IMPACT OF REMOTE WORK SETUP ON EMPLOYEE WORK EFFICIENCY

Prashant Praveen

Interim Report

November 2022
Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced most organizations and firms to work
remotely from their home. This shift of work process was on very short notice and with
limited choice. This research study investigates the various impacts on employee
productivity due to various factors like family background, work atmosphere, working
schedule, personal responsibilities at home, social isolation, and self-discipline while
working from home during the pandemic. Also, for understanding the general perception
people have and the impact when it comes to shifting back to the office to work or the
hybrid model that is being adopted by many organizations post COVID-19 to have a
smooth transition from working remotely to getting back to the office. Most of the
population favour working remotely, as it gives them freedom of choice and allows them
to stay close to their family. At the same time, another set of the population believes that
the lack of in-person communication, that happens at the workplace, which will not
happen when working remotely, is going to have a negative impact on having a good bond
among colleagues, which in turn will affect the productivity and confidence in future. This
research, with the help of various questionnaires with employees of organizations, aims to
study the impact of remote work culture on employee work efficiency and the idea they
have on returning to the office, and the effects related to this shift.
Table of Contents

Abstract 2

1. Overview 4

2. Background and related studies 5

3. Research Questions and Hypothesis 7

4. Aim and Objectives 8

5. Scope of Study 9

6. Research Methodology 9

7. Expected Results 10

8. Requirements

9. Risks Involved and Solutions 10

10. Research Plan 11

11. References 11

3
1. Overview

The majority of working professionals, especially in the IT sector, have been looked upon
in our culture as formally dressed people, going to their offices. Most of the time, an
individual spends commuting to and from the office, and this culture has been there since
one can remember.

Working professionals have always considered that going out to work is going to the
office and through this, we can understand the importance of the office in our professional
careers. With the advent of the COVID-19 outbreak, working from home became the new
working culture for millions of employees around the globe. Organizations had no or very
little choice but to ask their employees to come to the office, as the risk of virus spread
was very high. The spread of the Novel Coronavirus was so abrupt that a very sudden
switch of remote work culture was the demand of the situation, keeping health as the top
priority for every nation. This made millions of employees switch, on very short notice, to
remote work. This shift was huge, as suggested by Eurofound1 only in Europe itself more
than 50% of the workforce shifted to remote work setup as compared to 12% prior to the
pandemic. The world was in a state of mixed thoughts as to how will this work out, since
the majority of working professionals were not accustomed to working remotely without
an office. But no one had any idea that this new work culture will in turn increase2 the
productivity of the workers. This increase was majorly found in the IT sector, where
remote work was possible through a connected network of computers and cloud
technologies. Another reason for this increase in productivity, as suggested by a study, is
that working from home has given employees more freedom and creativity in performing
tasks and delivering a better piece of work. It also gave an impression to employers as well
the employees that this way of work will be the future. In contrast to this belief, one
study3 found that there was a fall in productivity. This fall was majorly in sectors where
the work demanded in-person presence or face-to-face interaction like travel, leisure, retail
etc. Other findings also came into notice like work responsibilities, working hours,
accountability to others, availability, and demands on the job. Many people felt their
accountability has increased along with long working hours compared to working from an
office culture. Also, it was expected from employees to be more available during or out of
office hours, as with the notion that people are always connected to the internet and have
their office set up at home.
Now that it has been more than two years since the pandemic hit, uprooting many
businesses and adversely affecting the nation's economy, many organizations are putting
various efforts to overcome this loss. Since the majority of the population is now
vaccinated and is safe to travel, many organizations like Morgan Stanley4 have asked their
employees to return to the office. Keeping in mind that it has many months that people are
working from their homes and are mostly gotten used to it, firms are adopting a hybrid or
flexible model of work where people are asked to work from the office only on some of
the working days depending on the requirements.

The adaptation of the “new normal” work culture is suggested impact businesses,
employees, and even work altogether. With all the understanding from previous studies
and research work that has been carried out, the aim of this study becomes to deep dive
into looking at various factors and trends that are impacting the efficiency of professionals
working remotely. And what is the impact of flexible/hybrid work practice post COVID-
19 outbreak?

2. Background and related research

The IT industry has to deal with rapid growth, adapting to new technologies, and with the
changing definitions of the industry’s capability, the workforce needs to have access to
their work setup at all times at all places. Also, with the availability of cloud services at
effective pricing and access to a virtual network, working remotely has been in practice
prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. As per one of the studies, in the US, more than 3% of the
workforce (45 million workers) were working at least half of the time away from the
office (GWA, 2017). The same case was there in Europe, where people working from
home or away from the office included 5% of total employed professionals (Eurostat,
2018). It has been agreed that it is essential to have a virtual work setup, especially for the
IT sector, even before the outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus. (Fargo K.). The study also
establishes the fact that many work processes require physical presence and can only be
carried out through face-to-face interaction. So all such operations where remote work
practice is not at all possible can be excluded from this research, as we are only focusing
on the impact due to remote work culture.

