REVIEW OF COVID-19 CRISIS AND TELEWORK: MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF BANKS’ MARKETERS IN AKWA IBOM STATE, NIGERIA

This study measured the relationship between telework during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and bank marketers’ performance within Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Relevant related literature was reviewed and regular home-based, high mobile and relocated back-office teleworking were adopted as dimensions of telework. The ex-post facto research design was used to investigate the relationships between telework during COVID-19 Pandemic and bank marketers’ performance using the following constructs; ability to achieve sales targets, ability to convert leads to customers, and ability to retain both customers and high net-worth customers. The sample size was determined as 254, using Krejcie and Morgan (1970) sampling table with a 95% confidence level, while 154 usable copies of the questionnaire were submitted indicating a 60.63% respondent rate. Convenience sampling was used to administer the questionnaire via Microsoft form URLs to emails and WhatsApp of respondents. The data were cleaned and analyzed using MS Excel and Power BI respectively, to test the three null hypotheses. The empirical analysis revealed that all three null hypotheses were rejected. This implies a significant positive relationship between the dependent and independent variables in the three hypotheses measured. Although, the ability to retain customers and high net-worth customers had the most significant relationship, with a 0.97 positive influence, however, all female participants (27% of participants) disagreed with meeting their sales target during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. This means that the female bank marketers were of the opinion that there is a negative significant relation between telework and bank marketers’ performance. Surprisingly, 33% of females were still willing to continue with extended teleworking probably because of other benefits. Since 55% of respondents agreed to engage in regular home-based telework, 55% also did high mobile teleworking while 36% were involved in relocated back-office telework, which signifies that some bank marketers were involved in more than one dimension of telework. Another minor finding was the fact that there is a very high correlation between high-income earners and willingness to continue teleworking. An area recommended for further studies is the effect of telework on gender-based performance.  Article visualizations: