A Phenomenological Study on How University Employees Experienced Working from Home during a Pandemic

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how employees at a mid-sized public university in the South experienced working from home during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-2021. Most employees in higher education settings were affected in some way by the coronavirus pandemic that hit the United States in the spring of 2020. Administrative, and clerical and support staff had to determine how to continue to provide the university with services while coordinating working from home. Now that we have experienced working from home, will that experience change the future of how staff work in higher education? For many, this was a first-time experience working from home, and it created a new set of challenges to completing everyday work tasks. Most participants found that working from home did not increase their overall productivity or job satisfaction, and few participants felt lonely or isolated when working from home. Overall, the negative aspects and benefits seemed to balance out in a series of trade-offs. The majority of participants would want to work from home again or at least be given the option to work from home part-time or on a hybrid schedule. Recommendations for further research include (1) performing quantitative research to develop scales of productivity and employee satisfaction when working from home, (2) determining how participants' responses would have been different if they had not been dealing with a pandemic, (3) interviewing the same participants from this study who were still working from home in the future to determine if their feelings about the experience changed, (4) asking more in-depth questions on whether the supervisors' style changed to accommodate the circumstances of working from home, (5) pursuing questions on worker engagement that were not asked in this study, (6) interviewing more males for the study to see if their responses showed a trend that was different from the female responses. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]