The COVID-19 pandemic has become a critical and disruptive event that has substantially changed the way people live and work. Although several studies have examined the effects of remote work on organizational outcomes and behaviors, only a few have inquired into how its opportune implementation impacts aggregate emotions over time. This chapter aims to conduct a sentiment analysis with public reactions on Twitter about telework during the pandemic period. The results showed fluctuations in emotional polarity, starting with a higher positive charge in the early pandemic scenarios that became weaker, and the negative polarity of emotions increased. Fear, sadness, and anger were the emotions that increased the most during the pandemic. Knowledge about people's sentiments about telework is important to complement organizational research and to complement the framework for the development of efficient telework implementation strategies.
TopIntroduction
In early 2020, the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) began its imminent spread around the world. Since then, these have been atypical times for all humankind. COVID-19 pandemic disease preventive measures have been a hurdle for millions of people and have led to disruptive changes in day-to-today activities (Palumbo, 2020). Many countries have implemented quarantine and social distancing measures to reduce the number of infections and protect the health of their populations. These included the shutdown of schools, universities, workplaces, businesses, mass events, and all activities non-essential activities (Kraus et al., 2020). However, by the end of the year, more than 70 million people were reported to be infected around the world (WHO, 2020), creating a landscape of uncertainty and mayhem.
Although these measures are guaranteed to stem the spread of infection and suggest that they will keep people safe, several studies have shown a negative impact on people's psychological well-being (Shofiya & Abidi, 2021). Furthermore, the whirlwind of changes and fears triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a tendency for people to experience a variety of emotions and psychological ailments. For example, a study carried out in Hong Kong revealed that 70% of the people surveyed were anxious about the idea of being infected by COVID-19 (Ren et al., 2020). While there is also a concern for economic and job security. In this regard, Lippens et al. (2021) found that 35% of Belgian respondents are afraid of losing their job due to the crisis.
In terms of the work environment, responses to the pandemic also brought about rapid changes in how people worked. With the world almost at a standstill; the only viable option was the massive relocation of workers to their homes and forcing a large part of them to adapt to the telework’ features (Toleikienė et al., 2020). Indeed, by the end of the third quarter of 2020, most workers (71%) reported that they could perform their work tasks remotely (Parker et al., 2021). Teleworking or remote work is a method of working in which the employee works full-time or partial time outside the conventional company workplace and is not a foreign practice for many companies, organizations, and individuals in multiple industries, but past efforts have not been as successful as expected for everyone (Messenger, 2019). Even the abrupt implementation since last spring has been difficult for those employees who rarely performed work at home (Parker et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the imminent threat of the coronavirus in the environment and the concern for a probable economic collapse in industries and governments; gave a new opportunity to test, at an unprecedented level, its virtues, and limitations and to be able to look forward to a better future for their operation.
Due to the large-scale change that remote work represents for employees, it is necessary to explore how they feel. Over the last two years (2020-2021), the conditions and effects of telework in individuals have been evaluated: exploring the presence of occupational fears from the COVID-19 crisis such as fear of job loss and the importance of perceived job insecurity on organizational and individual outcomes, for instance, job satisfaction or employee well-being (Lippens et al., 2021). In addition, evidence suggests that forced remote work can have negative consequences on the psychosocial and sentimental aspects of employees (Bentley et al., 2016; Palumbo, 2020; Vega et al., 2015). On the other hand, the effects of telework in organizations and workers have been evaluated through conventional methods and techniques (qualitative and quantitative). Collecting data in interviews, surveys, and indicators and with traditional analysis tools (Abdel et al., 2021; Edelmann et al., 2021; Garcia-Contreras et al., 2021), being less frequent the studies with alternative techniques such as sentiment analysis (Zhang et al., 2021a). This opens up a wide range of alternatives for the use of new unconventional computational methods, such as cloud technologies, machine learning, and sentiment analysis (Ozcan et al., 2021; Tyagi et al., 2021); which enable the analysis of large volumes of data (Big Data) such as banking applications, email, blogs, and social networks (López-Chau et al., 2020a).