Abstract: In March 2020, many organizations requested their employees to work from home to reduce their employees’ risk of a COVID-19 infection. Research has suggested that working from home increases perceived stress due to blurring boundaries between work and private life. The Competence Center Smarter Work examined whether this finding also held for “enforced working from home” (EWFH) due to COVID-19 based on a four-week diary study in April and May 2020 with 37 participants from the University of Muenster. In the talk, we will present and discuss quantitative as well as qualitative findings of our study. Overall, how did the participants perceive EFWH? What are factors that increased stress levels? Are there any positive aspects regarding EWFH? Spoiler alert: Yes, there are. Actually, it’s not that bad.

Speaker: Simon Lansmann is a research assistant and PhD student at the Chair for Information Systems and Interorganisational Systems, Department of Information Systems of the University of Münster in Germany. He is the newly appointed spokesperson of the ERCIS Competence Center Smarter Work as of December 2020. His research focus is on the organisational use of enterprise collaboration platforms, specifically Microsoft Teams. Currently, he works on the conceptualisation of knowledge workers’ ‘working modes’ and how this can be used as an analytical means to investigate the dialectics of individual and collaborative work. Simon argues that ‘individual focus work’ is an undervalued working mode in relation to increasing shares of collaborative work. He studied Information Systems (Bachelor and Master of Science) at the University of Münster and wrote his master thesis in cooperation with the University of Sydney, Australia.