Employees about working remotely
A questionnaire was organised in June about working from home during the pandemic. What were the results concerning the digital workplace?
“The aim of this particular questionnaire study has been to gain a general picture of the digital workplace and how it feels to work remotely as a KTH employee. We wanted to create a knowledge bank before any decisions were made as to how KTH should organise work in the future and what potential changes would be required,” says Jan Gulliksen, Vice President for Digitalization at KTH. The issue is currently being debated in many parts of society which I raised in my latest post in the Vicepresidents's blog .
What was the most striking finding?
“That women were generally the most satisfied group when it comes to working from home and the under 30s were least appreciative of this.
The biggest advantages of working from home according to the questionnaire responses, were given as greater flexibility, more time for other things, better opportunity to work undisturbed and not having to commute to and from work. The biggest disadvantages of working from home were the lack of social contact, isolation/feeling of loneliness, less creativity, difficulty in drawing the line between work and free time, and inadequate ergonomics.”
The questionnaire was sent out to all 5,000 or so KTH employees, of whom around 1,300 responded. How much can you read into the results?
“The questionnaire went out around about the same time as several other questionnaires so I quite understand why there was a certain degree of questionnaire fatigue. Even so, we got enough responses to be able to take a temperature reading of our organisation.”
Was there anything that surprised you?
“What was particularly interesting on the question of how employees wish to work in the future, was that most respondents would like to work remotely to a certain extent.
I also thought it was interesting to see how little knowledge there is about ergonomics and how you need to design a physical workplace. Here, there is a great deal to do. And that we are being swamped with a plethora of meetings as an effect of working from home because of the pandemic.”
How should this be used moving forwards?
“These are important data that will help in discussions as to how we want the workplace to be from now on, what kind of presence we want in the workplace, how we can best support working from home, and what health and safety requirements we should specify for digital workplaces to avoid injuries and repetitive strain problems," says Gulliksen.
Jill Klackenberg
The results from the survey can be read in the report Den digitala arbetsplatsen - hemarbete (In Swedish).