So Much For

Employers
The Disruption of Remote Work in
Employment Relations

David de Marez Oyens Litianyi (Daley) Zhao

Jungah (Cindy) Park Samin Nikkhah Bahrami Yizhao Zhang
2023.04.14
The Pandemic and the Great Resignation

● The COVID-19 pandemic promoted

digitalization and the adoption of remote
work

● The Great Resignation: spike in employee

dropout and job switching during and after
the COVID-19 pandemic
● Accompanied by increased reports of
isolation and job-dissatisfcation
● Drift between institutions that govern
employment and new remote work
practices - a probable cause?
Figure 1: Graph displaying the percentage of non-farm workers
that quit their jobs from 2019 until August 2022 in the United
States
Disruption of Employment Relations

● Functional employment relations balance the competing interests of employees and

employers
● Remote work freed employment from geographical constraints but also from the protection of
the law → Shift in the distribution of de jure and de facto political power in favor of
employees

● Employers lost valuable assets that helped them realize their

interests in their employment relations → employers became
more fungible for employees
● If the shift in power is not corrected for, employment relations
can become dysfunctional, worsening economic performance,
negatively affecting everyone
The Aims of the Proposed Research
● Research aims to investigate the disruption of the growing popularity of remote work
arrangements to institutions that reduce employer fungibility.
● To operationalize the concept of fungibility for analysis, voluntary employee turnover rate (VTR) is
used as a proxy variable

Regaining embeddedness: the

WP1: Mitigating A better
Main question: Increased Fungibility
potential of co-working spaces
grasp of
How does the by Embedding challenges
growing demand for Dealing with disembeddedness:
Remote Workers? of remote
effects of remote hiring on VTR
remote working work and
arrangements recommen
disrupt institutions WP2: Safeguarding Mismatched -dations
Perceptions of
Remote Workers: a Labor Laws & regarding
that help reduce legal support
Solution to Increased Perceived mitigation
VTR? Fungibility?
& VTR
Insufficiency strategies
Project 1:
Slide 1: turnover rates and job embeddedness theory

Slide 2: how the institution of embeddedness is disrupted by remote work

Slide 3: response of co-working spaces, research question 1 and methods

Slide 4: response of hiring process, research question 2 and methods

Slide 5: deliverables
Embedding
the employees
Remote Work and Job Embeddedness

Dissatisfaction & Disengagement

Higher
high-commitment Human Resource
Satisfaction?
Implement Management (HRM) applied to remote
working
Remote Work
Ease to Quit Voluntary Turnover Rate (VTR) theories
and ‘Job Embeddedness’
- Link
- Fit
- Sacrifice
Disrupted Embeddedness

Inefficient work-related interactions

link Diminishing informal talks

e~
By
Enhanced community participation

Lower organizational identification

fit Anxiety and stress from employees

Higher local engagement

Exposure to more job opportunities

sacrifice
Easier transition to new jobs
Link and Fit: rented co-working spaces

Research question
Co-working spaces can form strong
work-related local community by
providing a hybrid and vibrant How do co-working spaces function in regaining
environment, while for different worker
groups, their values, needs and
job embeddedness for different worker groups
preferences for such spaces are different. and what can be done to enhance it?

understanding the impact of co-working spaces in regaining

job embeddedness for different worker groups
● Focus group
● in-depth interview
proposing the placemaking strategies of co-working spaces
Figure 2. WeWork Melbourne ● place-making workshops
Sacrifice: the hiring process
Response of Hiring Process
● Adapt to Fast Turnover
● Work with Minimal Necessary
Work Force
Hire Workers with Better Fit
Research question
Does the degree of an individual's exposure to
online hiring platforms and headhunters affect
the likelihood of voluntary employee turnover?
Methods: propensity measure
● Job embeddedness measure
● Number of links to online job platforms or
headhunters
Deliverables

● Publications:
○ Three articles are expected to be published, two of which are from
research question 1 on the function of co-working spaces and
place-making strategies respectively, and one other from research
question 2 on hiring process and voluntary turnover rates.
● Place-making workshops:
○ Two or three workshops will be organized at selected co-working
spaces, where the remote workers, employers, designers and
operators are involved to strengthen the connections and
embeddedness.
● Improved method for predicting employee turnover.
How Project 2 will be presented (expectedly 5
slides)

