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Drawing on work from home (WFH), job demand-control and street-level bureaucracy literature streams, this paper specifically focuses on the emerging trend of WFH for public sector employees in a developing country context of Egypt.

The empirical sample comprises focus group discussions with a total of 40 public sector employees in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used on focus group discussion transcripts to bring out main themes linked to this topic.

Our findings show that employee (marginal discretion power, pharaonism, corruption), citizen (unfamiliarity with digital services) and country (lack of proper info-structure, overstaffing in the public sector)- level challenges hinder and/or slow down the potential for WFH in Egyptian public sector.

A major implication of our paper relates to highlighting the criticality of e-governance and WFH for public sector employees, as well as highlighting multilevel challenges associated with those. At the same time, socio-economic and political consequences of offering such options need to be considered in a country like Egypt where most public organisations are overstaffed, and those employees lack modern day employability skills. Hence, there needs to be an open debate in countries such as Egypt on the consequences of e-governance and WFH and whether it may facilitate delivering citizen services digitally. Also, high power distance culture plays a role in this context, and any change cannot be successful unless that specific aspect is confronted.

This study contributes to the emerging WFH literature by being one of the pioneering studies to offer a multilevel (micro, meso and macro) assessment of this phenomenon in the under-researched fragile developing country’s context.

This study aims to analyse the differences between professional interaction mediated by video conferencing and direct professional interaction. The research identifies diverging interests of office workers for the purpose of addressing work ethical and business ethical issues of professional collaboration, competition, and power in future hybrid work models.

Based on 28 qualitative interviews conducted between November 2020 and June 2021, and through the theoretical lens of phenomenology, the study develops explanatory hypotheses conceptualising four basic intentions of professional interaction and their corresponding preferences for video conferences and working on site.

The four intentions developed on the basis of the interviews are: the need for physical proximity; the challenge of collective creativity; the will to influence; and control of communication. This conceptual framework qualifies a moral ambivalence of professional interaction. The authors identify a connectivity paradox of professional interaction where the personal dimension remains unarticulated for the purpose of maintaining professionality. This tacit human connectivity is intertwined with latent power relations. This plasticity of both connectivity and power in direct interaction can be diminished by transferring the interaction to video conferencing.

The application of phenomenology to a collection of qualitative interviews has enabled the identification of underlying intention structures and the system in which they affect each other. This research identifies conflicts of interests between workers relative to their different self-perceived abilities to persevere in competitive professional interaction. It is therefore able to address consequences of future hybrid work models at an existential and societal level.

Micro and small enterprises (MSE) play a critical role in the Swiss economy but had no meaningfully adopted working from home (WFH) policy before the COVID-19 crisis. The timing of the study’s data collection allowed a unique assessment of Swiss MSEs’ adoption of WFH enabled by the adoption of digital technologies due to the first government-mandated COVID-19 lockdown. The study also set out to assess the permanence of any changes in the adoption of WFH by MSEs after initial government COVID-19 restrictions ended.

The study uses a threefold theoretical framework combining social, technical and spatial dimensions. Data were collected via telephone interviews. The utilised sampling frame included 153,000 small businesses with 4–49 employees, and the realised sample for the study was 503 interviews with MSE owners and managing directors (MDs).

The Swiss government’s COVID-19 crisis lockdown policies accelerated the digital transformation of work by employees in Swiss MSEs by increasing the number of employees WFH. However, the number of MSEs with WFH employees decreased after the first lockdown ended. Small business leadership is an important influence on the persistence of any increases in WFH.

The data collection uniquely captures the effects of externally driven digital transformation of work in small businesses by the adoption of WFH. The findings show that small businesses can rapidly learn new ways of working and support the claim that Swiss MSE MDs play a critical role in the adoption of WFH. They also confirm the importance of digital leadership and culture for realising the potential of WFH in small businesses.

The purpose of this study is to better understand technology adoption and working from home (WFH) behaviour of micro and small enterprises (MSE) with 4 to 49 employees during the first (2020) and second (2021) COVID-19 lockdowns in Switzerland.

