A study into telework: its advantages, disadvantages, and future business practices

• Autor(a) principal: Longo, Paulo Jorge Mendes Forte
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/157941
• topic: Telework; Remote work; Business practices; Set of principles; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

Telework and the promise of its future adoption has been heralded ever since its coining in the 1970’s, but the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought it into the spotlight and forced its widespread adoption, but its implementation can be described as erroneous as there isn't a clear guiding tool on how to do so. It was then, this dissertation’s goal to evaluate the current state of teleworking practices in Portugal and establish a set of principles that could guide managers in the evaluation of their teleworking practices and aid them in the implemen- tation of new ones. Based on a review of both academic and professional literature, an online survey was distributed to Portuguese workers having yielded 135 valid responses from tele- workers. The conducted research limitations were related to survey length constraints and lim- ited reach into private and public companies. Analysis of the responses demonstrated that there is a clear perceived productivity increase among those who engage in telework. Work reorganization, a recurrent concern for managers, shows no global trend but is shown to have clear links to teamwork. The proposed set of principles yielded moderately positive result of 4.9 out of a possible 7, indicating that Portuguese teleworkers view their companies as having adapted to this form of working in a sufficiently good manner. From the results, it can clearly be stated that telework increases productivity, and bolsters work and family balance. Additionally, attention must be paid to the effects telework has on mental health and the mitigation role of software. To build upon the results of the present dissertation, post-pandemic application of the devel- oped set of principles is warranted as well as hard data gathering from within companies and performance indicators analysed.