Stakeholder interviews
To understand working from home from an employment perspective, our project team is currently conducting short interviews with companies, organisations and individuals that are involved in employing, recruiting, or supporting working from home practices. The purpose of these interviews is to find out the challenges and opportunities that have already been identified about this type of employment.
What we would like to find out
We are interested in learning about how your organisation or company facilitates and supports working from home. From the perspective of your role we are interested in understanding:
How are working from home policies managed through your workplace?
Did the pandemic require you to change your working from home policies?
Since COVID restrictions have eased, have your working from home policies changed?
What are some of the challenges and opportunities that working from home offers to your organisation?
What kinds of advice and support is currently provided to remote workers in your organisation?
Are there any specific knowledges about working from home that are currently lacking but would benefit your organisation?
Practicalities
The interview will last about 30 minutes and will take place online via Zoom or in person. The interview style will be open-ended and conversational rather than a series of closed-questions.
Subject to your permission, we would appreciate recording the interview. If you would prefer not to be recorded, we will make brief notes of our conversation after the interview. The sound file will only be used for transcription.
Interested in taking part?
Confidentiality and safety
Participation is entirely voluntary, and you can decide to withdraw from the project at any time, and without reason. If you decide to withdraw, there will be no negative consequences, and your data will not be used.
Unless you request to be identified, conversation will be de-identified. Unattributed quotes may be used in project outcomes. These include: conference papers; scholarly articles; summary reports for industry and government bodies; submissions to government and parliamentary inquiries and op-eds.
Reference made to any off-record topics of conversation in the project outcomes will be generalised to ensure that you will not be personally identifiable.
Even with de-identification, there is still a small risk that you might be identified by what you tell us. To manage those risks the following safeguards have been put in place:
If you mention something identifiable which cannot be de-identified or generalised, we will either seek further permission from you to use it or we will not use it at all.
You have the option to review, edit and veto the use of your transcript or parts of the transcript.
Only the three researchers of the Working From Home project team will have access to the transcripts, the sound recordings, and the notebooks which will be typed-up and safely stored in password-protected, encrypted files at the University of Melbourne and Western Sydney University, and kept for five years. After this time, the data will be securely erased. If a third-party is used to type up the interview, they will only have temporary access to the sound recording.
The project benefits
We anticipate that our project will benefit Australian society by providing new knowledge about an important but underexplored form of employment practice.
Your input will provide us with new knowledge about how the positive and negative impacts of working from home practices are understood and managed from a stakeholder perspective.
This knowledge will be used to develop the questions that we will ask working from home individuals and households during the second stage of the project. Our aim here is to generate information that might ultimately be useful to workplaces and organisations.
Whilst it is unlikely that you will personally benefit from participating in this research, your contribution will provide broader benefits to Australian society by helping us to better understand the changing nature of work, home and communities.
The final project outcomes will be available at the project website. We can also send these to you on request.