Approaches Adopted by Researchers to Measure the Quality of the Experience of People Working from Home: a Scoping Review

Abstract

Working from home (WFH) remotely is a modality of working that requires the careful design of systems of rules and tools to enable people to exchange information and perform actions. WFH is expected to expand after the COVID-19 pandemic. How to assess and compare in a reliable way the experience of workers with different (sociotechnical) systems of WFH is a central point to supporting the diffusion of acceptable modalities of working. However, the concept of experience and how it can be measured in the domain in WFH is yet to be clearly characterized. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology for scoping reviews, we systematically map the approaches used by researchers to assess WFH, identify which aspects are usually investigated, and examine how such aspects are usually measured in terms of questions and tools. Literature is collected using Scopus and Web of Science. Thirty-four records out of 323 focusing either on validating a scale, presenting theoretically the experience of workers or testing this empirically are included in the qualitative synthesis. The results highlight a lack of unified terminology and tools, with assessments of workers' experience mainly characterized by survey approaches and qualitative questions. Clustering together the most investigated aspects in the literature and reviewing how these aspects are assessed, we propose a list of 10 relevant overarching dimensions and attempt to define workers' experience in the domain of WFH remotely. This definition can be used as a tool by researchers aiming to assess the experience of workers in order to inform the design or redesign of the sociotechnical systems that enable WFH.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41347-022-00264-4.

Keywords: Assessment; Experience; Remote working; Satisfaction; Workers’ experience; Working from home.

Fig. 1

A pictorial view of the review process in accordance with the flowchart of the PRISMA guidelines (Liberati et al., 2009)

Fig. 2

Heatmap of the types of scales (including indexes) reported in the records to assess workers’ experience by measuring aspects associated with the different overarching dimensions. Percentages are reported as proportions. Review studies (Craig et al., ; Negulescu & Doval, ; Wang & Ronen, 2011) were excluded from this analysis