This study uses two data sets gathered using computer-assisted telephone interviewing surveys conducted with 503 managing directors of Swiss MSEs after the first and 506 MDs after the second COVID-19 lockdown period.

The study revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, WFH arrangements are related to the adoption of technology by Swiss industry groups. Furthermore, industry characteristics and technology adoption strategies are also associated with the long-term prospect of WFH. The overall result confirms the predominant role of technology pioneers.

The study focuses on MSEs in Switzerland during a specific period. The data set includes mainly quantitative data. Future studies could investigate larger enterprises in international contexts, integrating employees’ viewpoints founded on long-term gathered qualitative data. The implications of this study include predictions about future WFH behaviour in Swiss MSEs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study collecting data in Swiss MSEs after the two COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. As a result, this study offers a unique perspective on a specific business segment, which accounts for around 70% of global employment.

This paper aims to explore the extent to which Covid-19 has challenged work habits and outcomes. The authors argue that after the lockdown period workers have been experiencing a new work mode called “Covid-working”. The aim is to provide a first interpretation of this phaenomenon and elaborate on future real estate strategies and workplace policies based on this experience.

Using survey data, this research analyses Covid-working in a large-sized company in Italy. The survey was answered by 90 employees and addresses three domains: locations of work; a comparison between work-from-home (WFH) and work from the office; and outcomes of Covid-working vs office-working.

With Covid-working, the workers of the case company drastically changed their traditional work from the office approach to pure WFH. While this abrupt switch might generate difficulties in adaptation, this working practice was generally appreciated by this company’s workers. Positive and negative outcomes of Covid-working confirm previous studies on remote working. Recommendations on multi-location of work, new value for the headquarters and diversity empowerment open up avenues for future real estate strategies.

Observations on Covid-working are still limited and mainly appear on grey literature, due to the newness of this phaenomenon. Empirical studies such as the proposed one can increase companies’ awareness of the positive and negative outcomes of this experience and support their future workplace strategies.

COVID-19 has changed the way we teach and learn, including service-learning (S-L). This study examines the impacts of the work-from-home (WFH) mode on the work performance and learning outcomes of student interns on an eight-week S-L internship programme, and the key factors in terms of its success.

A qualitative research methodology is adopted by interviewing nine student interns and four supervisors from three community partner organisations (CPOs) to understand their experiences of how the WFH mode has impacted intern work performance and learning outcomes. Thematic analysis is used for the data analysis.

The interns uncover a number of negative WFH impacts on the S-L internship, including ineffective communication and management practice, low work efficiency and quality, a lack of task variety and learning opportunities and distractions in the home environment. Furthermore, five critical factors for WFH success are also identified, including prior preparation, effective communication systems, personal motivators at work, the nature of the job in relation to it being suited to the WFH mode, and organisational support.

The study examines impacts on student work performance and learning outcomes in an S-L summer internship programme operating under the WFH mode as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Key success factors and practical recommendations have been developed for enhancing the future success of S-L internships operating under the WFH mode.

The purpose of the study is to discover clusters or homogenous groups of work-from-home (WFH) Internet subscribers in the Philippines based on the attributes of speed, network quality, customer service, after-sales support, price, contract and value for money. Another objective is to determine if the formed clusters are related to the demographic profile.

A total of 275 internet subscribers from Metro Manila were surveyed. K-means cluster analysis using the Hartigan-Wong algorithm was performed on the data to generate the clusters.

Results generated four significant clusters, which were named service value expecters, average expecters, low expecters and high expecters. Most of the subscribers are under the high expecters, followed by the service value expecters. The age and income of the subscribers are the profile that can affect the formulation of clusters in the Internet service industry. Those people in the younger age groups can be seen as more demanding, while older people tend to be content with the Internet service. Counter-intuitively, people with higher income seem to be more easily satisfied with Internet service features, while those people with lower income seem to be more demanding. Educational attainment and the number of household members do not have a direct effect on the formulation of clusters of Internet subscribers.

This is the first study to use cluster analysis in identifying possible segments of WFH Internet subscribers based on Internet service attributes. Its value is the provision of market segments based on which can be the basis for formulating marketing strategies and policies for the telecommunications industry.