Connecting and relating in Brazil: Implications of remote work

COVID-19 triggered a monumental shift to remote work. The challenge of connecting and relating among knowledge employees emerged globally, and research about remote work in this unique circumstance surged. However, we know more about the impact of remote work on knowledge employees in low-context cultures than in high-context. Given that Brazil is high context, we explored how remote work impacted relating and connecting among knowledge employees in Brazil. First, employees lost the informality of work-life;instead of informal, fluid communication and collaboration, participants had to book appointments and schedule time to discuss simple issues. Second, good-humoured behaviours diminished, implicating connectedness. Third, non-verbal communication ceased, and employees lost facial expressions, eye contact, and other prevalent signs necessary for context. Fourth, the loss of unstructured exchange of experiences and ideas lessened tacit knowledge sharing. Fifth, workspace inequalities emerged as the employees' homes were unequipped for remote work. Lastly, the most significant win was work-life balance. Therefore, remote work in high-context cultures is not without peril;culture and socioeconomics underline remote work's self-generating, self-organizing mechanisms. Thus, corporate leaders and human resource professionals should address remote work as a layered phenomenon and, carefully, with employees, co-construct the notion of connecting and relating. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Towards a Metaverse Workspace: Opportunities, Challenges, and Design Implications

Both enterprises and their employees have globally experienced remote work at an unprecedented scale since the outbreak of COVID-19. As the pandemic becomes less of a threat, some companies have called their employees back to a physical office, citing issues related to working remotely, but many employees have refused to return. Thus, working in the metaverse has gained much attention as an alternative that could complement the weaknesses of completely remote work or even offline work. However, we do not know yet what benefits and drawbacks the metaverse has as a legitimate workspace, because there are few real cases of 1) working in the metaverse and 2) working remotely at such an unprecedented scale. Thus, this paper aims to identify real challenges and opportunities the metaverse workspace presents when compared to remote work by conducting semi-structured interviews and participatory workshops with various employees and company stakeholders (e.g., HR managers and CEOs) who have experienced at least two of three work types: working in a physical office, remotely, or in the metaverse. Consequently, we identified 1) advantages and disadvantages of remote work and 2) opportunities and challenges of the metaverse. We further discuss design implications that may overcome the identified challenges of working in the metaverse. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Selection of Digital Tools for Organizing Students' Group Work in Distance Education

The transformation of classical education into distance education has become increasingly relevant, especially given the challenging conditions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and military operations in our country. In these circumstances, distance learning requires practical educational materials that are easily accessible to students. This paper proposes criteria and indicators for selecting digital tools that can facilitate group work with educational content in distance learning. We analyzed the tools available on the Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Cisco Webex platforms and evaluated their suitability for managing students' group work in distance learning in institutions of higher education at various stages of the learning process including setting tasks, designing the learning environment, facilitating group interaction and communication, managing educational content and files, promoting teamwork and productivity, and presenting results. To obtain expert assessment of the defined criteria and indicators, we engaged seventeen researchers and educators who have practical experience using digital tools in distance learning. Our study identified three important criteria for selecting digital tools for group work with educational content, namely: design, functional-technological, education -communication ones. We determined the weight of the indicators for these criteria and assessed digital tools for group work with educational content in distance learning. Digital tools such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace was found to be more suitable for providing group work of students in a distance learning, while Cisco Webex was found to be the most suitable tool for organizing real-time group work. Other digital tools for group work of students in distance learning can be evaluated according to defined criteria and indicators.

Exploring the authentication of COVID-19 vaccines using Surface-enhanced handheld Raman spectroscopy (SERS) equipped with orbital Raster scattering and machine learning

COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus first emerging in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has since spread rapidly across the globe escalating into a worldwide pandemic causing millions of fatalities. Emergency response to the pandemic included social distancing and isolation measures as well as the escalation of vaccination programmes. The most popular COVID-19 vaccines are nucleic acid-based. The vast spread and struggles in containment of the virus has allowed a gap in the market to emerge for counterfeit vaccines. This study investigates the use of handheld Raman spectroscopy as a method for nucleic acid-based vaccine authentication and utilises machine learning analytics to assess the efficacy of the method. Conventional Raman spectroscopy requires a large workspace, is cumbersome and energy consuming, and handheld Raman systems show limitations with regards to sensitivity and sample detection. Surface Enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) however, shows potential as an authentication technique for vaccines, allowing identification of characteristic nucleic acid bands in spectra. SERS showed strong identification potential through Correlation in Wavelength Space (CWS) with all vaccine samples obtaining an r value of approximately 1 when plotted against themselves. Variance was observed between some excipients and a selected number of DNA-based vaccines, possibly attributed to the stability of the SERS colloid where the colloid-vaccine complex had been measured over different time intervals. Further development of the technique would include optimisation of the SERS method, stability studies and more comprehensive analysis and interpretation of a greater sample size. © 2023 IEEE.

Adapting Software Teams to the New Normal: An Early Case Study of Transitioning to Hybrid Work Under COVID-19

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have begun to address what some refer to as the "new normal,” comprising hybrid arrangements of employees working from home and working at the office with varying schedule arrangements. While many of the studies to date addressed how employees coped with work-from-home, we sought to investigate how employees dealt with a transition to the new normal of hybrid arrangements. To shed light on this topic, we conducted a survey-based case study at one office location of a large, multinational software corporation. The site sought to transition employees fully working from home to working two days remotely and three predefined days in their shared workspace. Our survey results indicated a substantial decline in work satisfaction since the beginning of this transition, which can be explained by diverse work preferences. Furthermore, some software developers felt frustrated during this transition time;they described challenges they underwent and proposed potential solutions. In this paper, we present our lessons learned in this case study and describe some actionable recommendations for practitioners facing such transitions. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND OFFICE SPACE DEMAND DYNAMICS

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the mass adoption of remote working and other office market dynamics. As firms continue to adapt to the changes caused by the pandemic through various work patterns, the potential implications for the office market are unclear. Using data from Knight Frank's (Y)OUR SPACE (2021) survey, this paper employs probit and mul-tinomial models to examine the relationship between COVID-19 related remote working and changes to firms' office space strategies. The study confirms that the pandemic has significantly influenced firms' medium-term office space use strategies, and the results show that firms' perception of their employees' work-from-home experience has influenced their strategy re-view. The results specifically show that a positive WFH experience increases the likelihood that firms will reduce their total space quantity, reduce their density of occupation, and negotiate shorter leases in the medium term. We further observe that the pandemic is likely to have weaker effects on space quality than on space quantity, implying that economic factors remain core priorities in future office space use strategies, while social and environmental factors may remain secondary. These insights extend the literature beyond the economic determinants of office space demand to other social factors. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Vilnius Gediminas Technical University.

WORKING-FROM-HOME (WFH) PRACTICE FOR URBAN POOR RESPONDING TO PANDEMIC SITUATION

The situation where one can practise working from home is not easy for some people in Malaysia, especially those with limited space at home. Working from home (WFH), on the other hand, needs to be rethought and thoroughly examined for individuals in the bottom 40 percent (B40) for a variety of reasons. A total of 144 samples from low-income households in Shah Alam responded to the structured questionnaire. The questionnaire focuses on two main investigations: (1) the WFH conditions in terms of space and environment among the B40;and (2) how they manage WFH distractions in connection to the house space and environment. According to survey results, most respondents prefer working in a bedroom or living room since it is a more pleasant environment. The availability of electrical plugs, internet access, and adequate ventilation are further considerations that influence their choice of workspace. The survey's findings indicated that the lack of a comfortable workspace made the majority of respondents unhappy about practising WFH. The majority of responders suggested that future bedrooms be larger to guarantee that those practising WFH are comfortable. The results of this study are expected to enhance the planning and design of residential living space and pave the way for future low-cost housing development that places greater emphasis on the well-being of the urban poor. © 2022 by MIP.

