The benefits and costs of remote working for administrative personnel at a business university

Description

This business university, with more than 2,400 employees, including more than 800 man-agement and administrative staff, has been working on the challenges of diversity and digi-talization with the aim of achieving inclusion through mobile working. The university pre-sents itself as an attractive international employer for professionals in several positions and fields, as well as for young professionals who expect flexible working conditions. At the same time, the organization wants to attract professionals with caring duties, with disabili-ties or people in qualification trainings.
The organizational policy has been followed by ongoing scientific research on the study of culture change. The research includes topics such as leadership, dynamic group processes in virtual teams as well as intersectional processes between gender and diversity categories, where new forms of inequity appear. On a personal level, career development, managing stress, accountability and duties appear as well.
The aim of the study is not so much to expand knowledge as to analyze strengths and weak-nesses of existing models, to extract expectations and wishes, to reveal opportunities and risks, and to examine possible measures and adaptations in the university’s policy.
The methodological framework of the study includes narrative interviews. In addition, a document analysis and a literature review were conducted (Mayring 2009, Froschauer & Lueger 1992). The sample is a pilot group of selected staff and middle managers with re-mote working experience from 2000 to 2010, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. The inter-views were conducted from October 2020 to December 2020. We interviewed 43 people from general administration in all areas. The people answered questions about their experi-ences with "mobile working", challenges, individual needs, and shifts during the Corona period, as well as wishes for the future. These were analyzed using three complementary methods: Global Analysis (nouns, phrases and context, new questions) (Legewie 1994) and Grounded Theory method (theoretical sampling) to elaborate and develop categories that emerged in the data and detailed analysis (Charmaz 2014, Mey & Mruck 2011). The theoret-ical framework is Pierre Bourdieu's social theory with a focus on an academic field and dif-ferent types of social capital and symbolic capital (Barlösius 2012, Bourdieu 1988, Bour-dieu, Wacquant & Farage 1994).
The results not only show a change in flexible working models before and during the Corona period, but also that the ideas of mobile working are changing fundamentally. Due to the increasing digitalization and hence control of working time, flexibility is actually lost and the effects are manifold. It becomes apparent, for example, that undisturbed work and con-centration on specific topics is hardly possible any more. Constant accessibility and visibil-ity via MS teams, among other things, leads to excessive demands and stress, which cancels out the advantages of mobile working. Concentration on a task, adapted to a family sched-ule, as in the time before Corona and before extensive digitalization, is difficult to achieve. Self-determination over the organization of work is lost.
Moreover, digitalization and flexible forms of work lead to new forms of inequality, espe-cially in dealing with trust and control. In the administrative sector, with clear hierarchies and distribution of tasks, control and strong management of work and working time are es-sential. As digitalization opens up the possibility of constant control of constant access and thus leads to interruptions in work and demands for new tasks and activities. At the same time, many women working online in administration have to manage work and family (Schmidt, Kaindl & Mazal 2020, Wilson & Greenhill 2004).
Women, as well as men, need a clear work organization in a self-determined way. Mobile working should actually contribute to achieving more work-life balance. Currently, the in-creasing digitalization in connection with teleworking prevents this. In order to achieve in-clusion through telework, organizations need to create a path to more trust in staff.

Period	26 Jul 2023
Event title	Academy of World Business, Marketing and Management Development
Event type	Conference
Conference number	10th
Location	Perth, AustraliaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International