The Role of Telework in Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The aim of this article is to better understand the role of telework in resilience during the pandemic. The authors analyze the results from five online surveys from March 2020 to February 2021. The corpus results from the compilation of different sources: written reports on March 2020, a narrative survey on April 2020, a quantitative survey on May 2020, a second narrative survey on December 2020, and finally, three focus groups on February 2021. Thus, the transcription of 1,299 managers is studied following the textual data analysis methods. The findings indicate that the role of telework differs according to whether the resilience is individual or collective. It also changes over time and differs according to the process of resilience which the authors propose to divide into three phases: preventive resilience (before the disaster), reactive resilience (during the disaster), and curative resilience (after the disaster). The authors use the results of the resilience study to discuss implications for the development of telework as a digital tool and practice.