Remote Success
TCU professors help lead study to explore what helps remote workers feel supported and be productive.

Patti Jordan, left, and Laura Meade study the impacts of working remotely.
Remote Success
TCU professors help lead study to explore what helps remote workers feel supported and be productive.
WHEN THE COVID-19 LOCKDOWNS IN EARLY 2020 LEFT WORKPLACES ACROSS THE COUNTRY REELING, a team of academics, including two from TCU’s Neeley School of Business, saw a research opportunity. The group wondered, as the pandemic forced employees in many industries to work remotely, if productivity was suffering as a result.
TCU’s Laura Meade, director of Neeley international programs and professor of supply chain practice, and Patti Jordan, associate professor of professional practice in information systems and supply chain management, joined three researchers from other universities to co-author “How Job Resources Can Shape Perspectives That Lead to Better Performance: A Remote Worker Field Study,” published in the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness in 2023.
The sudden shift to remote work was a challenge for many, Jordan said, particularly those who had worked only in an office. More remote workers meant a wider range of people to learn from. “This provided us a different perspective on the level of support, trust and resources required than you might see from employees who were working remotely pre-Covid,” Jordan said.
“If you trust your employee and you give them an assignment and they meet their deliverables, you shouldn’t have to monitor them.”
Patti Jordan
The study was a survey of remote workers in multiple industries. Participants were asked to evaluate their job performance and to answer questions about different aspects of their jobs, such as work-life balance and whether their organizations provided enough resources — defined in the study as “work flexibility, control, autonomy and trust” — for them to work effectively.
Results, based on responses from 223 participants, showed that productivity decreased when technological demands and work-life interference were high. The team recommended that employers increase productivity and work-life balance by establishing trust with remote employees and giving them work flexibility, such as the freedom to set their own hours.
The study explains that when employees don’t feel trusted or don’t trust their employers to support them, workers’ stress increases and productivity goes down. Jordan said an example of this is when organizations require remote workers to use software that monitors cursor movement and mouse clicks. She said this practice can leave some remote workers feeling micromanaged and mistrusted.
“You can always establish trust, even in a remote environment,” said Jordan, who added that employers can do so by getting to know their workers, developing a relationship and making them feel supported.
Managers also must be willing to not track workers throughout the day, which Jordan said becomes easier once trust is established. “If you trust your employee and you give them an assignment and they meet their deliverables,” she said, “you shouldn’t have to monitor them.”

Patti Jordan, left, and Laura Meade envision further exploration of remote and hybrid work formats.
Many 21st-century roles are fully remote, and new hires have no in-person interactions with employers. In 2023, about 14 percent of employed American adults — roughly 22 million — worked from home all the time, reports the Pew Research Center.
Meade said trust issues can fester if there’s no supervisor-employee relationship beforehand. She expects challenges ahead as organizations hire more remote workers while struggling to establish trust without in-person time. “I think trust is going to be an even bigger issue than it was in the early stage of Covid,” she said.
Technostress, which occurs when the daily use of information and communication technology causes anxiety and overwhelms a person, also harms productivity. Having to balance multiple communication platforms — such as emails, videoconferencing programs, enterprise software and texts — can leave workers feeling like they must be constantly available. This stress can then bleed into home life, damaging work-life balance and straining personal relationships.
To manage technostress, Meade emphasized the importance of creating and managing boundaries, such as turning off email to focus and be productive. Meade said being intentional and committed to stepping away from work at the end of the day is also important for well-being.
“Just because your boss sends you an email at 10 o’clock at night because of their work flexibility,” she said, “doesn’t mean you have to respond at 10 o’clock at night.”
As remote and hybrid work formats remain popular, both professors envision further exploration. Meade said she’d like to see more research on younger generations entering the remote workforce, while Jordan said more effort is needed to help organizations promote workers’ success. She said she hopes to see studies exploring how to maximize innovation, collaboration and productivity.
“It would be very interesting,” Jordan said, “to study how to create the right working environment that would provide all three.”
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