Work-in-Progress—The Sudden Requirement to Work from Home Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Restrictions: Attitudes and Changes in Perceived Value of Physical and Immersive Workspaces

Abstract

What begins as an undifferentiated space becomes a place as we get to know it better and endow it with value, space is freedom [1]. The context for this work in progress paper is the recent Irish government guidelines and requirement for all centralized office based knowledge workers in the Republic of Ireland to work from home as a result of the Global Covid-19 pandemic. Individual knowledge workers who previously had worked 80% or more in a centralized office environment were selected as part of a mixed methods research study. The paper has two intended outcomes. First, to provide immediate short term insights to better understand the impact of rapid change of physical work space, due to Covid-19 on knowledge workerattitudes and task outcomes. Second, to use the findings in this paper for further research relating to the requirement to work from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact on knowledge workers across a number of chosen areas of interest relating to workspace learning, productivity and how technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) can improve this experience. The questions posed in this paper are to enable future research and Open Science collaboration beyond that of the Republic of Ireland which could be used to support public sector and private sector organizations to provide more immersive, productive and learning workspaces beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. The full data a survey questions are available in the extended version of this working paper. A Constructivist supported by an epistemological approach encompassing embodied interactions [2] physical determinism [3] and psycho spatial dynamics [4] provide a balance springboard to launch this comparative investigation into this new area of research.