How does working from home during COVID-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-Use studies

Abstract

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions of workers to suddenly shift their activity out of their offices and into their homes: 5–15% of Americans worked from home before the pandemic, whereas 50% of the Americans who were employed pre-COVID reported working from home in April/2020 (Brynjolfsson et al., 2020). While the effects of this sudden and exogenous shift on workers’ behavior, as well as their productivity and wellbeing, are still largely unknown, organizations have already started to consider extending “working from home” (WFH) arrangements beyond the pandemic (Kelly, 2020). In this research we explore the effects of the forced WFH arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic on managers. We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day, and how the type and length of work activities they engage in. Managers are a particular type of “knowledge workers” – i.e. workers who typically focus on problem-solving and related cognitive tasks (Autor & Dorn, 2013). Unlike other knowledge workers whose tasks depend more on allocating one’s individual efforts and skills to conduct solo-tasks, such as writing reports or coding, the job of managers requires primarily coordinative tasks, including the supervision, evaluation, and deployment of the work of others (Drucker, 2012). We focus our study on managers for two main reasons. First, broadly, managerial work is a central enabler that allows organizations to expand and thrive in distinct markets (Chandler, 1990), and the importance of managerial occupations in the U.S. economy has grown significantly over past decades (Autor & Dorn, 2009, 2013). However, we do not yet have a detailed understanding of how a forced transition to WFH affects managers’ daily activities and the structure of their work. The need to understand these effects is made even more salient by the fact that the forced transition out of the office initiated by the pandemic will likely result in a more permanent shift toward WFH arrangements (Barrero, et al., 2021). Second, more specifically, WFH presents a challenge for team-work and social activities Lowy, (2020; Neeley, 2021), and managers are very likely to engage precisely in activities that rely on team-work and social interactions (Deming, 2017). Since coordination is such a central activity of what managers do and what organizations require, it is important to understand the extent to which a transition to WFH arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected this occupation. One method to characterize how managerial work has changed in a context of a sudden transition to WFH is to examine changes in where managers allocate their most valuable and scarce resource: their time (Mintzberg, 1990).