and work-related health where work characteristics and management of employees both are important factors. Yet the motivational aspects of these factors within remote working arrangements is lacking in the existing literature. In addition, a home-office situation can greatly interfere with employees’ job recovery processes (i.e., the process of reducing or eliminating physical and psychological strain symptoms that have been caused by work after work hours). With more use of home-office, job recovery may be particularly important to pay attention to, as these processes can be in jeopardy giving negative consequences for work-related health. Accordingly, three focus areas are highlighted in the project: 1) work characteristics of remote work; 2) management of remote workers; 3) job recovery processes in remote work arrangements. In addition, a part of the project aims to explore whether relations within these focus areas are somehow different for employees with caregiving responsibilities for children.