Once this is established that remote work culture used to be their way before the COVID-
19 pandemic, we move on to the time when the pandemic did hit in early 2020, forcing
people to stay at home during the mandatory lockdowns to control the spread of the virus.
As we have in past history of emergencies, such situations have always brought a drastic
change in how things were carried out, COVID-19 outbreak was no such exception. With
the sudden shift from working in an office along with pier group and colleagues to a
solitary work culture of operating remotely, companies had no option but to come up with
working environment solutions to address this huge shift. Right from providing all the
required things to set up a home office to training their employees on technical as well as
operational skills to continue delivering with any business loss. Industries like Many
global multinational giants Like Accenture, and Goldman Sachs that were having cloud
technologies backing up their work process architecture and already having a vision and
strategy to address the pandemic outbreak, and the telecom industry, were able to move to
a completely remote setup for the employees where that was possible (Bick, A.).

The early days of forced work-from-home practice projected shocking outputs, as per one
of the studies done by Thompson. According to his study, it was found that productivity,
as well as efficiency of work, increased during this period. The major factor for this
increase as per the study was flexible work hours, which allowed the employees to work
according to their availability without much pressure of being available on screen as it
used to be while working from the office.

One of the studies where a survey was conducted on 278 US employees had interesting
outcomes. The survey considered some specific factors like working hours, demand on the
job, responsibilities, and accountability to peers in order to understand the impact on the
efficiency of workers while working remotely. Around 56% of the respondents said that
the shift of work practice from the office to home was a positive experience and 61% of
the people agreed that if they are given an option between going to the office or working
from home once things get back to normal, they will happily select the latter. The study
also looked into various well-being indicators like productivity, creativity, stress, work-life
balance, and health. Out of 278 respondents, 70% of them said that the new work culture
gave them the freedom to be more creative and nearly 50% of them felt that using online
platforms helped them in being more productive, increasing their job satisfaction.

Moving forward to the next phase of the pandemic in the year 2021-2022, some studies
highlighted the downfall in productivity and work-life balance. Lisa Baudot and Khim
Kelly reported that females had to work more than men (77.81% versus 71.31%). Also,
couples worked more than singles before COVID(16.30% versus 24.24%) but post-
pandemic results showed that it was the opposite (76.07% versus 72.46%). From results
highlighted by Baudot, L., and Kelly, K in their studies showed that from 2020 to 2021 the
trend for productivity is decreasing. And this is where the zoom fatigue kicks in, Hadar
and Wilken tell us that extended remote work has caused a new kind of problem, zoom
fatigue. The study established that richer media interaction during a virtual meeting in the
like in the form of video conferences led to more exhaustion among the employees.
Various hypotheses were taken up by Hadar and Wilken in order to understand the
relationship between video conferences and exhaustion. Some of the major vectors which
were looked upon in the study were i) the duration of the conference call, ii)meeting
size/participant’s size, and iii) the level of interaction during a meeting.

So to boost the economy again, companies like BP oil came up with a solution of a hybrid
work model, where employees as asked to visit the office only 2 days a week. This will
allow people to have face-to-face interaction and will help them in having a better work-
life balance. But this work practice had some challenges as well, as it would be difficult
for people staying far away from their work location to return just to go to the office 2
days a week. Therefore, through this research, we need to find what is the best and the
most optimum solution for maintaining positive work efficiency considering all the
challenges.

3. Research Questions and Hypothesis

The following research questions are suggested for each of the research objectives, as
highlighted follows.

1. Research Question 1: How does remote work culture impact the efficiency of
employees?

2. Research Question 5: Which type of activity (IT Employees) is better for Home, and
which is better for Office setup?

3. Research Question 3: Does hybrid/flexible work practice leads to an increase in

Organizations need to think from an employee perspective while refining work practice,
moving towards a direction of mutual growth, and implementing work strategies by
analyzing their technological competency. Also, all the aspects like work-life balance,
mental well-being, freedom of creativity, and growth in all dimensions of life must be
considered.

The below hypotheses can be assumed -

● Freedom of being flexible allows employees to be more efficient.

● Hybrid work culture will be the “new normal” for the IT industry.

4. Aim and Objectives

To study the impact of remote work culture on employee efficiency

The research objectives are formulated based on the aim of this study, which are as
follows:

 To analyze the factors that need to be considered in order to understand the impact on
work efficiency of employee
 To highlight the challenges faced in remote work setup.
 To see whether the hybrid model of work will help to overcome these challenges.

5. Scope of Study

This study will help in understanding the impact on the efficiency of IT employees while
working in a remote work setup. It will try to highlight what all strategies work best in
order to achieve higher work productivity. The remote work culture has been practiced for
more than a decade now, and the pandemic has now made a larger population practice a
similar work setup, which is something no one had imagined.

The world has gone through some worse times in the last few years, putting many under
psychological stress, anxiety, and depression. It is a very crucial time and organizations
just be mindful while implementing any new working norms. Through this study, we will
analyze all the possible causes that affect employee work experience in a positive as well
as negative manner.

The research objectives are formulated based on the aim of this study, which is as follows:

● To look for the various factors and KPIs that impact IT employee work experience.

● To analyze if the hybrid/flexible work culture is the best solution.

