RAPID: Remote Work in the Time of COVID-19

2019冠状病毒病大流行改变了工作场所。为了响应许多州强制要求呆在家里的命令，能够做到这一点的美国员工花了一些时间远程工作。在家工作的突然增加，加上托儿所的关闭和在线教育的兴起，代表了工作条件和家庭生活的巨大变化，实际上是一场大规模的社会实验。为了开始了解实时展开的这一社会实验，RAPID项目将收集定量和定性数据，以围绕三个目标推进科学和为政策制定提供信息。首先，该项目将调查远程工作的经验和实现远程工作的技术，包括性别、年龄/生命历程阶段、社会经济地位和种族/民族之间的差异。其次，该项目将研究工作需求、工作资源和生活质量之间的关系，包括对远程工作的战略适应和工作资源对某些群体的重要性。第三，该项目将从工人的偏好和战略适应方面考察COVID-19后在家工作的可持续性。关于工作、家庭和个人层面以及技术机制及其在不同生命阶段对女性和男性的相对重要性的证据，将有助于各组织制定有效的干预措施，帮助工人更好地适应由COVID-19危机引发的远程工作的风险和可能性。这些发现将为未来的组织干预和监管反应奠定基础，以制定和实施21世纪的新工作设计，从而提高美国的经济竞争力。这个RAPID项目将启动一项基线调查，其中有2000名远程工作者的全国代表性样本，同时还通过亚马逊土耳其机械（MTurk）收集500名远程工作者的定性数据。在线基线调查的受访者将来自KnowledgePanel，这是美国最大的基于概率的在线调查小组。同时，MTurk将招募500名远程工作人员，让他们完成关于远程工作经历的开放式面试。多方法数据将促进对不断变化的工作性质和技术使用的理解，雇主采用的新策略来监控工人，与远程工作相关的斗争和利益，以及员工对新工作条件的战略反应。拟议设计和开展一项具有全国代表性的调查，以及从MTurk收集的文本数据，将为COVID-19疫情背景下工人的工作经历和生活提供原始、实时和动态的经验证据。总之，这些发现将为社会组织中关于工作在何处、何时以及如何完成的持久不平等的理论以及社会和组织变革的理论提供信息。这项研究还将阐明，社会混乱与不断发展的通信技术相结合，如何成为思维方式和社会变革的深刻转变的催化剂，特别是在未来的工作灵活性方面。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed where work is done. In response to stay-at-home orders mandated in many states, U.S. workers able to do so have spent some time working remotely. This sudden spike in working from home, combined with the closing of childcare facilities and the move to on-line schooling, represents a sea change in working conditions and family lives, effectively a large-scale social experiment. To begin to understand this social experiment unfolding in real time, this RAPID project will collect quantitative and qualitative data to advance science and inform policy development around three objectives. First, the project will investigate the experiences of remote work and technologies enabling it, including disparities by gender, age/life-course stage, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity. Second, the project will examine the relationships between work demands, work resources, and quality of life, including strategic adaptations to remote work and the importance of work resources for certain groups. Third, the project will examine the sustainability of working from home post COVID-19 in terms of workers’ preferences and strategic adaptations. Evidence on the work-, family-, and individual-level as well as technological mechanisms and their relative importance for women and men at different life stages will help organizations to develop effective interventions to help workers better adapt to the risks and possibilities of remote work jumpstarted by the COVID-19 crisis. These findings will lay the groundwork for future organizational interventions and regulatory response in developing and implementing new work designs for the 21st century, thus promoting U.S. economic competitiveness. This RAPID project will launch a baseline survey with a nationally representative sample of 2,000 remote workers, while also collecting qualitative data from 500 remote workers through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Respondents for the online baseline survey will be drawn from the KnowledgePanel, the largest probability-based online panel in the U.S. Concurrently, 500 remote workers will be recruited through MTurk to complete an open-ended interview schedule regarding their remote work experiences. The multi-method data will promote understanding of the changing nature of work and technology use, novel tactics employers adopt to monitor workers, struggles and benefits associated with remote work, and employees’ strategic responses to the new working conditions. The proposed designing and fielding of a nationally representative survey, together with the textual data collected from MTurk, will provide original, real-time, and dynamic empirical evidence of workers’ work experiences and lives within the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. Together, findings will inform theories of enduring inequalities in the social organization of where, when, and how work is accomplished, as well as theories of social and organizational change. This study will also illuminate how a social disruption in combination with evolving communication technologies may act as a catalyst for profound transformations in mindsets and social change, specifically regarding future work flexibility.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.