The outbreak of COVID-19, along with the measures implemented to contain the virus, forced companies and individuals to adapt their working practices. In most European countries, professionals who could work from home were asked to do so, particularly during the most critical phases of the pandemic.

In Austria, many employees worked from home in the period between March and May 2020, and then again between October 2020 and January 2021. Remote working, which had already become more common, became increasingly widespread as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the positive and negative effects of remote work have been explored by researchers, these effects might have been different during the pandemic, due to the restrictions. For instance, curfews, school closures, and the inability to engage in leisure activities also influenced the work-life balance and wellbeing of remote workers.

Dr Eva Straus and her colleagues at University of Vienna carried out a study to better understand the experiences of remote workers during the pandemic. They wished to gather insights that would inform interventions aimed at improving the work lives and wellbeing of remote workers.

For their study, Eva’s team recruited a total of 2222 participants, all of whom were working remotely in Austria during two critical lockdown periods starting in Spring and Autumn of 2020. These participants were asked to fill out questionnaires to record their working experiences and overall wellbeing, as well as any new resources they had access to.

Two distinct questionnaires were used in the study. The first included general questions about the resources that the remote workers had access to at that point in time, as well as their overall working conditions. These resources were divided into three broad categories: personal resources, such as independent goal-setting, external resources, such as the equipment available at home, and organisational resources, such as job security.

The second questionnaire, which the participants were asked to complete every day, assessed the workers’ wellbeing, their perceived productivity, and their levels of engagement on a given day. Ultimately, Eva and her colleagues collected a total of 5950 daily entries, which they analysed using a Latent Charge Score model. Latent Charge Score models are frameworks that allow researchers to model processes in which factors introduced in the short-term affect a system in the long-term. These frameworks are often used by researchers in longitudinal studies to identify patterns in large amounts of data collected over a set time period.

The team’s data yielded various interesting results, highlighting the relationships between different factors and the wellbeing, perceived productivity, and engagement of remote workers during the pandemic.

The researchers found that the availability of all three types of resources was positively related to the wellbeing of remote workers. In other words, having higher levels of personal, external and organisational resources was linked to higher wellbeing. The perceived productivity and engagement of professionals also appeared to be positively linked to most of the resources examined by the team.

Using these results, Eva and her colleagues set out to test a few hypotheses. The first hypothesis was that the wellbeing, perceived productivity, and engagement of remote workers had decreased from the first time they were asked to work from home during the pandemic, in Spring 2020, to the second time in the Autumn of the same year. Indeed, the data they collected appeared to support this hypothesis.

The researchers also hypothesised that personal resources, external resources, and organisational resources would mitigate the decline in the wellbeing, perceived productivity, and engagement of remote workers during the first and second lockdown period. The team’s analyses revealed that higher personal resources were linked to a smaller decline in the wellbeing and engagement of remote workers from the first to the second lockdown.

External resources, such as having good technical equipment, was linked to larger decreases in the participants’ wellbeing between the first and second lockdown. Such resources had the opposite impact on productivity – with participants reporting a smaller decline between the first and second lockdown. The level of external resources didn’t impact their changes in engagement.

Finally, the researchers found that some organisational resources, especially greater freedom to make decisions, social support from colleagues, job security, and satisfaction with the company’s communication, mitigated the decline in wellbeing and engagement from the first to the second lockdown period. However, these organisational resources were not linked to any changes in perceived productivity.

Eva and her colleagues also identified resources that had the strongest effect on the participants’ daily wellbeing, perceived productivity, and engagement. These were self-efficacy, which describes someone’s confidence in their working abilities, social support from colleagues, and access to necessary equipment and materials.

Overall, the team’s recent study highlights several key resources that improve the working experiences of remote workers under the difficult conditions posed by COVID-19. Their insights could inform the development of strategies to best support remote workers during pandemics or at other times of global crisis.

For example, as self-efficacy is linked to higher reported wellbeing and greater engagement in professional activities among remote workers, it could encourage companies to introduce coaching sessions designed to strengthen their employees’ self-efficacy. Similarly, the reported positive effects of social support from colleagues could inform the creation of chat groups or other initiatives that encourage supportive interactions among employees who work from home.

Further interventions that could prove effective include improving remote workers’ equipment, motivational training sessions, and exercises that teach employees how to independently organise their work.