Designing for digital: an insight into the technological evolution of work-from-home in the contemporary workplace

Abstract

Work-from-home is increasingly becoming more prevalent over the last few decades. Given the recent pandemic, work-from-home has become an essential practice for many organisations across the world. Large-scale implementations of work-from-home are an abrupt shift in organisations, which presents a new set of challenges. Managers and employees are often not prepared for handling these large-scale adoptions of work-fromhome. The challenges of these implementations need to be explored in detail to develop counterstrategies. The large-scale adoption of work-from-home practice has negatively impacted employee engagement due to spatial distancing of employees from their workgroups and an overall reduction in employee interactions. This thesis analyses the consequences of the shift towards work-from-home on Information Systems competencies from a resource-based view. It analyses how organisations have been affected by the large-scale implementations of work-from-home. An overview of the effect on the competencies has been presented. Additionally, the effects of the pandemic on employees are investigated by collecting data from managers across industries. The results indicate that the challenges presented by work-from-home affect employees' perceived autonomy, which subsequently decreases employee engagement. Next, IS-driven solutions to the issue of disengagement are explored. The responses of organisations to address the affected engagement levels are investigated. These responses include resource-intensive and technology-driven human resource development (HRD) interventions which have been swiftly implemented. A conceptual model analysing the effect of these interventions is presented. Finally, the thesis investigates gamification as a motivational system to engage employees at the workplace. The current theoretical scenario of gamification at the workplace is explored by reviewing the recent literature and analysing the theories, constructs, and frameworks used to study the phenomenon. A broad taxonomy of theories used in the literature of gamification at the workplace is presented. Understanding the workplace context becomes essential in designing the gamification model for successful implementations. Subsequently, the central role of the need for domination in gamification design and the intention of employees to use Information Systems based on gamification is explored in the workplace context. A user engagement model of gamification is presented, which analyses the mediating effect of the need for domination.