RAPID: Remote Work in the Time of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed where work is done. In response to stay-at-home orders mandated in many states, U.S. workers able to do so have spent some time working remotely. This sudden spike in working from home, combined with the closing of childcare facilities and the move to on-line schooling, represents a sea change in working conditions and family lives, effectively a large-scale social experiment. To begin to understand this social experiment unfolding in real time, this RAPID project will collect quantitative and qualitative data to advance science and inform policy development around three objectives. First, the project will investigate the experiences of remote work and technologies enabling it, including disparities by gender, age/life-course stage, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity. Second, the project will examine the relationships between work demands, work resources, and quality of life, including strategic adaptations to remote work and the importance of work resources for certain groups. Third, the project will examine the sustainability of working from home post COVID-19 in terms of workers? preferences and strategic adaptations. Evidence on the work-, family-, and individual-level as well as technological mechanisms and their relative importance for women and men at different life stages will help organizations to develop effective interventions to help workers better adapt to the risks and possibilities of remote work jumpstarted by the COVID-19 crisis. These findings will lay the groundwork for future organizational interventions and regulatory response in developing and implementing new work designs for the 21st century, thus promoting U.S. economic competitiveness.

This RAPID project will launch a baseline survey with a nationally representative sample of 2,000 remote workers, while also collecting qualitative data from 500 remote workers through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Respondents for the online baseline survey will be drawn from the KnowledgePanel, the largest probability-based online panel in the U.S. Concurrently, 500 remote workers will be recruited through MTurk to complete an open-ended interview schedule regarding their remote work experiences. The multi-method data will promote understanding of the changing nature of work and technology use, novel tactics employers adopt to monitor workers, struggles and benefits associated with remote work, and employees? strategic responses to the new working conditions. The proposed designing and fielding of a nationally representative survey, together with the textual data collected from MTurk, will provide original, real-time, and dynamic empirical evidence of workers? work experiences and lives within the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. Together, findings will inform theories of enduring inequalities in the social organization of where, when, and how work is accomplished, as well as theories of social and organizational change. This study will also illuminate how a social disruption in combination with evolving communication technologies may act as a catalyst for profound transformations in mindsets and social change, specifically regarding future work flexibility.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.