Challenges to Working Practices During the COVID-19 Lockdowns: Insights Through Academic Studies

Remote work, as a technologically possible and widely applicable working mode, gained renewed attention during lockdowns amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. On one hand, remote work ensured that working remained sustainable; on the other hand, the unexpected and widespread nature of the immediate shift to remote work led to issues in terms of practicing and adapting to the process. Moreover, remote work can have strong social, economic, and environmental effects that have to be comprehensively understood. The high interest of employees in continuing with full or hybrid remote work calls for effective coping strategies at the individual and organizational levels in the future. This article focuses on academic studies documenting the peculiarities of remote work during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The aim is to identify the issues relating to remote work during the COVID-19 lockdowns that are documented in academic studies and thematically classify them into a range of factors. In this study, bibliometric and content analyses were employed, leading to comprehensive insights into the following areas: (1) remote work as a cause for changes in physical and psychological health; (2) remote work as a cause for changes in daily behavior, routine, and lifestyle; (3) factors that affect the process and productivity of remote work; (4) societal, economic, and environmental consequences of remote work; and (5) the distribution of the effects of remote work on individuals, economic subjects, and sectors. In conclusion, this study on working practices during the COVID-19 lockdowns that were documented in academic studies offers several benefits and areas of novelty: first, a comprehensive overview of the widespread process of adjusting to this new working mode; second, a classification of factors that affected the process at different stages and in different areas; and third, common factors that had more widespread effects during the remote working period. The findings also offer the following theoretical and practical implications: For researchers, this article can be a reference offering a holistic view of remote working during these lockdowns. For practitioners, it can provide an understanding of the impacting factors and their contextualization in terms of health, sociodemographic, and sectoral aspects can allow for more accurate human resource management strategies.