COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on a Global Liner Shipping Company Employee Work Digitalization.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that began to spread across the world in 2020 still poses a threat not only to human life and health, but also to the global economy. This situation led to the breakdown of many supply chains, and this could have resulted in the collapse of the international exchange of goods. The COVID-19 affected the shipping industries development: shipping operators, port operators, government authorities, shippers, seafarers, passengers, supply chain operators and others. The paper presents the impact of the pandemic on the working model throughout the results of a survey conducted among the office employees of a shipowner company being one of the leaders in the maritime container transport sector. It aimed to investigate the effects of the pandemic as regards the management and organisation processes in the light of digital transformation within this enterprise. Employees were asked to express their opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of the remote work and its influence on the way they performed their duties. At the beginning, employees were most affected by the lack of direct contact with colleagues. At the same time, many of them declared that after the end of the pandemic, they would like to combine the remote and office work . The hypothesis of this research reads as follows: as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new working model has been created allowing the continuity and the efficiency of operations in the maritime container sector, therefore ensuring the resilience within the global supply chains. The results prove that the transition of office workers to remote digitalised working mode allowed the company to continue operating efficiently during the first phase of the pandemic. Actually, this new mode, which was initially meant to be only a temporary solution, has become the dominant form or a combination with the traditional mode of work, creating a kind of hybrid version working model in the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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