How does working from home during COVID-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-Use studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure 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.

Biographical note

Thomaz Teodorovicz is a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University, affiliated to the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Raffaella Sadun is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Faculty Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.

Andrew Kun is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, and director of the UNH Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

Orit Shaer is a Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College. She founded and directs the Wellesley College Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab.

Notes

¹ This instruction aimed to reduce noise – we wanted to filter out responses for cases participants had an unusual working day (e.g., a day where unanticipated and rare personal events got in the way of regular work-related activities).

² To help participants recollect the activities undertaken on that representative working day, we encouraged them to enter personal notes in a free text field in the survey: this field was optional, and we notified participants that the research team would delete this information as soon as the survey ended. Participants could also add free text subtitles to each activity.

³ The validation exercise consisted of collecting longitudinal data for 203 knowledge workers – all outside the sample of respondents from the main analyses reported in this paper- about their time allocation on one day of their week over three consecutive weeks. We deployed the validation exercise in June/2020. That data suggested that working days were already substantially stable within-workers by June/2020 and reassured our team that the DRM is able to capture persistent differences in work behavior.

Additional information

Funding

This work was in part supported by National Science Foundation (NSF grants CMMI- (University of New Hampshire: 1840085; Wellesley College: 1840031; Harvard Business School: 1839870). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. Further, the authors declare that this submission contains original work which has not been published previously;NSF [CMMI - Harvard Business School #1839870,CMMI - University of New Hampshire #1840085,CMMI - Wellesley College #1840031];

Notes on contributors

Thomaz Teodorovicz

Thomaz Teodorovicz is a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University, affiliated to the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Raffaella Sadun

Raffaella Sadun is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Faculty Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.

Andrew L. Kun

Andrew Kun is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, and director of the UNH Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

Orit Shaer

Orit Shaer is a Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College. She founded and directs the Wellesley College Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab.