Our research in this thesis will be separated into three sources of data with the first being information gathered from industry leaders in the field of remote work, and the second being our own interviews with managers and employees who are working remotely. Finally, we will use secondary sources, news articles regarding remote work during First, we will
study earlier research in order to understand how managers manage remote work and change in a crisis situation, when the change is sudden. Additionally, we will investigate the pros and cons of remote work, and the issues that both managers and employees face when working remotely. The literature that we have chosen is the most accurate and up to date
information on remote work that we could find, from as reputable sources as possible. The secondary sources discussed further below, were chosen to fill in the gaps with regards to existing literature and the lack of practical and actionable advice, and to gain a more holistic and useful result. Secondary sources will be presented before the analysis in order to add to
the information we gained in our results
Secondly, due to the topical nature of the subject, we will gather information from industry experts who have extensive experience in the field of remote work. The companies and journals selected were chosen due to either their long standing as remote workplaces (as in the cases of GitLab and Stack Overflow) or their experience with remote work and supporting
remote workers, through software or education (as in the cases of Microsoft, Zoom, and Harvard Business Review). The third step will be to do our own research by making a qualitative study using semistructured interviews with managers and remote workers who have recently began working remotely due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Naturally,
interview subjects all work in industries where remote work is possible. We selected these interview subjects in order to get an as holistic view as possible, considering our limitations, of how organizational membersare coping with the change to remote work. We have interviewed members of the banking sector, programmers, members of the insurance sector, and a
manager at an employment agency
In this step we will also study a selection of news articles pertaining to remote work during These articles have been found through searching prominent news sources sAccording to us a qualitative study is most suitable, because we want to get a deeper understanding of the issues and a better understanding of how organizational members are handling the transition
to remote work. There are many advantages of collecting data based on a qualitative paradigm. By giving explanations in words, talking about events, and explaining the things that lead to a certain outcome is better explained and understood in words than in numbers and graphs/diagrams (Mathew, et al. 1994 s 1.) This would make it easier for the readers to
understand instead of us presenting numbers/diagrams without any deeper understanding and explanation. That is the reasons why we think a qualitative data collecting is better than quantitative. The interviews will be done individually, so that we can minimize the risk of people giving answers that are affected of the other participants. When it comes to the
sample the qualitative research
can often be based on a small sample of objects (in this case people) and still provide with deep understanding of the issue when studying the context and the subject from a deeper perspective, meanwhile a quantitative research asks for a larger sample and tries to find a statistical significance between different variables (Miles, et al., 1994 s. 27) meant to
generalize the results to a larger population and to draw conclusions based on relations between variables. Due to the nature of the subject and time restrictions we will supplement our interviews with secondary sources. These sources have been selected through searching prominent news sources for articles on the subject of remote work, additionally we will only
looking at articles from after January 2020 since that was when the COVID-19 situation really started in the west. So to summarize, we choose the qualitative method because it gives a deeper understanding in words, and are accessible to any reader, without a need for previous understanding in statistics, graphs and diagrams in order to understand what we explain in
Conclusion
the thesis. Another reason why we choose qualitative method is because we can base the result on a small sample and still get a deep understanding and a credible result. In the situation that we are in with the limited time, we believe that qualitative data is the most feasibluch as, Time magazine, the New York Times, Forbes etc. Our interview guide (se appendix was constructed by analysing the advice of industry experts and the existing
literature. This led to an interview guide intended to cover the more pressing issues that the transition to remote work carries. We have also adapted the interview guide to suite managers and employees by altering the questions to reflect and gather information about the issues faced by each of the different interview subject types more appropriately. When designing the interview guide, we kept it as open as possible in order to promote conversation and more in-
depth answers. However, some questions are inevitably more of the yes or no nature, but these are quite few and deemed necessary in order to gain useful insights. As previously stated, the interviews are semi-structured, and the guide is not a script. This means that the interviews will differ slightly in their structure and the order of the questions in order to match
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