Flexible work arrangements and gender differences in research during the COVID-19 period in Zimbabwean higher learning institutions

This study sought to investigate the impact of COVID-19-induced flexible work arrangements (FWAs) on gender differences in research outputs during COVID-19. A mixed research methodology was used, focusing on higher learning institutions in Zimbabwe. Purposive sampling was applied to select 250 researchers from the 21 registered universities in Zimbabwe. The study's findings revealed that institutions of higher learning in Zimbabwe did not provide the necessary affordances to enable both male and female academics to work from home effectively. The study also established that FWAs were preferred and appreciated by both male and female academics. However, whilst both male and female academics performed their teaching responsibilities without incident, unlike males, females struggled to find time for research, thus affecting professional growth and development negatively for female academics. Cultural traditions were found to subordinate females to domestic and caregiving responsibilities unrelated to their professions. The findings raise questions on the feasibility of the much-recommended FWAs for future work on female academics' research careers. Thus, without the necessary systems and processes to support female researchers, FWAs can only widen the gender gap in research outputs. This study contributes to the Zimbabwean higher learning institutions' perspective on how FWAs' policies and practices could be re-configured to assist female researchers in enhancing their research outputs as well as their career growth.

Task-Technology Fit and ICT Use in Remote Work Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study examines the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in remote work practice during the COVID-19 pandemic by integrating task-technology fit theory and the post-acceptance model of IS continuance into a research framework. In addition, it operationalizes the technological characteristics of TTF (task-technology fit) with the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory. The methodology to test the research model takes support from the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method using a sample of 320 employees. The results show that TAM significantly explains TTF. Furthermore, there is a positive impact of ICT use on individual and organizational performance. User satisfaction has the most significant effect on individual performance, organizational performance, and IS continuance intention. The authors provide some managerial implications for addressing the challenges of remote work related to ICT disruptions for the post-COVID-19 period.

Media synchronicity implications for Indian white-collar employees' work-from-home wellbeing and preference, mediated by psychological needs satisfaction

PurposeWork-from-home (WFH) gained ground with COVID and will now continue to be a part of India's future of work. Under WFH information and communication technologies (ICT) media become the primary/sole mode of communication for employees, which holds several implications for employers and employees. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of ICT media characteristics and usage frequency on multiple WFH outcomes. Specifically studied was ICT media's ability to support synchronicity or coordinated behaviours of individuals working together.Design/methodology/approachThis work examined the effect of ICT media's synchronicity-supporting ability and usage frequency on WFH employees' need for competence and relatedness satisfaction, thereby wellbeing and preference to WFH. Data from 301 white-collar employees of varied manufacturing and services organizations of India was analysed via partial least squares structural equation modelling.FindingsAchieving more synchronicity by frequently using ICT media that can better facilitate coordinated behaviours did not directly influence WFH employees' feeling of belongingness (need for relatedness) or wellbeing. It did, however, positively affect their feeling of effectance (need for competence) and thereby wellbeing. However, unexpectedly, it negatively influenced preference to WFH more often.Originality/valueThis study has uniquely combined media synchronicity and self-determination theories to investigate the implications of a work practice on employee wellbeing and preferences. Also, an extensible media evaluation parameter was created that encompasses the characteristics and usage frequency of a set of ICT media.

Housing inequalities and resilience: the lived experience of COVID-19

COVID-19 policy responses have intensified the use of housing as a spatial and material defence against community spread of infection. In so doing, they have focussed attention upon pre-existing inequalities and the effects of socio-economic management of COVID-19. This paper draws upon individual households' accounts to explore these effects on housing inequalities, and then adapts a critical resilience framework from disaster response in order to examine the implications for policymaking. The empirical work centres upon a case study of lived experiences of COVID-19-constrained conditions, based on a longitudinal-style study combining semi-structured interviews with 40 households, photographs and household tours at two datapoints (before/during COVID-19) in Victoria, Australia. The study reveals how these households were impacted across four domains: (1) employment, finances, services, and mobilities;(2) homemaking including comfort and energy bills, food and provisioning, and home-schooling/working from home;(3) relationships, care and privacy, and;(4) social, physical and mental health. The interviews also indicate how households coped and experienced relief payments and other related support policies during COVID-19. Drawing upon literature on disaster response, we highlight the centrality of vulnerability and resilience in recognising household exposure and sensitivity to COVID-19, and capabilities in coping. From this analysis, gaps in COVID-19 housing and welfare policy are exposed and guide a discussion for future housing policy interventions and pandemic planning.

