COVID-19 and remote work: Is it sustainable?

Abstract

Key business publications have recently reported that some CEOs are unhappy with the results they are seeing from their employees who are working remotely due to COVID-19. The concerns that the CEOs expressed included loss of productivity, company culture and employee upward mobility. This paper documents the results from a survey of 109 working adults to gauge their opinion on the sustainability of working remotely. The results of the survey show that employees feel that remove work is sustainable. Further they feel that while it is harder to train new coworkers and to be innovative, they can still be sustained while working remotely. Remote employees do not feel that their careers will be negatively impacted, and they do feel that they still have good access to their manager. The majority of the employees surveyed did feel that they were socializing less with their coworkers. Employees also did not feel that the team morale had diminished significantly since starting to work remotely and that their company's culture had not been impacted. The paper calls for greater research on the impact of remote working on employees since many companies will be going to a hybrid model as the pandemic eases.