Teleworking in the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Effects of Life-Work Conflict on Job Outcomes and the Role of the IT Telework Environment

Teleworkers who live and work in the same space are vulnerable to conflicts between personal life and work (LWC). The Covid-19 lockdowns increased the intensity and risk of LWC and changed telework conditions, confronting teleworkers with difficult personal situations and often ill-equipped telework environments. To develop a better understanding of the effects of different LWC dimensions (e.g., time, strain, behavior) on work exhaustion, job satisfaction, routine and innovative job performance and the role of the IT telework environment among teleworkers in the Covid-19 pandemic, a research model based on a sample of 249 teleworkers was developed and validated. The findings show that LWC has adverse effects on job outcomes and that the IT telework environment moderates these effects. The study contributes to the telework and role conflict literature by revealing the essential role of the IT telework environment and by differentiating between routine and innovative job performance among teleworkers. © 2023, The Author(s).

Flexible Working Arrangements and Social Sustainability: Study on Women Academics Post-COVID-19

One of the main challenges faced by companies, scholars, and governments nowadays is achieving economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Remote working, reduced work weeks, and other types of flexible working time arrangements (FWAs) are the new characteristics that will shape the future of work to ensure social sustainability. In changing work patterns, working styles are changed to possibly improve women employees' mental health and life–work balance. However, recently, very few firms have succeeded in adopting these new FWA trends. The purpose of this paper is to investigate women's preferences towards FWAs in the academic sector as a social sustainability source. We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on female faculty members' future job preferences. The data used in the research are collected from a survey given to female faculty members who work in a Saudi women's university and have already experienced FWAs during the COVID-19 period. The study uses mixed methods of research, combining a choice modeling (CM) method, one sample t-test, a paired sample t-test, cluster analysis, and probit models. Our results show that flexible working arrangements improve the wellbeing of women employees, which ensures sustainable social development. The findings also show that flexibility in location plays a significant role in the decision made by female faculty members when revealing their flexibility preferences. However, flexibility in time did not play a significant role in the decisions made by respondents. This study adds to the empirical evidence in the current literature on female academic staff preferences for FWAs in Saudi Arabia, using choice modeling conjoint analysis and mixed approaches. © 2022 by the authors.

The Dynamics and the Context of Working Parents' Emotional Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to reconstruct the emotional experiences of working parents facing the changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, related to the blurring of temporal and spatial boundaries between professional work and private life. The authors argue that the work-family configuration is a crucial factor mediating the macro-social (global) crisis and the emotional condition of individuals. The theoretical framework of the present analyses includes the boundary theory and work-family border theory, enriched with selected assumptions of the sociological theories of emotions located on the border of the interactionist and cultural approaches. The paper's empirical basis involves the authors' research, including in-depth interviews with parents of at least one child under 12 years of age who worked profes-sionally at home due to the pandemic. The conclusions from the research make it possible to describe how the global processes result in the transformation of professional work and family life, leading to an emotional destabilization of individuals. Moreover, the authors take a stand in the discussion on the boundary theory, describing the relations between professional work and private life in light of an increasing complexity, fluidity, and uncertainty of contemporary connections between them. © by the author, licensee University of Lodz, Poland.

Balancing work and life: An examination of social worker experiences

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of social workers balancing work and life. A qualitative phenomenological research design allowed for the focus of the participating social workers to be on their lived experiences balancing work and life. Seven social workers from Ohio and California participated in semi-structured digitally recorded interview sessions. Manually transcribing and coding initial raw data and then imported the raw data into the computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) NVivo, three critical themes emerged from the collected data: words demands, allocation of time and blurring lines between work and home. The universal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all seven participants proved to create more stress on the social workers but also revealed some new professional and personal traits that will need to be fostered in the future. The results of this study could provide assistance to social worker organizations to construct a blended remote and traditional working environment that is conducive to operating in a harmony state of work and life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Digital Inclusion at the Workplace Post Covid19

The rapid advances in information and communication technologies and the widespread adoption of disruptive technologies such as AI and automated systems are changing the work landscape dramatically and are affecting especially older workers and workers with disabilities. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated some of these changes, widening the unemployment gap for people with disabilities. To facilitate reskilling and upskilling of older workers and people with disabilities we need to create inclusive work environments that consider their evolving needs and capabilities. The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) provides workers, employers and organizations with tools and methods to include accessibility into their practices and policies. The SmartWork project provides a great opportunity to test how Morphic, the auto-personalization from preference solution provided by the GPII, can help building a more inclusive workplace.