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. 2023 Jan:195:111509.
doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2022.111509. Epub 2022 Sep 9.

From forced Working-From-Home to voluntary working-from-anywhere: Two revolutions in telework

Darja Šmite  1   2 , Nils Brede Moe  2   1 , Eriks Klotins  1 , Javier Gonzalez-Huerta  1
Affiliations

From forced Working-From-Home to voluntary working-from-anywhere: Two revolutions in telework

Darja Šmite et al. J Syst Softw. 2023 Jan.

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused interruptions to production, transportation, and mobility, therefore, having a significant impact on the global supply and demand chain's well-functioning. But what happened to companies developing digital services, such as software? How has the enforced Working-From-Home (WFH) mode impacted their ability to deliver software, if at all? This article shares our findings from monitoring the WFH during 2020 in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, the USA, and the UK. We analyzed different aspects of productivity, such as developer job satisfaction and well-being, activity, communication and collaboration, efficiency and flow based on the archives of commit data, calendar invites, Slack communication, the internal reports of WFH experiences, and 30 interviews carried out in April/May and September 2020. We add more objective evidence to the existing COVID-19 studies the vast majority of which are based on self-reported productivity from the early months of the pandemic. We find that engineers continue committing code and carrying out their daily duties, as their routines adjust to "the new norm". Our key message is that software engineers can work from home and quickly adjust their tactical approaches to the changes of unprecedented scale. Further, WFH has its benefits, including better work-life balance, improved flow, and improved quality of distributed meetings and events. Yet, WFH is not challenge free: not everybody feels equally productive working from home, work hours for many increased, while physical activity, socialization, pairing and opportunities to connect to unfamiliar colleagues decreased. Information sharing and meeting patterns also changed. Finally, experiences gained during the pandemic will have a lasting impact on the future of the workplace. The results of an internal company-wide survey suggest that only 9% of engineers will return to work in the office full time. Our article concludes with the InterSoft's strategy for work from anywhere (WFX), and a list of useful adjustments for a better WFH.

Keywords: COVID-19; Case study; Empirical study; Software engineering; Telework; WFH; Working from home.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.Fig. 6InterSoft employees’ choices of working from home vs. from the office after the pandemic.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Daily activity. The blue line denotes the average value during the office work (2019-03-11–2019-12-31), while the red line represents the WFH period (2020-03-11–2020-12-31). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Changes in output (LOC, rolling average for 4 weeks).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Changes in Slack communication in public channels.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Changes in work meeting characteristics.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Changes in work meeting scheduling.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
InterSoft employees’ choices of working from home vs. from the office after the pandemic.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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