Text by: Marie Stebner, Student Assistant at RWTH Aachen University; Vera Rick, Research Associate at RWTH Aachen University.
The Corona crisis has turned our working world upside down. Now, especially in office environments, people are working from home. Within a very short time, companies had to reorganise workplaces, set up home offices and develop new communication channels.
But what impact does this have on the working person? While some advantages are obvious, e.g. home office workers benefit from more autonomy and can better combine tasks in private and professional areas. However, working from home can also mean constant accessibility, information overload and a blurring of the boundaries between private and working life. Maintaining and promoting healthy work practices and helping employees learn healthy routines for the work-from-home environment are therefore of particular importance.
In the WorkingAge project, the home office setting is therefore given special consideration through a dedicated use case to enable employees to work healthily from home in the long term. Not only is the technical implementation a challenge, but also the question of acceptance of the WAOW-Tool in the home environment is very important, as this is a much more private environment than the office normally is. However, the acceptance is necessary so that the WAOW-Tool is actually used in the end.
Therefore, during the first months of the new year, we asked users to evaluate the WAOW-Tool once more. For this study, it was important to us that participants worked in an office setting. Specifically, we wanted to evaluate user responses of whether or not they would like to utilize the WAOW-Tool not just in their normal office setting but also in a home office setting.
The online questionnaire was answered by almost 500 potential users from Germany, representative in age and gender for the German working population. Participants were asked to answer user acceptance questions based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)[1], as well as open response questions on what they believe is the best aspect of the WAOW-Tool.
We surveyed two types of employed working adults, those who work in a normal office and those who work from home, and we asked their willingness to use the WAOW-Tool. We are very excited that more than every second respondent could envision themselves using the tool! Furthermore, it is even mainly people who work from home who want to use the WAOW-Tool (57%), even though the difference to people who work in the office is very small (53% could envision themselves using the tool).
We are excited to see such positive feedback from potential users who work from home, but also from those who work in the office.
[1] Venkatesh, V., & Bala, H. (2008). Technology acceptance model 3 and a research agenda on interventions. Decision sciences, 39(2), 273-315.