Harnessing People Factor at Workplace During Covid-19 Pandemic: A Public Sector Study in Kolkata

A favourable work place is one that brings out the best in people. It is quite imperative to strategize human factor at work sphere for building an agile, resilient organization that can sustain in both normal and crisis times. With the aftermath of the Covid-10 pandemic the essential objective of the paper is to explore and investigate the prominent domains and items in the public department that may be considered in line on restructuring workplaces with the use of the tools and philosophies of strategic HR and people management. The primary survey towards objectives of the study has been based among employee categories in labur department on a specifically set up research scale in the name of "Potential Assessment of Human Resource at Work Place - Public Department” i.e. "PAHR WP - PD” Scale. The structured PAHR WP - PD scale has eight broad areas of strategic human resource interventions. The eight broad domains identified are Capacity Building, Creating HR infrastructure preparedness, Implementing health & safety measures, Building swift HR change management plans, Crafting guidelines, Coordinating Virtual work & Physical work, Organising employee wellness drives, Creating avenues for life & livelihood. The significance of reframing work-place dimensions in the public arena against pandemic situation is quite relevant and realistic in the context of modern management practices. © 2023 DMICS.

Applying Human Factors to Modify and Design Healthcare Workspaces and Processes in Response to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present unique challenges to healthcare organizations around the world. Members of a provincial Human Factors team supported several workspace design projects prompted by the pandemic. This article highlights some of the challenges identified in a selection of these projects. It also presents the human factors methods and recommendations that were used to improve workspace designs, processes, and patient safety in healthcare environments. © 2023 by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

(Re)creating the Inhabited Workspace: Rematerialization Practices of Remote Work

Through the metaphor of the inhabited workspace, this chapter explores the practices of recreating the various workspaces deployed by remote workers. To do so, it draws on an exploratory qualitative study conducted in Montreal with 13 people who were already working remotely before the Covid-19 pandemic. After developing the concepts of remote work, space and materialization, the chapter explains the methodological approach in more detail. In France, since the 1980s, "teleworking” or "working from home” has been promoted by the public authorities as a way to reorganize the territory. Remote work covers a variety of experiences and trajectories. However, remote workers have one thing in common: the blurring of the boundaries between personal and professional life. The study shows that recreating an inhabitable workspace requires a combination of three boundaries: material, of course, and also temporal and virtual disconnection. These boundaries are characterized by their ephemeral and constantly renegotiated nature. © ISTE Ltd 2022.

The Flex Office: What are the Challenges for Organizations and Users?

This chapter reviews the main scientific contributions relating to the flex office by reviewing the genesis of this spatial organization of work, by proposing a summary of what the existing research says about the opportunities and risks associated with the flex office, and by showing why the Covid-19 health crisis could greatly accelerate its development. The flex office accompanies the internal and external mobility of service sector employees. It was in the 1990s that the flex office concept underwent its first phase of development due to the rise of new information and communication technology (NICT). The flex office questions the invariable environmental needs of people, perhaps more than other forms of workspace organization. Flex office users are reluctant and often resistant because they identify the losses they will suffer. The flex office offers a liberal vision of the work environment since it supports the idea of self-directed management of workspace and time by employees. © ISTE Ltd 2022.

Benefits and Risks of Teleworking from Home: The Teleworkers' Point of View

Using a qualitative research-based approach, this study aimed to understand (i) the way home-based teleworkers in France perceive and organize their professional activities and workspaces, (ii) their teleworking conditions, (iii) the way they characterize the modalities and the nature of their interactions with their professional circle, and more broadly (iv) their quality of life ‘at work'. We performed a lexical and morphosyntactic analysis of interviews conducted with 28 teleworkers (working part-time or full-time from home) before the COVID-19 crisis and the associated establishment of emergency telework. Our results confirm and complement findings in the literature. Participant discourses underlined the beneficial effects of teleworking in terms of professional autonomy, flexibility, concentration, efficiency, performance, productivity, and being able to balance their professional and private lives. Nevertheless, they also highlighted the deleterious effects of teleworking on temporal workload, setting boundaries for work, work-based relationships and socio-professional integration. Despite the study limitations, our findings highlight the need for specific research-based and practical strategies to support the implementation of a sustainable telework organization in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era. © 2022 by the authors.

