Eighteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

Every day we perform several recurring activities with little or no guidance from conscious intention. These daily and repetitive actions are often referred to as habits. The situation with Covid-19 has had a dramatic impact on how we go about our daily lives and how we interact with other persons at home or at work. In relation to working life one specific aspect was that many office workers were forced to telework to uphold social distancing. Our study encompasses white collar workers and managers (n = 48) in two municipalities in Sweden, mandated to work from home (WFH) to the extent possible during the pandemic. Using Photo Elicitation Interviews (PEI), letting interviewees present photographs they felt meaningfully represent their experience working from home, our aim was to further our understanding of what happens with daily habits when work is performed remotely using digital technology. Specifically, we focused on what role daily habits played in establishing boundaries between work and private life. Results indicate that habits from the workplace were sometimes hard to uphold when working in the domestic area. For example, to take brakes on a regular basis. But also, a wide variety of new daily habits such as for example taking a morning walk to mimic the commute to the office and thus in a sense “going to work”. And conversely at the end of the working day stowing the work-related technology away and go out into the garden and thus “leaving work”.