Work from Home Practices and COVID-19: Future Implications

Among several practices to maintain the Work Life Balance (WLB) in organizations is Work From Home (WFH). Started as an option for a specific employee population the practice currently has become the only option due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper assesses the viewpoints and the associated sentiments of the employees engaged in WFH practices. Quantitative analysis based on a self-administered questionnaire and qualitative analysis based on open-ended questions using frequency distribution, word cloud, and sentimental analysis indicate that although employees have favored WFH practices due to flexibility in working hours and increased productivity in terms of personal and some work-related activities, factors like reduced coordination and virtual interactions account for the negative sentiments.

Working from home challenges: Resources, tools, and quality concerns

This chapter provides a glimpse into the conversation around the resources that university staff need to thrive in their work both on campus or through telework. The COVID-19 pandemic and shifting to working from home exposed disparities in resources for staff at the University of Utah many of which existed in the on-campus work environment as well. Institutions of higher education were no exception;most non-essential employees made the change from working on campus to a teleworking environment. Because most colleges and universities still operate from a brick-and-mortar setting and primarily offer in-person instruction, this change to serving students and carrying out job responsibilities from home was a huge and unexpected shift, and very little infrastructure was in place for addressing needs and providing essential tools and resources for employee thriving in a work-at-home environment. It is found that the move to working from home revealed a broad continuum where on one end staff had access to essential resources for thriving as new telecommuters, and on the other end staff struggled from one day to the next to maintain quality services for students and co-workers due to the lack of basic resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Entgrenzte Flexibilität im Homeoffice

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Situation von Beschäftigten und Mitbestimmungsgremien im Homeoffice jenseits und in der Corona-Krise. Adressiert wird die Frage, inwiefern das Ausweichen ins Homeoffice als gesteigerte Qualität einer ohnehin flexibilisierten betrieblichen Arbeit zu deuten ist und welche Folgen damit einhergehen. Die Analyse basiert auf 47 Interviews, die seit Januar 2020 im Rahmen von zehn Betriebsfallstudien in den Bereichen Chemie/Pharmazeutik, Metall/Elektro, Nahrungsmittelindustrie und Dienstleistungen erhoben wurden. Die empirischen Befunde verweisen dabei insbesondere auf Herausforderungen in drei Bereichen: alltägliche Arbeitspraxis und Kollegialität, Geschlechterarrangements und Arbeit der betrieblichen Interessenvertretung. Zunächst skizziert der Beitrag die bisherige betriebliche Regelungspraxis orts- und zeitflexibler Arbeit;im Weiteren werden die empirischen Erkenntnisse zu den drei genannten Themenbereichen vorgestellt. Abschließend diskutiert der Beitrag die neue Qualität des Arbeitens als „entgrenzte Flexibilität".Alternate :This paper examines the situation of employees and works councils while working from home beyond and in the Corona crisis. It addresses the question of the extent to which the switch to working from home can be interpreted as an extension of the specific character of flexibilized work, and what the consequences are. The analysis is based on 47 interviews that have been conducted since January 2020 as part of ten company case studies in the chemical/pharmaceutical, metal/electrical, and food industries and in the services sector. The empirical findings point in particular to challenges in three areas: everyday working practice and collegiality;gender arrangements;and the practice of works councils. In the beginning, the article outlines the existing practice of regulating flexible work and working time;subsequently the empirical findings on the three topics mentioned are presented. Finally, the article discusses the new character of working as "de-bounded flexibility”.

