Digitally transformed home office impacts on job satisfaction, job stress and job productivity. COVID-19 findings.

In these times of successive lockdown periods due to the health crisis induced by COVID-19, this paper investigates how the usages of collaborative and communication digital tools (groupware, workflow, instant messaging and web conference) are related to the evolution of teleworkers' subjective well-being (job satisfaction, job stress) and job productivity comparing during and before the first lockdown in spring 2020. Using a sample of 438 employees working for firms located in Luxembourg, this analysis enables, first, to highlight different profiles of teleworkers regarding the evolution of usages of these tools during the lockdown compared to before and the frequency of use during. Second, the analysis highlights that these profiles are linked to the evolution of job satisfaction, job stress and job productivity. Our main results show that (1) the profile that generates an increase in job productivity is the one with a combined mastered daily or weekly use of all of the four studied digital tools but at the expense of job satisfaction. On the contrary, (2) the use of the four digital tools both before and during the lockdown, associated with an increase in the frequency of use, appears to generate too much information flow to deal with and teleworkers may suffer from information overload that increases their stress and reduces their job satisfaction and job productivity. (3) The habit of using the four tools on a daily basis before the lockdown appears to protect teleworkers from most of the adverse effects, except for an increase in their job stress. Our results have theoretical and managerial implications for the future of the digitally transformed home office.

[Digitalisation in Companies: The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Push Factor]. / Digitalisierungsschub in Firmen während der Corona-Pandemie.

This article shows the extent to which companies' investments in digital technologies have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a large German company survey conducted by the Institute for Employment Research, the authors examine whether and which companies have invested in different types of digital technologies, how these investments are connected to working from home, and how investments are influenced by the economic situation of companies during the pandemic. The authors also discuss further training activities provided and planned by employers and how those are related to their investments in digital technologies.