Remote Working the New Reality

One of the most challenging episodes in an organisation’s life is an organisational crisis (König et al., 2020). Organisational crises stir up strong emotions, such as anxiety, panic, and distress. However organisational crisis management, like many other management issues, is being reshaped by information technology (IT) (Nan et al,.2014). At the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unexpected changes to the lives of people across the globe (World Health Organization, 2020). With no effective treatments or vaccines available (Salari et al., 2020), organisations around the globe encouraged workers to work from home where possible in order to support the essential behaviours of self-isolation and social distancing. Iansiti and Richards (2020) noted that in a matter of days, almost any process that could be rapidly digitized was virtualized, with employees across the globe moving from onsite to home working. This in turn mitigated the disruption to business as usual for many organisations, during the pandemic.