Trends in remote work: A science mapping study

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic made workers suddenly change their routines and several companies adopted a remote work modality. This change quickly started to be analysed in academic literature. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to perform a scientific mapping on the theme “remote work” to highlight the prominent themes associated with the subject for 2020 and 2021, covering the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Identifying mainly the “motor themes”, this study contributes to identify themes developed and relevant to the subjects analyzed. METHODS: An initial sample of 479 articles published in the analyzed period was listed from the Web of Science database. After analysing these articles, 186 were selected and were analyzed by Scimat software. Journals and references were also analyzed. RESULTS: The centrality and density indexes of the sub-themes “job-satisfaction” and “flexible-work” were more evidenced in the analysis, enabling the classification of these sub-themes directly as “motor themes”. Regarding the density index of the sub-theme, the classification “stress” was less seen. After a careful analysis of the articles content, it was verified that this is also a “motor theme”. CONCLUSIONS: Considering the three defined “motor themes”, they can be considered the most developed and important sub-themes of study in this field and, therefore, need to be well understood by new researchers in the field. In addition, these findings show that the mentioned sub-themes must be focused on by managers, considering the relevance that the literature attributes to them.