● To see if this hybrid model of work is suited for everyone.

The research will be carried out through surveys, questionnaires, and interviews, following
a similar approach as done by previous researchers. Using this method of collecting
insights from employees working in IT firms will help us in understanding employees’
perceptions while following the remote as well as a hybrid working model.

Collection of Primary data (Oct-Nov 22)

Primary data will be collected from IT companies, mainly developing organizations and
SMEs, through a survey and interview to assess the below-mentioned areas –

Analysing the current workspace strategy and its impact on performance (productivity,
satisfaction with working from home, and work-life balance)

Understanding the preferred workspace strategy and the reason for the same. The
projected impact on performance from some results obtained if possible from
organizations that shifted to work from office work culture post Covid-19.

Understanding the impact on work performance by other alternatives of work culture, like
the hybrid/flexible model adopted by some organizations that could work better than the
existing options

The questionnaire that will be shared, covers the current workspace strategy and the level
of flexibility allowed in choosing the strategy, what is the best strategy as per their
perceptive productivity, what is the best strategy that contributes directly to the positive or
negative impact on work performance.

Collection of Secondary data (Oct-Nov 22)

A systemic literature review from online libraries, including the university's libraries,
Google Scholar, and other sources, would be conducted to meet the requirements for
CRAAP (Current, Reliable, Authoritative, Accurate, and Purposeful).

Data Analysis (Nov-Dec 22)

The preferred method is a quantitative one where analysis will be done on the responses
received from the questionnaires using different analysis tools and methodologies like
python data analysis libraries (Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib).

Steps involved in the Data Analysis process:

a. Data will be collected using surveys and questionnaires targeting the required segment.

2. Processing of raw data to generate curated data layer a. Perform data transformations to
clear the noise from the raw data and generalize the data format for future analysis.

i. Use of data transformation techniques available in python libraries like Pandas, NumPy,
etc. for data cleaning.

ii. Performing data quality checks to avoid null or missing data points.

3. Performing EDA on the curated data layer:

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is an approach to analyze the data using visual
techniques. It is used to discover trends, and patterns, or to check assumptions with the
help of statistical summaries and graphical representations.

EDA uses python scripting to generate graphical and statistical summaries using various
python libraries like,

1. NumPy

2. pandas,

3. OS

4. joblib

5. warnings

6. matplotlib

7. seaborn

Some of the graphical analyses that will be conducted on the collected data are as follows:

● Heatmap

● Correlation Matrix

● Bar Graphs

● Pie Charts

● Scatter table

● Line chart
● Hybrid Graphs

7. Expected Results

After the analysis of the collected data, the expected outcome of the study is as mentioned
below:

● The impact of remote work culture on employees is positive or negative.

● Is The hybrid/flexible work model beneficial or not for a larger set of IT population?

8. Requirements

● Access to the internet

● Microsoft Office applications stacks for writing and presenting the research study.

● Google stacks: spreadsheets, surveys, and PDFs

● Primary data

● Grammarly and Turnitin

● A laptop with all the required software Python along with all the dependent libraries
installed.

9. Risks Involved and Solutions

Though all the necessary planning is made for conducting the research, there are some
risks that need to be highlighted and worked upon to reduce or mitigate the issues and lay
backs that may occur.

Some risks that must be looked upon are as follows:

➔ Low data size.

The collected data may not be of appropriate size in order to generate data insights looking
at graphical representations(Heatmap, scatter plot graph).

➔ Gathering meaningful data insights

With the amount of data available, it’s difficult to dig down and extract the insights that
are needed most.

➔ Poor data quality

Since the data collected will be primary in nature, the input received from the target
segment needs to be considered as true even if it does fall under the appropriate date range
for that category

Suggested Solutions:

➔ Low data size.

The target segment should be large enough to derive the required insights from the
analysis.

Meeting the minimum sample size for the graphical analysis of data.

Focus on data point deviation must be there.

➔ Gathering meaningful data.

Focus on the latest data source can help in extracting meaningful insights.

➔ Poor data quality

A centralized system eliminates these issues. Data should be gathered using a single
source of the input form.
11. References

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home during the COVID-19 outbreak: The impact on employees’ remote work
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2. Williamson, K. D. (2021). The Great Resignation. National Review.

3. Bloom, N., Bunn, P., Mizen, P., Smietanka, P. and Thwaites, G., 2020. The impact of
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4.https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/goldkman-sachs-morgan-
stanley-order-staff-to-return-to-office-full-time-122090100049_1.html

5. Vyas, L., 2022. “New normal” at work in a post-COVID world: work-life balance and
labor markets. Policy and Society, 41(1), pp.155-167.

6. Monteiro, N.P., Straume, O.R. and Valente, M., 2019. Does remote work improve or
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7. Figaro, K.A., 2015. Competencies and attributes essential for 21st century virtual team
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8. https://www.accenture.com/in-en/case-studies/about/ready-remote

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outbreak”, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, available at:

10. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/09/magazine/remote-work-covid.html

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12. Bellmann, L. and Hübler, O., 2020. Working from home, job satisfaction and work-
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