REÎNTOARCEREA LA BIROU - PRIME IMPRESII ALE CELOR CE AU LUCRAT DE ACASĂ

The main objective of this paper is to observe the effects that a long-term online work program have on the importance of having an office to go to work to. I talked with nine white-collar workers (back-office and administrative responsibilities) from an international company with branch-offices in Bucharest, in order to collect their impressions about their current work environment and arrangements. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to work from home for the last two years. Through discussions, I have concluded that, for them, the home's environment has helped them when it came to their daily professional tasks. At the same time, they were in agreement that the only advantage of having an office was the chance to better socialize with coworkers. For this study's participants, work-from-home meant no time wasted on the way to the office and back and more time either to increase their work efficiency or to unwind. Before the pandemic hit, they saw the office as indispensable. After the pandemic, the office has lost this role and became more important as a central place for employees to gather and socialize.

Measuring the Digital Divide: A Neighborhood-Level Analysis of Racial Inequality in Internet Speed during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, internet access has been vital to ensuring individuals can work from home, attend online school and maintain contact with loved ones. While research has already shown that inequalities exist regarding who has access to the internet, less research has used actual internet speed test data to examine neighborhood inequalities in internet access, and even less research has explored trends related to this during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a dataset containing over 100 million internet speed tests in the United States, we analyze neighborhood-level variation in internet speed. We find that neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents tend to have better download speeds but worse upload speeds. Notably, upload speeds are especially important for video communication, which massively proliferated during the pandemic. Further, upload speeds in Black neighborhoods have consistently fallen relative to white neighborhoods during the pandemic. This trend has substantial implications for racial inequality in the digital age.

The impact of burnout on university workers' intention to quit in times of Covid-19

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of burnout on university workers' intention to quit in Tamaulipas. The study is based on a quantitative methodological design with a causal correlational and crosssectional scope. The data were collected through an online questionnaire, based on Maslach and Jackson (1986), whose sample is made up of 254 workers (teaching and administrative staff). The conclusions reveal that the situation experienced by the staff causes them to feel indifferent to their work (depersonalisation). This, in turn, affects their intention to look for another job, and therefore it is concluded that burnout does indeed induce an intention to quit. © 2022 Emerald Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

Troubling gender norms on Mumsnet: Working from home and parenting during the UK's first COVID lockdown

This article examines the troubling of gender norms that unfolded on the social networking site, Mumsnet, at the beginning of the UK's first lockdown response to the COVID pandemic. Using an analysis of 7144 contributions which included the acronym ‘WFH' (=working from home), posted from March 1, 2020 to April 5, 2020, the article examines how Mumsnet members talked about working from home while caring for toddlers and home‐schooled children. Mumsnet discussions about everyday moral dilemmas create a discursive space for examining the situated rationalities and normative judgments that shape expectations of how to behave as a working parent. Drawing on post‐structuralist discourse theory, the article shows how Mumsnet contributors generated alternative sub‐categorizations of ‘good mums', and destabilized discourse assumptions of intensive motherhood, such as always ‘being there' for their children, thereby ‘working the weakness in the norms' (Butler, 1993) and creating potential for change.

Interessenpolitik in der Corona-Krise

Der Beitrag beleuchtet die Rolle der Mitbestimmung in der Ausnahmesituation der Pandemie. Anhand von exemplarischen Befunden aus drei Handlungsfeldern – der Entwicklung und Umsetzung von Maßnahmen zum Infektionsschutz, der Stabilisierung der Beschäftigung sowie der Verlagerung von Arbeit ins Homeoffice – wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob die Beteiligung am betrieblichen Krisenmanagement zu einer Stärkung oder Schwächung der Interessenvertretung führt. Die Befunde zeigen eine aktive und häufig auch als erfolgreich wahrgenommene Betriebsratsarbeit, sie zeigen aber auch erhebliche Branchenunterschiede, fortgesetzte Spaltungstendenzen und erweiterte Beteiligungsoptionen, denen die Verankerung in der Mitbestimmung fehlt. Dies deutet auf Pfadabhängigkeiten einer Mitbestimmung im Krisenmodus hin.Alternate :This paper deals with the role of co-determination in the extraordinary situation of the pandemic. Presenting exemplary findings from three fields of action, i.e. development and implementation of measures for infection prevention, stabilization of employment, and relocation of work into the home office, the paper addresses the question whether participation in crisis management leads to a strengthening or weakening of the workersʼ interest representation. The empirical findings reveal an active role of the works councils which in most cases has been perceived as successful. On the other hand, there are also indications of significant differences according to branches, continued tendencies toward fragmentation, and extended participation options lacking anchoring in the codetermination norms and institutions. These results point to path dependencies of codetermination in the crisis mode.

