Research Seminar by Prof. John Geary (UCD)

 

ACCESS TO THE TEAMS

Working at home and employee well-being during the Covid-19 pandemic

By and large, we know that working at home has benefits and costs for both workers and employers. The distribution of those gains and losses, however, has largely been a matter of conjecture in the absence of reliable data. A great deal of public commentary has been based on specific sectors, individual companies’ experiences, or on surveys of questionable provenance. We conducted a major national representative survey on job quality and worker well-being during the pandemic. In this presentation, we provide comprehensive evidence on the consequences of working at home for workers. We examine a series of important questions that include: in what ways did working at home affect the conduct of employees’ work? Did it improve or impair the quality of their jobs and what effect, in turn, did it have on their physical health and mental well-being? We also examine workers’ preferences for the future as between working at home, in the office or some blending of the two. Finally, we argue that ‘remote working’ represents one of the most significant – if not the most significant – challenge currently confronting employers and it is potentially momentous in its consequences for the organisation and management of work. The presentation concludes by addressing the implications of remote working for employers, trade unions and public policy-makers.

 

Bio

John Geary is Full Professor at the School of Business, University College Dublin and Honorary Professor at the Marco Biagi Foundation, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy. John's area of expertise is in the broad area of work and employment. John obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford where he studied at Nuffield College. In the past, John worked at Warwick Business School in the UK, held visiting professorships at the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento (2019), the University of Bologna Business School (2017-2018), the Department of Economics, University of Oslo (2010), and was Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. He was the first Director of UCD's College of Business and Law Graduate School and was also Director of Doctoral Studies at the UCD School of Business. He was Subject Area Head for the Human Resource Management and Employment Relations Group in UCD's School of Business for a period of 7 years, relinquishing the position in September 2022. John's areas of research interest include work and employment, employment practices and human resource management in multinational companies, employee voice, and union organisation. He is currently writing a series of papers on findings derived from a national representative survey of workers' job quality and well-being during COVID-19 in Ireland.