Russo Daniel, Hanel Paul H P, Altnickel Seraphina, van Berkel Niels
Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark.
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
Empir Softw Eng. 2021;26(4):62. doi: 10.1007/s10664-021-09945-9. Epub 2021 Apr 28.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide to impose movement restrictions on their citizens. Although critical to reducing the virus' reproduction rate, these restrictions come with far-reaching social and economic consequences. In this paper, we investigate the impact of these restrictions on an individual level among software engineers who were working from home. Although software professionals are accustomed to working with digital tools, but not all of them remotely, in their day-to-day work, the abrupt and enforced work-from-home context has resulted in an unprecedented scenario for the software engineering community. In a two-wave longitudinal study ( = 192), we covered over 50 psychological, social, situational, and physiological factors that have previously been associated with well-being or productivity. Examples include anxiety, distractions, coping strategies, psychological and physical needs, office set-up, stress, and work motivation. This design allowed us to identify the variables that explained unique variance in well-being and productivity. Results include (1) the quality of social contacts predicted positively, and stress predicted an individual's well-being negatively when controlling for other variables consistently across both waves; (2) boredom and distractions predicted productivity negatively; (3) productivity was less strongly associated with all predictor variables at time two compared to time one, suggesting that software engineers adapted to the lockdown situation over time; and (4) longitudinal analyses did not provide evidence that any predictor variable causal explained variance in well-being and productivity. Overall, we conclude that working from home was not a significant challenge for software engineers. Finally, our study can assess the effectiveness of current work-from-home and general well-being and productivity support guidelines and provides tailored insights for software professionals.
新冠疫情迫使世界各国政府对本国公民实施行动限制。尽管这些限制对于降低病毒繁殖率至关重要，但也带来了深远的社会和经济后果。在本文中，我们调查了这些限制对在家工作的软件工程师个人层面的影响。虽然软件专业人员习惯于使用数字工具开展工作，但并非所有人都能在日常工作中进行远程办公，突然强制实施的居家办公环境给软件工程界带来了前所未有的情况。在一项两阶段的纵向研究（=192）中，我们涵盖了50多个此前与幸福感或生产力相关的心理、社会、情境和生理因素。例如焦虑、干扰因素、应对策略、心理和生理需求、办公环境设置、压力和工作动力。这种设计使我们能够识别出那些能够解释幸福感和生产力独特差异的变量。研究结果包括：（1）在两阶段研究中持续控制其他变量时，社交联系质量对个人幸福感有正向预测作用，压力对个人幸福感有负向预测作用；（2）无聊和干扰因素对生产力有负向预测作用；（3）与第一阶段相比，在第二阶段生产力与所有预测变量的关联度较低，这表明随着时间推移软件工程师适应了封锁情况；（4）纵向分析没有提供证据表明任何预测变量能因果性地解释幸福感和生产力的差异。总体而言，我们得出结论，居家办公对软件工程师来说并非重大挑战。最后，我们的研究可以评估当前居家办公以及总体幸福感和生产力支持指南的有效性，并为软件专业人员提供针对性的见解。
