Essay Sample onTeleworking and Its Implications: Pre and Post-COVID-19 Perspectives

Introduction

Telecommunicating is also referred to as teleworking. Telecommunicating involves working from a remote location or setting outside the confines of the office (Tremblay & Thomsin, 2012). A person may work from home, coffee room, hotel room, or in any other place outside the work office. The arrangement of working from home is usually made possible through technology such as the internet, phone, laptops, webcam/video calling, fax, and instant messaging. Over the past few years, telecommunicating has been mainly used in the communication sector, the high-tech industry, and the financial sector (Tremblay & Thomsin, 2012). However, presently, telecommunicating and remote work are some of the emerging practices that many organizations are adopting globally. Notwithstanding the high increase of competition in the business section, competitive gain and augmented productivity are due to telecommunicating.

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The idea of working from home not only allows businesses to save a lot but also enables employees to work comfortably at home and generate time for their issues (Brynjolfsson et al. 2020). Balancing work and family, in addition to the decrease in transportation, were initially the interests set forth to clarify the interest in mobile work and telework. However, currently, the world is experiencing a new reality with the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Due to Covid-19, telecommunicating is now not an option but a necessity for many businesses and organizations worldwide to stay afloat (Brynjolfsson, et al. 2020). Companies are getting used to the new reality of staff working from home due to health safety issues. The paper focuses on telecommunicating in the context of Covid-19 and the benefits of telecommunicating. It also discusses the future of telework post-covid-19.

Background

Ten years ago, working from home appeared to be a far-fetched dream. Currently, it is the future of work. Since millennials were the steering force behind the change in the labor force, remote work was rejected as another "irritating" millennial character (Loubier, 2020). However, with more companies adopting telecommunicating, the benefits are apparent. Telework, though initially developed in the 1970s, telework, or telework, comprises of a novel model of an alternative work plan. Though there is no generally recognized meaning of telework, it can be described as a form of work or delivery of services conducted remotely, far away, and online through a computer and using telematics technologies (Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés, 2020). The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines telework as the usage of communication and information technologies, for example, smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets for work that is done outside the premises of the employer. Hence, it merely implies that telework is work accomplished through the help of ICT, and carried outside the location of the employer.

According to Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés (2020), telework can take place from several locations, that is, home, office, or other places, through various technologies and using different frequencies. In 2003, Statistical Indicators Benchmarking the Information Society (SIBIS) described four various telework modalities. These include mobile telework, telecommunicating from home, freelance telecommunicating in small/home offices, and telework carried out outside of the home or organization (Brynjolfsson et al. 2020). Telework enables workers to work from home, using common facilities or through any that supports the essential technologies. Consequentially, the technologies applied and the location governs the dimension and the thought of telework. As per Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés (2020), the ILO considers various teleworking modalities: regular home-based telework, which denotes to employees regularly operating from home through ICT. The second modality is a high mobile network, which describes employees working in various places, using ICT, and with a high mobility level. The third modality is occasional telework, which refers to staff who occasionally work in more than one place outside the premises of the employer and have a lower degree of mobility.

Literature Review

Teleworking in the Framework of Covid-19

Telework enables flexibility and a healthy family-work balance while minimizing the environmental effects of transportation (Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés, 2020). Although the benefits of telecommunicating were apparent, its implementation across Europe, especially home-based telework, has been slow. However, telework has suddenly undergone a rebound due to the measures businesses and governments are implementing to safeguard citizens from the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Sawhill (2020), at the start of 2020, governments worldwide advised that corporate entities promote teleworking to prevent staff from gathering together at one place. Teleworking or working from home would, therefore, help companies to adhere to the social distancing rule as a measure of preventing further spread of COVID-19. Therefore, work-from-home has been an essential practice for several entities and employees during the lockdown period of the coronavirus crisis.