The influence of distractions of the home-work environment on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previous research showed that office workers are mainly distracted by noise, influencing their mental health. Little investigation has been done into the influence of other workspace characteristics (i.e. temperature, amount of space, visual privacy, adjustability of furniture, wall colours, and workspace cleanliness) on distractions at the office, and even fewer while working from home (WFH). The influence of home-workspace distractions on mental health also received limited attention. This research aims to investigate relationships between home-workspace and personal characteristics, distraction, and mental health while WFH during COVID-19. A path analysis approach was used, to find that, at home, employees were distracted by noise and when having a small desk. Those with a dedicated workroom were less distracted. Distractions mediated most relationships between home-workspace characteristics and mental health, while personal characteristics influenced mental health directly. Employers can use these results to redesign policies regarding home-and-office working to stimulate a healthy work environment. Practitioner summary: The investigation of the influence of home-workspace characteristics on distractions and mental health while WFH during COVID-19 appears to be limited. This research filled this gap by performing a path analysis, using a holistic definition of mental health. Findings showed that distractions mediate relationships between home-workspace characteristics and mental health.

ONLINE PARTICIPATORY TOOLS IN CLASSROOM AND RESEARCH SETTINGS

Collaborative engagement in research and education often involves the need for a shared workspace among participants. With improved web-based technologies, and limitations to in-person interactions presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, educators and researchers need to adapt their methods and tools to support meaningful engagement. We reflect on our experiences and iterative experiments navigating these challenges in the domains of design education and design research. As design educators, our team utilized various online platforms including video conferencing, whiteboards, spreadsheets, surveys, and polling tools, to support teaching and student collaboration. As design researchers working in the domain of maternal healthcare, we borrowed from our experiences in the classroom and applied some of these tools to our research with patient and clinician stakeholders, to support data collection and research team collaboration. In this paper, we elaborate on these experiences by drawing from examples across our teaching and research activities to share key strengths, challenges, and considerations of the online workspaces, with a particular focus on online whiteboards. We compare the two settings and reflect on barriers and facilitators of online engagement specific to these. Lastly, we suggest recommendations for designing online activities and selecting appropriate online tools based on the objective, contextual needs, and the affordances of tools and activities. Our findings may support decisions of educators, designers, and researchers in planning for online engagement. © Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education: Disrupt, Innovate, Regenerate and Transform, E and PDE 2022. All rights reserved.

CodeWalk: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed-Ability Collaborative Software Development

COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward remote software development, increasing the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration. Existing tools and practices impose high coordination overhead on blind or visually impaired (BVI) developers, impeding their abilities to collaborate effectively, compromising their agency, and limiting their contribution. To make remote collaboration more accessible, we created CodeWalk, a set of features added to Microsoft's Live Share VS Code extension, for synchronous code review and refactoring. We chose design criteria to ease the coordination burden felt by BVI developers by conveying sighted colleagues' navigation and edit actions via sound effects and speech. We evaluated our design in a within-subjects experiment with 10 BVI developers. Our results show that CodeWalk streamlines the dialogue required to refer to shared workspace locations, enabling participants to spend more time contributing to coding tasks. This design offers a path towards enabling BVI and sighted developers to collaborate on more equal terms. © 2022 ACM.

Circular Economy of the Built Environment in Post-pandemic Era;A Disignerly Proposal for the Future Generation of Workspaces

Considering the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on the foundation of our socio-economic and environmental systems, it is imperative to apply multi-faceted sustainability approaches for the current and post-pandemic era. The built environment plays a key role in the spatial engagement of humans and their workspace in the urban environment. Proposing new concepts for the post-pandemic era that combine the built environment and sustainability techniques may provide an opportunity for better integration into the essence of sustainability. In this regard, this paper recommends applying circular economy idea in adaptive reuse practice of industrial heritage to create circular workplaces for the post-pandemic period. As an example of this given proposal, a scheme for a textile factory in Isfahan, Iran is presented. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Remote Work and Other Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Enterprises and Cultural Management

