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Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic is unlike anything we have ever experienced in recent times. It has had devastating effects on people's mental health and well-being and caused serious problems for families and communities around the world (Donthu and Gustafsson, 2020). Many people have lost their jobs and source of income; others, particularly those in developed economies, have been furloughed or forced to rely on government support (Gursoy and Chi, 2020). The pandemic has also taken a huge toll on the global economy (Donthu and Gustafsson, 2020; Song and Zhou, 2020). We are seeing a steady decline in revenue generation as organizations continue to reduce costs, cut staff benefits and invest less on human capital expenditure (Bryce et al., 2020). These socioeconomic challenges were brought about by national lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures introduced to curb the spread of the virus. While such restrictions have been successful at minimizing person-to-person transmission of the disease, many workers were forced to make the abrupt shift to remote working. As these changes could have far-reaching consequences for both individuals and organizations, questions remain as to whether or not remote working is actually beneficial to employee engagement.
Research has shown that remote working has benefits for most employees. It offers the flexibility for people to work from anywhere, at any time. Employees are able to make savings on travel costs, spend less time commuting and strike the right balance between their work- and family-related duties (De Menezes and Kelliher, 2011; Felstead and Henseke, 2017). Notwithstanding, there are several limitations of remote working, including poor communication among teams, more distractions, reduced work motivation, lack of in-person collaboration, possible data security problems and the difficulty of monitoring performance (Golden and Gajendran, 2019; Vander Elst et al., 2017). These issues represent real problems for many employees and ultimately their employers. In particular, employees' work engagement could suffer due to reduced opportunities for workplace participation and conflicting work- and nonwork-related demands. Yet, there is a lack of qualitative evidence on whether remote working inhibits employee engagement, and if so how. As the Covid-19 crisis continues to wreak havoc and the permanence of remote working becomes more and more apparent, we need to better understand employees' lived experiences and develop...