Remote work and diverse workforce in the era of epidemic and its long-term consequences

As Finland faces the current COVID-19 epidemic, the measures to tackle the threat for the country’s diverse inhabitants and economy have pushed all workers possible to work from home. This is a drastic change to normal working life conditions and its consequences are yet to be understood in depth. CoWeAll researches and develops ways to minimize the negative impacts of the epidemic on Finnish working life, and it looks for possible positive outcomes as organizations and individuals are forced to create ad-hoc new ways for organizing and working. At the same time, new challenges emerge: increased inequality in access to digitalized forums, limits of working spaces at home, and impacts on mental health and well-being in isolated circumstances. CoWeAll aims to alleviate the negative impacts of the epidemic in working life contexts by researching a) what consequences the intense long-lasting remote work has for workers with diverse backgrounds, organizations and society; b) what are the solutions that have sprouted ad-hoc for problems created by the situation; c) how organizations and society can support and enable development of micro-level innovative solutions, and how they can better resonate to the COVID era and post-COVID time.
Further information from the project team: Senior Researcher Mira Karjalainen (mira.karjalainen@helsinki.fi) addresses the blurring boundaries of working life in the era of remote work; Senior Researcher Jukka Lehtonen (jukka.p.lehtonen@helsinki.fi) with focus and viewpoint on LGBTI people and organizations; Associate Professor (PI) Marjut Jyrkinen (marjut.jyrkinen@helsinki.fi).