Twenty-third International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

The research relates to a business university, with more than 2,400 employees, including more than 800 management and administrative staff. The institution has been dealing with the challenges of diversity and digitalization with the aim of achieving inclusion through mobile working. The organizational policy has been followed by ongoing scientific research on the study of culture change. The research includes topics such as leadership, dynamic group processes in virtual teams as well as intersection-al processes between gender and diversity categories, where new forms of inequity appear. On a personal level, career development, managing stress, accountability and duties appear as well. The results not only show a change in flexible working models before and during the Corona period, but also that the ideas of mobile working are changing fundamentally. Due to the increasing digitalization and hence control of working time, flexibility is actually lost and the effects are manifold. It be-comes apparent, for example, that undisturbed work and concentration on specific topics is hardly possible any more. Constant accessibility and visibility via MS teams, among other things, leads to excessive demands and stress, which cancels out the advantages of mobile working. Concentration on a task, adapted to a family schedule, as in the time before COVID and before extensive digitalization, is difficult to achieve. Self-determination over the organization of work is lost.