Abstract

Working from home is far from being a new reality for both workers and organizations: for example, in the U.S.A, 3.3 million people were already telecommuting in 2016. In Europe, it has been estimated that around 3% of EU workers are teleworking from home, although this number is not consistent in all European countries: northern countries have the highest proportion of teleworkers, the UK has around 10% of workers doing telework for at least 25% of the time, but southern countries – namely Portugal and Italy – only achieve 2% for part-time remote work and 1% on a fulltime basis.

Telecommuting brings advantages and disadvantages, particularly from the workers’ perspective, that have already been addressed by several authors. Among the “pros”, we can find (a) better balance of home and work life, (b) increased flexibility and autonomy, (c) reduction of commuting time, (d) increased productivity, (e) higher morale and job satisfaction, and (f) avoidance of office politics. As for the “cons”, (a) blurring of boundaries between work and home time and overwork, (b) presentism, (c) social isolation, (d) lack of support, inadequate equipment, (e) career progression or promotions, and (f) resentment from colleagues are the most highlighted. From the organizations’ point of view, the major constrain is the fact that telecommuting is more common among the so-called “knowledge workers”, highly qualified workers, usually managers and professionals. According to Gallup, people with more formal education are those working from home the most often. Moreover, telecommuters tend to belong to upper-income group and work in white-collar professions. Comprehensibly, more operational positions (namely in manufacturing industries, for instance) raise significant challenges once the most daily tasks need to be fulfilled on site.

Given the present challenges the world is facing due to COVID-19 pandemic, telecommuting clearly raises as one of the best alternatives to prevent unnecessary social contact. Nevertheless, European countries – and specifically Portugal – were unprepared for having their major percentage of workforce remotely and had to rapidly adapt to this work configuration without proper anticipation, infrastructures and guidelines for promoting both working and monitoring work activities (from the leaders’ side). Moreover, specificities of Portuguese labor market (99.9% of SME, major number of services sector companies) pose great challenges but also opportunities to implementing best practices related with telecommuting, appealing to innovative approaches and customized alternatives to help people working at home. Thus, the project aims to: (1) characterize how workers deal with telecommuting, particularly their perceptions on work motivation, organizational support, mobilized and needed competences, relationship with leaders, and their overall wellbeing during COVID-19; and (2) to assess how workers in leadership roles perceive their own competences and the competences of their team, the organizational support received to complete their jobs, as well as their strategies to motivate and manage their teams during COVID-19. We also aim to promote discussion on the most needed competencies of workers and team leaders, and on effective management strategies to deal with telecommuting among workers and leaders; as well as to create guidelines for the best organizational practices when workers and leaders face telecommuting.