Abstract
Abstract As a consequence of the unprecedented labor market circumstances that the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic brought about, organizations have faced challenges never seen before. One such challenge was the sudden ubiquity of working from home, which resulted in an intensive learning experience for employees and employers alike. While there is an increasing body of research on working from home in general, the perceived effectiveness of this mode of working is still under-researched. This niche provided the inspiration for us to investigate what factors might influence employees' self-efficacy in working from home arrangements. We conducted a mixed-methods case study by collecting both qualitative and quantitative data from 24 employees of a division of the Hungarian subsidiary of a chemical and consumer goods multinational. The purpose of our investigation was to gain a deeper understanding of perceived self-efficacy and self-regulation during the learning processes that the participants experienced under the new circumstances. Results suggest that the perceived high level of work-efficiency among the employees of the examined division was based on the firmly controlled work-division, trusting managers, as well as supportive and clear communication, which created space for autonomy in the adaptation process. The findings also revealed that self-reflection acted as a predictor of perceived work self-efficacy.
Highlights
Due to the extraordinary circumstances resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic in the last two years, organizations have had to face labor market changes that are rare in the life cycles of companies
As the scales were adapted to the home office (HO) context and were translated by the authors from English into Hungarian, it was necessary to check whether the new scales were still reliable
We can see from the data that within the dimensions of Autonomy, work-scheduling autonomy showed the highest mean at 4.03, which suggests that the HO context lends respondents substantial independence in how they schedule their work activities
Summary
Due to the extraordinary circumstances resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic in the last two years, organizations have had to face labor market changes that are rare in the life cycles of companies. The transition to a new organization of work and smooth operation has resulted in an intensive learning process for both employees and employers, and the lessons are worth exploring, structuring and incorporating into post-emergency recovery work processes. The paper presents the results of a case-study investigation of one division of the Hungarian subsidiary of a chemical and consumer goods multinational company, after working from home for a few months due to the pandemic restrictions and organizational regulations. Our research investigated the perceived effectiveness of working from home and attempted to explore what factors might influence this.
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