Living Rooms as Offices : “How a Sudden Shift to Remote Work Impacts Employee Voice and Psychological Empowerment in Office Workers”

Stockholms universitet, Sociologiska institutionen 2021

Hojjati, Shanli

This study examines how the sudden shift to remote work due to the pandemic is experienced by office workers. The material was gathered through semi-structured interviews with people who live in Stockholm, Sweden. The study includes 11 individuals of different (adult) age, sex, types of ethnical background and (office) jobs. These individuals have gone from working in office spaces to having to transform their homes into their new workspace environment. This implies communicating with their employer and colleagues through digital means. To be able to analyze and anchor these micro aspect experiences to theory, two main concepts are being used: employee voice and psychological employee empowerment. The results show that the respondents both experience positives and negatives with working remotely. These experiences vary depending on the employer’s ability to lead remotely and defects in the organizational structure.
The aim of this research – to contribute with micro sociological knowledge about in which ways a sudden shift to remote work for office workers can impact the employees – has the purpose to grasp a deep understanding for how the changes, which remote working comes with, are experienced. The coded interviews (abductively approached) and found behavioral patterns are presented in detail by supporting the evidence with the two key concepts, employee voice and empowerment. In order to manage and maintain a company or organization the employees need to be well prepared for various cases every day, which means that the employer is responsible for their needs. Since there no longer is a common office for all digital units, it must be created by the workplace. The digital communication can then invite the employees to exchange information and continuously transform job assignments to stay in line with their colleagues, for instance learning about how they should reply to customers. Organizational culture can be interpreted as a way to internally educate the staff in how to think of the company or organization that they work for. This “unionization” among workers can be challenging to penetrate and reach their genuine (and personal) opinion when employees feel satisfied by the organizational culture at their work, or the opposite, in cases where they are dissatisfied but afraid to get negative response for their opinion. The challenge is especially problematic when deep diving into inquiries of internal structures of a company or organization, but to find tendencies towards the genuine opinion is possible. The two categorized themes “Outside control” and “Organizational culture” are mainly coded to connect aspects of this character, which some employees associate with the negative parts with remote work. The associations can also be positive, it fully depends on the personal preferences and their experiences about the shift to remote working.

employee voice; psychological employee empowerment; remote work; digital communication; organizational culture; workplace interactions; Social Psychology; Socialpsykologi; Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology); Sociologi (exklusive socialt arbete, socialpsykologi och socialantropologi); Student thesis; info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis; text

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