Teleworking Experience of Education Professionals vs. Management Staff: Challenges Following Job Innovation

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of teleworking. Due to the constraints of the pandemic, the education sector has undergone a dramatic change, with teachers and students en masse moved to work from home. In the past, digital solutions have gradually penetrated the education sector, but the pandemic has turned the process into social innovation in the broad sense and performance innovation in the narrow sense. The latter aspect is addressed in this article. The paper aims to reveal the effect of the transition to teleworking on employees in the education sector. Based on the survey results, the study reports experiences of higher education and college professors, secondary schools and vocational schools' teachers and managerial staff in terms of personal well-being, management quality, and performance. The paper is novel in terms of the scope of the study: it analyses the teleworking issue in different educational institutions. In addition, the study compares the experiences of education staff and managers. There is a lack of such research in the scientific literature in the education sector. The research confirms that telecommuting managers experienced less shock and fatigue than professors and teachers. In addition, university professors proved to be the best prepared to work in innovative ways, but they also rated the performance of their managers' management work the worst among all educational institutions. Meanwhile, while teachers in secondary schools rated telework the most negatively, they rated the ability of their leaders to lead the team in extraordinary conditions the best. The research results can be useful for education leaders and policymakers as well as for researchers dealing with the topics of teleworking, teachers' job performance, employee fatigue, and leadership competencies.