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies, not only in the cultural management, and their employees had to cope with a number of changes, and people faced new challenges, not only in the workplace. However, remote work has become a pandemic phenomenon. The aim of the article was to analyse the experience with remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 in Enterprises on the examples of Czech Republic and in worldwide cultural management, i.e. to prepare the state-of-the-art report and, based on the report, to present recommendations for remote work in the future. The methodology process was that at first, the secondary data were obtained by selection and content analysis of 475 quantitative and qualitative print and virtual information published on the topic of pandemic impact. Then through search, comparison and synthesis, an insight into the major changes that have occurred in working life due to the pandemic has been gained. Based on induction, deduction and the authors' own experience, recommendations were then made for the future use of remote work. Amongst the findings of the article is a comprehensive view of the experience with the remote work phenomenon, its positives and negatives, as well as a description of particular effects of coronavirus pandemics on both employers and employees. The discussion then covers the recommendations on how to better face and cope with these situations in the future, not only in our conditions but also in conditions of similar economies. © 2022, Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. All rights reserved.

Musculoskeletal Discomfort Faced by Interior Design Students During Online Learning

Musculoskeletal disorders are prevalent in young adults in the present times. A major section of this age group are the students pursuing higher education. In the current pandemic situation due to COVID-19, the students have been forced into attending classes through online mode and so the infrastructure available at home may not be optimal ergonomically, leading to musculoskeletal discomfort amongst the students. In Interior Design course, the students are required to do practical work in a sitting position using the furniture available at home. They are also required to attend classes through computers, tablets and smartphones, which can also lead to musculoskeletal discomfort. As these students are exposed to the risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, the present study was conducted with objectives (a) to gain insight into working methods and home workspace of the students, (b) to identify incidence of musculoskeletal discomfort experienced by interior design students during online learning and (c) to find out the perceived causes of musculoskeletal discomfort by the students. The sample of the study was 77 under-graduate students pursuing Interior Design course and data was collected using questionnaire. The findings of the study revealed that these students are in need of proper workspace and work environment at home, they need guidance in optimizing there working methods and developing proper work schedules and lastly, they need awareness regarding maintaining correct postures during sit-down work as well as corrective measures for optimizing their current work-station at home. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Work engagement and its antecedents in remote work: A person-centered view

The aim of this study was to investigate characteristics associated with employees' ability to cope with the challenges of remote working as flexible work arrangements are predicted to constitute an increasingly pervasive model of work. More specifically, we investigated job resources specific to remote work and employees' strengths and behaviours that may be crucial for enhancing work engagement when working outside a traditional office environment. The present study adopted a person-centered approach to investigate work engagement and its antecedents. A sample of 455 employees completed a questionnaire four times across a ten-month period during the enforced remote work occasioned in response to the corona pandemic. The results revealed four distinct work engagement profiles. Most employees (75%) belong to profiles with either average or high levels of work engagement, which remained stable after a slight initial increase. A decrease was observed in 25% of those employees whose work engagement was already low at the study baseline. High levels of organisational support, the functionality of home as a work environment, job-related self-efficacy, and job crafting characterised the profile in which work engagement remained at a high level during the remote work. Implications for practice concerning well-being protective multi-locational work are presented.

Satisfaction with activity-support and physical home-workspace characteristics in relation to mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previous research indicates that employees' mental health might be influenced by their satisfaction with physical office characteristics, such as noise, daylight, and ventilation. However, similar research on mental health in relation to working from home (WFH) is limited. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the relationships between satisfaction with physical home workspace characteristics and support of work activities and mental health while WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic. Relationships were analysed using a path analysis approach, based on a sample of 1219 office workers, who had to work fully from home. The internal relationships between the ten considered mental health variables were also studied. Results showed that satisfaction with daylight, artificial light, greenery, and views outside were directly related to one of the mental health variables and indirectly to several others. Surprisingly, satisfaction with temperature, noise, ventilation, and air quality did not seem to play a role at the home workplace. In addition, unlike at the office, personal characteristics did not relate to workspace satisfaction nor perceived support of activities at home. Furthermore, all mental health variables were related to at least one other mental health variable. Workplace managers could use these insights to formulate recommendations for employees on how to design their home-workspace.