Examining the impact of Covid-19 on employee performance and future aspirations in the context of digital economy

Abstract

With the lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations became forced to adopt and adapt to working from home. This paper is proposed to investigate the impact of home-working during the lockdowns on Arab employees' performance in Istanbul/Turkey and to analyze their preferences in terms of proceeding working from home or the workplace after the pandemic ends. The data were collected using an online semi-structured questionnaire. The Virtual snowball sampling was used to collect data, and the research sample included 255 Arab respondents residing in Istanbul/ Turkey. The explanatory factor analysis (EFA) technique was used to reduce the number of variables and the ordinal logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the effect of respondents' characteristics, socio-demographic, socio-economic variables on the performance of employees. In contrast, the multinomial logistic regression analysis was used to investigate the impact of the same factors on the target employees' preferences towards working place after working from home experience during the lockdowns. The results find that employees' age, their experience years, and the motivation by their colleagues and managers had a statistical influence on the performance. However, employees' gender, the number of children they have, motivation, family conditions, work environment, and the sector they work in had no statistically significant influence on their performance during the lockdown. According to our results, parental status, experience years, colleagues' and managers' motivation, and work environment had a statistical influence on employees' preference towards working place. On the other side, the distance from employees' home to the workplace, their gender, the number of children, and age did not significantly impact working place preference.