Covid 19 Pandemic Assessment of the Employment Status of Home-Based Workers

At the arrival of Covid 19 and under the isolation measures, businessmen have implemented protocols to mitigate the contagion and the advance of the disease. Thus, for activities within the organization that do not require transformation processes and where the employee's physical presence is not required, new forms of work were established, such as the implementation of temporary work from home or permanent teleworking. According to the above, the present research proposal arises, which under a mixed methodology, of a descriptive-transversal type, focuses on the analysis of the different business scenarios from the technical, technological, economic and human variables that allow evaluating the effectiveness of the implementation and adequacy of the aforementioned modalities as a contingency in the face of the Covid 19 pandemic and that in the same way they allow contributing to the economic reactivation processes. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Home at Work or Work at Home? On the Understanding and Dynamics of Border Areas during a Pandemic

The article examines some of the findings of a qualitative research project that looked into the issue of daily "boundary work" as experienced by working adults with and without children during the COVID-19 pandemic. We define boundary work as work that occurs at the intersection of two domains: work and life. We concentrate on border locations in the context of two major issues: first, how people identify borders (boundary identity), and second, what individual coping strategies (cognitive and emotional boundary work) were produced by the pandemic. Because of the frequent spatial overlap between the two spheres (work and life), temporal and spatial boundaries became ineffective, and the majority of the labor of creating borders was moved to mental and emotional levels.

When Home Becomes the Workplace: Work–Life Balance Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relevance of the intersections between work and personal life. Measures introduced to slow the spread of COVID-19 have included an increase of working from home and the temporary closure of schools and child-care facilities, leading to a lighter workload for some and a heavier workload for others. These consequences are likely to affect employees' work–life balance (WLB), although the impact may differ across groups of employees depending on the nature of their work, family and personal demands and resources. This mixed-method study examined how Dutch government employees perceive their WLB during the pandemic and how differences in what employees are experiencing can be explained. In May/June 2020, an online survey (N = 827) and an interview study (N = 17) were conducted at a government organization whose employees were obliged to work from home partly or exclusively. Results indicate that demands changed when working entirely from home and resources became more important to maintain WLB satisfaction. Being able to manage boundaries across life domains and find a new routine also appeared to be crucial for WLB satisfaction.

National qualifications in Scotland: A lightning rod for public concern about equity during the pandemic

Scotland, traditionally, has high levels of confidence in teachers. Fairness and justice are key concepts in policy and practice in Scottish education. For more than 100 years, the high‐stakes assessment system in Scotland, with the Scottish Higher qualification at its heart, has been crucial to that sense of opportunity and justice. However, in 2019–2020, public confidence in high‐stakes assessment in Scotland, as in other United Kingdom countries, was dented. In Scotland, the Covid‐19 pandemic meant that schools were closed, teachers provided online learning opportunities for pupils working at home and, for the first time in 130 years, it was not possible to run national examinations. To ensure that learners were not further disadvantaged, alternative approaches to gathering evidence for qualifications were instigated. However, these results were challenged as socially unjust and the results that had been nationally moderated were replaced by results based on locally moderated teachers' professional judgement. As Scotland looks to qualifications beyond Covid‐19, trust must be re‐built. This article reports on a participative research project that sought to understand public perceptions of standards and fairness across a range of key communities following this experience. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we analyse factors which affected trust in National Qualifications under the pandemic. The evidence suggests that when considering what matters for qualifications to be trusted, technocratic solutions are likely to be rejected by stakeholders. Understanding and responding to what led to the mistrust of qualifications in Scotland will be crucial to inform its future qualifications system.