More Flexible Working, More Productive Workers?

Abstract

While globally the Covid-19 pandemic is at different stages and far from under control in some countries, it reveals that the organisation in any sector faces a simple and complex problem about health issues and organisational problems such as managing people remote working areas. Adaptive personnel policies are introduced, such as work from home, online or digital meeting, and flexible work arrangement to effectively manage the individual issue. In this article, we empirically test models of perceived productivity among employees in a pandemic situational context. The research questions guiding this work are: How well flexible working arrangements could foster productivity among employees in the pandemic outbreak. Using convenience sampling, about 52 employees from various organisations participate as respondents in this research. Data were collected through questionnaires in which participants completed measures of flexible working arrangements and perceived productivity. The quantitative methodology was used, and regression analysis applied to analyse the effect of flexible work arrangements on perceived productivity. Our results show that the progression of productivity through flexible working is linear. More flexible work arrangements for employees would play a significant role in the greater perceived productivity. Findings also indicate that flexible work arrangements accounted for 0.329 of the variances in perceived productivity. The study findings suggest the importance of flexible working arrangements getting employees on the right track in building better productivity. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are addressed and discussed in this study. Keywords—flexible working arrangements, perceived productivity, pandemic outbreak