During the COVID-19 lockdown period, societies have experienced a broad scale of "forced trials" where companies, employees, and sectors have maintained to work while being physically disconnected, on condition that they have the required legal, technological, and digital security protocols. According to the OECD (2020), this has potentially massive effects on all types of businesses, whether the firms had previously adopted teleworking or not. As stated by Brussevich et al. (2020), though telework has enabled some companies and employees to stay afloat better during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly individuals who previously teleworked, the capacity to telework during COVID-19 was not free to everyone, and difference in telework access may have aggravated underlying discrepancies. For example, most employees, specifically young, lowly-educated individuals, during this pandemic work in jobs that demand physical appearance.

According to Brussevich et al. (2020), social distancing measures enacted to contain the coronavirus pandemic affect a large share of employees globally. Millions of employees are unemployed, and countless number of jobs are at risk. Employees in occupations demanding physical presence at the workplace need a high level of personal proximity to have a limited scope of working at home. ILO (2020), workers with a low probability of working from home are high in sectors worst hit by the COVID-19 crisis. The areas include accommodation, transportation, food services, whole, and retail industries. Brussevich et al. (2020) approximate that more than 97.3 million employees, about 15 percent of the labor force, are at risk of furlough and layoffs across several countries in Europe. Employees below the wage distribution face the threat of earning losses, which further shows how telework during COVID-19 may increase inequality. Cross-country heterogeneity shows dissimilarities in the structure of production, technology use, labor market detection, and differential spread of workers across jobs.

Telework has been critical in sustaining production during the COVID-19 crisis, yet its impact on productivity is not clear. In the short term, likened to the pre-COVID-19 era, the excellent situations in which telecommunicating was enacted may have reduced performance for individuals who could work remotely. According to (Gorlick, 2020), Nick Bloom claimed that working alongside family, in unfitting places with no in-office periods, will lead to a productivity calamity for companies. According to Morikawa (2020), a survey carried out by Japan's Institute of technology during the period of lockdown verified reduced self-reported employee productivity. Contrariwise, Ozimek (2020) argues that a poll carried out among hiring managers in the U.S. discovered that managers were highly likely to have realized short-term performance earnings instead of losses.

The Prevalence of Teleworking Before COVID-19

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics approximations from the 2017-2018 American Time Use Survey, slightly under a third of employees over fifteen years said they could work from home (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). The majority of people who worked from home never had a formal work-from-home plan but rather took work home with them. As per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019), of the population surveyed, only 20% said they were rarely paid to work from home, and only 12% worked from home regularly for a month.

Also, Sawhill (2020), states that people who can telecommunicate are often people with higher pay. Sawhill (2020) says that half of working U.S. citizens in the top 25 percent of the earnings distribution engaged in any paid work-from-home in 2017 and 2018, compared to 4 percent in the bottom quartile.

The Prevalence of Teleworking During COVID-19

The data collected on the application of telecommunicating before COVID-19 complements the acumen acquired from the application of teleworking during COVID-19. From the start of the year, telework has skyrocketed as several employees are compelled to stay home. As stated by the OECD (2020), the high rate at which companies have adapted to the health crisis by allowing most of their workers to work from home shows that the use of telework before COVID-19 was well below what is achievable. Ozimek (2020), states that in the U.S., 94 percent of 1500 managers studied showed that some of their employees telecommunicated during the pandemic. In a different survey by Brynjolfsson et al. (2020), in the U.S., out of the 25000 people studied, 34 percent of individuals employed during that period acknowledged switching to teleworking.

Besides, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of searches of the word "teleworking" on Google worldwide has exponentially improved. Hence, this provides proof of the necessity of teleworking during this crisis

Perception of Employees on Working from Home

According to a study by Baert et al. (2020), approximately two-thirds (65.7%) of employees studied report that their general satisfaction with their work augments with telework. 64.6 percent of the study respondents also believe that telework improves their work balance, while approximately 48.4 percent of the participants think that telework assists in reducing job-associated stress. Also, 47.6 percent of participants report that telework helps in reducing the possibility of burnout. Baert et al. (2020) also evaluated the impact of telework on performance, and 55.3 percent of participants reported that telework improved their efficiency in productivity while 50.7 percent of participants asserted that it improved their work concentration. The positive impacts of telecommunicating on work satisfaction, reduced stress, and work-life balance are shared with other studies such as (Charalampous et al., 2018).