I skuggan av en pandemi… : Har distansarbete kopplat till pandemin skapat mer “worklife balance” eller har det resulterat i ett mer gränslöst arbete? - En kvantitativ studie ur ett medarbetarperspektiv.

The purpose of the essay is to investigate how employees have experienced telework during covid 19. All people around the world were affected and still are today in different ways of the largest virus infection to date in modern times where healthcare was one of the activities most heavily burdened. However, the pandemic also affected other industries and organizations as it put many employees in homework full time where all communication had to be handled digitally. On the one hand, it brought with it opportunities in the form of many organizations and individuals being pushed in the right direction towards their goal of an innovative workplace and a more flexible way of working. On the other hand, the employees had different conditions for succeeding in carrying out an equivalent work from home as in the office regarding the family situation, network connection or other elements that required the employee's attention. The employees' different working conditions affected their work effort and approach where they had different strategies for success in an equal way as in an office environment. It has also emerged that women seem to have experienced distance work more positively compared with men as they have seen the possibility in a more flexible everyday life of dealing with family, households, and children. Men, on the other hand, have looked differently at the situation where they have been bothered to a greater extent by the sounds of the surroundings and other disturbing elements. With the help of a quantitative survey, we examined the area of telework and focused on an employee perspective. We wonder if the employee has achieved a greater "worklife balance" or if it has resulted in the opposite. Everyone has their own picture of how covid-19 changed their work situation over a period of two years, but the technology has also opened up opportunities for the future. The survey was constructed based on our basic idea that teleworking for employees entailed both obstacles and opportunities. But we also want to investigate whether the result differs depending on gender or conditions such as living space and number of people in the household. The questionnaire was sent out via social media in a random sample to reach out to many and get a broad target group of those who responded. The common denominator for our respondents, however, is that they have all gone from being tied to a workplace to having started working remotely. In our theoretical framework, we have used models such as Robert Karasek's requirements, control and support, Ulrich Beck's theory of the risk society and Anne Grönlund's theory of the “honey trap”. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking based on our theories, articles, and models with the help of our self-constructed quantitative study. To extend our questions and give a deeper picture of the main purpose of the essay, we formed three hypotheses based on them. All dealt with the content of the issues, but with an in-depth study of specific areas where during the course of the essay we noticed a greater difference between, for example, gender, borderless work and mental illness. The hypotheses were: "telework has created more limitless work", "women have experienced a greater flexibility than men in telework" and "telework has resulted in mental illness in employees".