Remote working during COVID-19 - Initial Report
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The University of Otago has completed the intial report into Remote Working during COVID-19.
New Zealand, like many countries worldwide, went into Lockdown on the 26th March 2020 due to the COVID19 pandemic, but unlike other countries New Zealand went hard and emerged quickly. Working life began to return to normal in June. During Lockdown many people, some of whom had no previous experience of working remotely, worked from home. This provided an unexpected opportunity to explore New Zealanders’ perceptions of remote working, and to use this to inform the Future of Work in New Zealand.
The New Zealand Remote Working during COVID19 survey was launched on 5th May 2020, during the first few days of Level Three (of New Zealand’s four-level alert system), with the majority of the 2,560 responses received during this alert level. The survey was advertised through the social media channels of Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as through professional networks such as the Human Resource Institute of New Zealand and Tourism Industry Aotearoa. Our aim was to distribute the survey as widely as possible, and gain responses from a broad range of workers who could and did work from home.
Questions related to participants’ experiences of working from home, their thoughts on the future of remote working, as well as how they felt their organisations responded to the challenges working from home raised. The survey included a mixture of closed and open questions. In this report we provide basic descriptive insights from the data, but our intention is to interrogate the data further to answer specific research questions.
HRNZ Members can download the Intial report. Further information will be available here as we work through our analysis.