Teleworking - Which tasks suit best? Using teleworkers’ work design to understand the relationship between work location and multiple performance outcomes

There are many reasons to expect that home-based telework will remain and make up a considerable part of contemporary labor. Whilst documented positive consequences for both employees (e.g. enhanced work-life balance) and organizations (e.g. lower turnover), practice and policy are still unsure about how to successfully manage teleworking such that it enhances employee performance and scientific research remains inconclusive about how telework affects individual efficiency and effectiveness. We claim that a disregarded though highly relevant factor is the nature of the tasks carried out while teleworking. This research project aims at unraveling the telework-performance relationship, using a task-related approach based on work design theory. In a first study, we examine which tasks (e.g. complex) are best performed at home (compared to at the office) and how task-work location interactions affect employees’ task performance. In a second study, we build upon our developed typology of teleworkable tasks to assess how task characteristics affect daily concentration as mediating mechanism exerting influence on performance. A third study then uses an intervention to assess how daily and weekly work design, i.e. a combination of task characteristics at home and at the office, affects both daily and weekly performance. Findings promise to contribute to the topical telework literature and both practice and policy struggling with managing teleworkers.