Teleworking and Clients’ Perception of Frontline Services: Evidence in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract Previous research has examined the effects of client and bureaucrat attributes as well as contextual factors on clients’ perception of aggregate-level public services. However, there is limited evidence on clients’ evaluation of specific frontline services and the role of technology. This study takes advantage of a unique multi-year course evaluation dataset in higher education in China to elucidate the effect of teleworking on clients’ perception of frontline services. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak in January 2020, Chinese universities were forced to turn the in-person courses into online courses, which provided an excellent opportunity to identify the exogenous effect of technological shock. A series of statistical analyses suggest that online teaching significantly improves students’ perceptions of course quality. Moreover, this positive effect increases when class size, a typical indicator of task complexity in teaching processes, increases. This study has important theoretical and policy implications for introducing teleworking into public service delivery.