Teleworking & flexible work arrangements as a new working model in Greece: impact on employees' work experience.

Abstract

Greek enterprises recently shared the challenge of adapting to Covid-19 social-distancing restrictions, with teleworking and Flexible Work Arrangements (FWA) being extensively used as safety practices to ensure their operation (Pouliakas, 2020). Currently, the Greek enterprises are looking into the possibility of employing those working models in their day-to-day operation; therefore, the present study came to investigate how teleworking and FWA in Greece affects employees’ work experience, and more particularly, their job satisfaction, performance, job stress and well-being. Particularly, we hypothesized that FWA is associated with a better employee work experience than teleworking. A questionnaire was used to measure the variables associated with teleworking and FWA to a sample of 278 participants. The data were analyzed using the IBM SPSS statistical package. Our hypotheses were not verified, since the results showed that both teleworking and FWA did not have statistically significant differences in the reported employee experience. However, teleworkers were found to be significantly more rested than FWA employees, affecting positively their well-being. Furthermore, employee specific characteristics can also play an important role, such as household composition and education level. As both factors increase, the employee satisfaction decreases. Finally, the duration of remote working was found to have a significant impact on effectiveness. It was found that the longer the employee gets used to remote working the more effective he becomes. The continuation of remote working was found to have other benefits as well, such as feeling less pressure by the supervisor, less job stress, and an overall more positive experience.