Managers and Employees during during COVID-19 in the Czech Republic

From telecommuting to home office - An ordinal regression model

Abstract

Purpose of the article The COVID-19 pandemic brought managers and employees from all industries into forced home office. While research was conducted on several segments trying to find patterns for negative and positive adaptability during forced home office, research on managers is scarce. This research wants to have a look on the first and second line management and white collar employees who were working in a telecommuting framework before. As telecommuting includes several features of full home office frameworks, it might be suggested that telecommuting-experienced staff should be better off than telecommuting unexperienced managers and employees.

Methodology/methods A random online survey is conducted in the machine builder industry in the Czech Republic with an overall return rate of 16.2%. The survey was repeated monthly from March to December-2020 (March and April data were projected reversely) with the same sample population. The gathered data is analysed with an ordinal regression model in IBM SPSS Statistics 25 software.

Scientific aim While global research found ambivalent results on how forced home office affects workers, this research wants to contribute to theory by having a look on the differences between managers and workers, as well as on telecommuting-experienced and telecommuting-unexperienced people. Factors are determined to understand which patterns influence the perceptions on the mental state and the working environment.

Findings The ordinal regression shows patterns for telecommuting-experienced people and for the lockdown intervals. Further, it shows that company and technical support plays only a minor role in producing positive perceptions for employees and managers likewise. In this factor, being a manager showed a significant difference to further employees.

Conclusions Telecommuting-experienced workers are better able to adapt to forced home office. However, being a manager showed to be one crucial factor for positive adaptation and by having more positive perceptions. Due to their constant workload and decision-making, managers are able to compensate negative aspects.