The Home as Productive Place? Investigating Individual Work While Working From Home

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,3, University of Münster (Wirtschaftsinformatik), language: English, abstract: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world of knowledge work to the left. Increasing the productivity of knowledge workers is a permanent challenge for organizations. It attracts attention that knowledge workers report being more productive when forced to work from home. This thesis investigates how this perceived increase in productivity might relate to the better conditions for deep individual work knowledge workers encounter in the enforced working from home setting. Therefore, this thesis reviews the enforced working from home literature in the context of deep individual work and conducts two exploratory interviews. This thesis shows narrative evidence that knowledge workers can concentrate better in the workplace at home, prepare their tasks to be suitable for long deep individual work phases, and have the control over their schedule to arrange long interruption-free phases. Thus, knowledge workers engage in deep individual work phases of higher quality, which allows them to be more productive in terms of better work results.