The new spacetime of telework: A challenge for the quality of worklife

Abstract

Spatiotemporal coordinates are crucial for understanding work experience. The combined effect of the confinement in the face of Covid-19 andthe intense and accelerated development of digital technology changed the nature, forms, conditions, and working relationships. This transformation has been radical with regard to what has been modernly thought of as space and as working time. The objective of the study was to analyze psychosocial aspects of this new reality, visualizing its antecedents and reflecting on its implications. The information was collected from various types of sources: for the study of the antecedents, a selection of classic studies on work space-time was used, which provided a historiographic description of the paradigm inherited from modernity. For the perspective of the psychosocial implications of the new work environment, mainstream literature and secondary sources provided by the abundant multi-color literature available on Google were used. The collected material was subjected to a treatment inspired by thematic content analysis. In an initial phase, the core of the change was identified as a basically spatial phenomenon of distancing from the workplace. From this perspective, the focus of attention was the comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face activity and interactions with virtual work, mediated by gadgets, clouds, networks, and virtual platforms. The psychosocial impact attributed to the combined digitization, internalization, teleworking from home, and virtualization of processes has been described as a dilution of the boundaries between work and non-work, as colonization and work contamination of domestic, family, private and personal space-time and, ultimately, as a threat, but also as an opportunity, for the quality of working life.