Telework in Baltic Countries during the Pandemic: Effects on Wellbeing, Job Satisfaction, and Work-Life Balance

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to start by show my appreciation for the work done by the authors. The topic presented is relevant. The recent importance of telework due to the pandemic, specially the impact on workers’ wellbeing deserves further research.

 

I would like to share some comments that I expect may contribute to further improve the quality of the paper:

• The paper is well written. The list of references is quite long, but could be more up to date (only about 50% are from the last 5 years);
• The paper is based on a quantitative approach, but it does not present a model or hypothesis; please elaborate on a conceptual model and a set of hypothesis that translates the goals of the research;
• The literature review needs to be re-written. The literature review is quite descriptive and acritical. It does not offer a consistent theoretical background and it does not build on the relevant concepts and their relations. 
• The authors use the expression “work-life balance” almost all the time, but sometimes use the expression “work-life conflict”. In fact, the measure used in the empirical study was work-life conflict, but the literature only once refers to work-life conflict.
• Also, the authors seem to use interchangeably the expression “telework” and “work from home” which are quite different. The research only measures work from home, but the title, introduction and literature review always refer to telework. This needs to be clarified since the type of telework is relevant for the research goals.
• It is not clear how the authors measured “telework preference”.
• Please make clear what is the model presented in figure 3 (I assume it’s the “high preference for telework” but this is not clear)
• Figures 1, 2 and 3 need further description and explanation. It is not sufficient to present the figures and the numbers and expect them to be self-explanatory.
• The discussion needs to be further developed. What might be the explanation for the results of the research? What explains the significant relations, but also the absent of expected relations?
• Please explain and clarify what you mean in lines 437-439

I expect that tese comments help you in improving the paper. Wish you the best of luck for your work. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for their time and effort in giving us detailed feedback on the manuscript. We have carefully addressed all their comments and revised the manuscript accordingly. We feel that it has improved as a result. Below please see our point-by-point responses. To facilitate the review, we first reproduce the comments in italics and then provide a summary of our response. Unless otherwise noted, page numbers in our responses refer to the revised version. In addition, in the revised version, we provide the Figures and Tables inline, and new text is marked in yellow.

1. Thanks for your proposal. According to the suggestions of the referees, the theoretical background has been rewritten. Accordingly, updated literature has been cited in the current version of the manuscript.
2. Many thanks for this interesting suggestion. We have included a conceptual model with hypotheses. A new Figure (Figure 1) was added to show the model and the relationships between variables. Hypotheses refer to these relationships. Therefore, the Results and Discussion Sections have been revised including the acceptance or not of the hypotheses.
3. We have rewritten the literature review, focusing on the relations between the analyzed variables.
4. The have included the term “work- life balance” across the manuscript. Literature refer to both “work-life balance” and “work-life conflict”. As the Eurofound survey uses the former, we follow suit. Specifically, Eurofound affirms, “the survey also included questions about people’s work situation, their work–life balance and ability to telework during the first phase of the pandemic” (page 7).
5. We are measuring telework because our database refers specifically to telework. Therefore, we have included the term “telework” in the manuscript and we have omitted the reference to remote work. Thanks for this suggestion. We believe it clarifies the text.
6. Telework preference is defined from the questionnaire. We have specifically included this definition in the current version of the manuscript (see Subsection 2.5. Preference for telework).
7. We appreciate your suggestion. Figure 3 has been explained in detail. We think it improves the readability of the manuscript.
8. In addition, we have included new paragraphs to explain all Figures as suggested. Indeed, this helps the reader to follow the manuscript.
9. We have rewritten the Discussion Section, focusing on the results from the selected papers and in the analysis of these results. As mentioned by the reviewers, the last version was very descriptive. We hope we have solved this problem in the current version. We think the paper has improved as a result.
10. We think that this sentence has been clarified by the explanation of the preference to telework and the Figures related to this model.