Slide 1. The emergence of remote working and gaps in labor laws: introducing some factors considered to be influential (privacy,
physical safety, etc.). One forceful example is Germany’s recent regulation amendment regarding employees’ physical safety in the
RW context. (list some of those factors + oral explanation)

Slide 2. Existing survey: how those previously mentioned factors have been proven to affect employee’s job performance and
organizational engagement (one figure+oral explanation)
— What makes ours different from theirs: more targeted and up-to-date (oral explanation)

* Slide 3. General intro + the first phase of our research (What is our hypothesis, how we will examine the hypothesis, what is our
methodology, and what is the core question in the designed survey) (will spend the most time here)

# Slide 4. The second phase of our research (How we are about to analyze the results) (can be either a single slide or a simple oral
explanation)

Slide 5. Expected impacts of our study: academic publication plus reaching out to the wider public (emphasis on its contribution to
Labour Economics and the uniqueness of having a roundtable discussion)
Safeguarding
the employees
● The Problem of Endogeneity

○ Reverse Causality
Remote
○ Ommited Variable
working ● Cost of equipment

○ Measurement vs. Error ● Physical safety and insurance

coverage
●Existing labour
Scientifically Stablished laws
and Statistically
● Monitoring and privacy
Significant
 What
affects
employee’s
decisions?

Figure 3. Working
environment factors that
affect employee’s
satisfaction
(SHRM 2016, 31)
What does legal employment status mean for
remote workers?

● The employment benefits that they receive while working on a

remote project (sick leave, overtime premium pay, pension plans,
etc. )
● The health insurance of remote working while working on a
remote project
● The share of employees and employers in funding the transition
to teleworking
● The inadequacies in legal protection for remote workers from
their point of view
Highlights of our project
Hypothesis
The high turnover rates in the tech
sector correlate with remote workers'
perceptions of work values that are
induced by the deficiencies in remote
working legal support.
Research questions
Is an actual mismatch between remote
working arrangements and labor laws
the cause of this perceived insufficiency?
Is high turnover rate in the tech sector
correlated with remote workers’
perceptions about insufficient legal
support ?
 Phase I. Gaps In Remote Working
Qualitative survey Law

The most important question: Adverse Effect On

Retention Factors
In the past n months, how many times
have you voluntarily changed your job
(including accepting a new project even
though that necessitated abandoning a
Job Dissatisfaction
current one)?
What were your reasons for taking the
stated course of action?
Leaving The Job (?)
 Phase II.
The Perception of Remote
Workers With Poor Legal Quantitative analysis
Protection

● The Problem of Endogeneity

○ Reverse Causality
○ Ommited Variable
○ Measurement Error
High Incidence Of ● Scientifically Stablished and
Voluntarily Leaving A Job
Statistically Significant
Deliverables

Reaching Out To A Broader Public: Academic Contribution:

A Roundtable Discussion Journal of Labor Economics

Policy And Regulations: Data:

Amendment of Remote work Laws Exhaustive dataset on tech sector
Social Impact
● Uncovering the disruptive effects of ● Guiding policymakers in designing
remote work on employment relations adaptable labor regulations for
remote work
● Identifying key institutional functions
impacted by remote work ● Providing insights for employers on
innovative hiring practices and
● Informing measures to mitigate the
co-working spaces
disruption and maintain mutually
beneficial employment relations

Fostering inclusive, productive, and

sustainable employment relations!
Thanks!
Q&A

David de Marez Oyens

Litianyi (Daley) Zhao
Jungah (Cindy) Park
Samin Nikkhah Bahrami
Yizhao Zhang

2023.04.14
References
● Figure 1: Liu, J. (2022c, October 7). Remote work could keep fueling high turnover: “The map is open for job seekers.”
CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/10/07/remote-work-could-keep-fueling-high-turnover.html

● Figure 2: Mcgillick P. (2019, February 22). Learning to share: Introducing the new generation of co-working.
https://www.indesignlive.com/ideas/introducing-new-generation-co-working

● Figure 3: SHRM. (2016). Employee job satisfaction and engagement: revitalizing a changing workforce - a research
report by The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM).
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/documents/2016-employee-job-satisfactio
n-and-engagement-report.pdf