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

1. The article is interesting, although the research area is not groundbreaking. It also meets the basic criteria of research articles. Still, I have a few suggestions and questions outlined below.
2. I suggest that you define the concept of teleworking exactly also in introductio006E, because in the legal sense it has a different meaning than remote work, and probably this concept was meant by the authors of the article. Additional explanations are needed on this issue and the exact specification the authors write about.
3. A request for correct editing and a request for fonts throughout the article, e.g. the last paragraph of the first chapter.
4. In the research part, there are no sources of selection of individual criteria in accordance with the literature. There is also no information about testing the research tool.
5. A request to explain all abbreviations in the research part also in tables.
6. The drawings could be in better resolution.
7. From the employer's perspective, I do not take into account an important criterion for undertaking and supporting teleworking, namely the minimization of the cost of bio-space - many companies, at least in Poland, reduced their office space by half, thus reducing the costs of enterprises' operations.
8. Has the research part taken into account the criteria of who selects teleworking to a greater extent? What about factors such as the size of the apartment, distance from the office, means of transport, number and age of children, etc.?
9. There are no precise criteria and division of the research sample according to: gender, country, sample size, etc.

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for their time and effort in giving us detailed feedback on the manuscript. We have carefully addressed all their comments and revised the manuscript accordingly. We feel that it has improved as a result. Below please see our point-by-point responses. To facilitate the review, we first reproduce the comments in italics and then provide a summary of our response. Unless otherwise noted, page numbers in our responses refer to the revised version. Also, in the revised version, we provide the Figures and Tables inline, and new text is marked in yellow.

1. Thanks for your comments. We feel your feedback very motivating.
2. The definition of telework has been included in the Introduction. Thanks for this suggestion.
3. Sorry for the typos. Formatting has been revised throughout the manuscript.
4. We have reinforced this area by including hypotheses and literature review to justify the relations between variables.
5. All abbreviations have been defined. Some abbreviations just refer to the name of the variables in the questionnaire (e.g., nD215_05; nD215_01, etc.). These variables have not been defined because their definition is already included in the Table 1 in the description of variables).
6. We improved the resolution of the Figures. The platform limits the size of the updated files in the submission. Therefore, we reduced the resolution of Figures to fit in the size limits proposed by the Journal. Thanks for the comment that improves the readability of our manuscript.
7. You are right. We included the environmental criteria in Subsection 2.2 “Telework in organizations” to justify the advantages of telework.
8. Your suggestion is very interesting. However, our database is based on the situation of work in the pandemic and we have no information about the mentioned variables. We do not know the distance to work of the respondents, or their means of transport, size of the apartment, etc. These variables would improve our research but unfortunately, we are not able to include them in our empirical analysis. Nevertheless, this idea is included at the end of the Discussion as part of future research because we think these variables are relevant to understand the usefulness of telework.
9. A new Table describing the descriptive statistics from the database was included in the new version of the manuscript. However, there are not many variables related to the individual characteristics of the sample. We only have information about gender, age and responses by country. Therefore, we did not include a Table just for these three variables. Sorry for the inconvenience. We have included descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) from the variables used in the empirical analysis and new paragraphs to include more information of the sample (e.g., “From this database, to conduct our empirical research, we selected the data from the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia) which consists of 947 respondents”; “To split the sample in highs and lows in preference for telework, standard deviation was added or subtracted to the mean. The result were two subsamples which different sizes. The subsample low in preference consists of 238 and the highs in preference comprises 709 subjects. Even though there is a clear size difference, 238 subjects are a relevant size from which some tendencies could be obtained”).

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you to the authors for their effort in addressing the comments and suggestions. From my point of view, the paper has improved as a result of the authors' effort and work.

Although the discussion improved, as the rest of the paper, I think the section Discussion and Conclusions could be further improved, namely by deepen the answer to the question "how this research contributes to knowledge on the topic?".

However, this aspect does not prevent from considering the paper improved and I recommend publication.