The Physical Environment in Remote Working: Development and Validation of Perceived Remote Workplace Environment Quality Indicators (PRWEQIs)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors could include a discussion in what situations can their instrument be used or its practical utility.

Since the authors make use of many statistical tools, perhaps they could include a brief explanation as to the use of each prior to presenting their findings. This would add to the ease of comprehension of the study even for the ordinary reader who may not be well-versed in statistics.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Thank you for your helpful comments and suggestions. We report below the responses to the comments, including the references to the changes made in the revised version of the manuscript. These modified parts are reported in red (Track Changes).

Best Regards

The Authors

• We thank the Reviewer for the suggestion. We have included in the conclusions a reference to the implementation of PRWEQIs in the design of sustainable workplaces and the contribution to scientific research (Lines 479-491).
• We thank the Reviewer for the suggestion. We tried to add some explanation for exploratory factor analysis (Lines 173-175), invariance (Lines 279-280), fit indices (Lines 318-320), and tested invariance types (Lines 370-373).

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Remove the following from the abstract: As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more organizations have implemented 11 remote working, resulting in an overlap between home and work environments

 

Discussion section is extremely weak. Please revise!

Add elements on validation

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Thank you for your helpful comments and suggestions. We report below the responses to the comments, including the references to the changes made in the revised version of the manuscript. These modified parts are reported in red (Track Changes).

Best Regards

The Authors

• Dear Reviewer, we apologize, but we do not understand the reasons for this request. The text (Lines 38-53) reports the statistics demonstrating the significant increase in the number of workers in remote working. Starting from the advent of the pandemic, with related lockdowns, and subsequently, with the acceptance of remote working and the more massive implementations even in non-emergency conditions, remote working activity was mainly conducted in the domestic/home context. Therefore, we have not fully understood the reasons underlying your suggestion. To better clarify, we added "partial" to the statement "resulting in a partial overlap between home and work environments".
• We followed the Reviewer's advice and implemented the two discussion paragraphs (2.3. and 3.3.). In the Conclusions, we have also implemented references to practical applications and research (Lines 479-491).
• We have added the inter-correlation table between factors in Study 2 (Table 4; Page 8). We also decided to include an analysis of the relationships between the 5 factors and some work-related psychological well-being variables (engagement, perceived stress, and remote job satisfaction): the results are reported in the "Results" section (Table 7; Lines 400-413) and commented in the "Conclusions" section (Lines 433-449).

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper reports the development and validation of a set of scales to measure different physical aspects of ones remote working environment. This is an interesting and useful contribution to the research literature given the influx of remote working and telecommuting following the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors took the effort to collect data and validate their scales using multiple samples recruited from different populations (remote, college students and clerical workers). With that said, I do have some questions and comments about the paper which I provide in detail below:

1. In my opinion, the main limitation of this manuscript is that there are no data or results to demonstrate the convergent or divergent validity of the PRWEQI scales with any relevant existing measures. Although these scales appear to provide a useful measure of general perceived comfort, it would be helpful to demonstrate how these scores contribute to employee well-being, perceived strain, or overall job satisfaction. 

2. What was the rationale for testing the PRWEQI scales for gender invariance? I appreciate that the authors did cite other scale development studies as support for conducting measurement invariance analyses, but are there any reasons why the authors would suspect that the scales may not function equally for men and women? Invariance between students and workers (who might have different work styles or tasks to perform remotely) seems more relevant to me but that is just my own opinion. 

3. Is there any other information that the authors can provide about the students in Study 1? Were they sampled from a specific department or area of study? 

4. Can the authors please report the correlations between the five PRWEQI scales for the second study (similar to the correlation matrix reported for Study 1 in Table 2)? This information is helpful for readers who may potentially use these scales for their own research or practical use.  

5. Were there any differences in PRWEQI scores based on participant demographics? It would be interesting to know whether the scales identified any differences in working environments based on age, educational attainment, or any other demographic factors which were measures in either Studies 1 or 2.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Thank you for your helpful comments and suggestions. We report below the responses to the comments, including the references to the changes made in the revised version of the manuscript. These modified parts are reported in red (Track Changes).

Best Regards

The Authors

• Dear Reviewer, thank you for the comment and the starting point for the review. The purpose of the study was to create a first indicator of perceived comfort in the context of remote working, a topic still little explored in the literature. The absence of a similar indicator did not allow the evaluation of the convergent or divergent validity of the instrument. This is undoubtedly a limitation of the research that we have included as a starting point for future research (Lines 508-512). We also reasoned on the following point (" it would be helpful to demonstrate how these scores contribute to employee well-being, perceived strain, or overall job satisfaction"). We agree with the need to present evidence of the positive impact of perceived comfort on some indicators of work-related psychological well-being (engagement, perceived stress, and remote job satisfaction), which were measured in the questionnaire on remote workers (Study 2). We have inserted in the text the references of other instruments (Engagement, Perceived Stress and Remote Job Satisfaction, Lines 298-312) and the results of the regressions on those constructs, with the 5 PRWEQIs factors (Table 7; Lines 400-414). The results have been included in the Discussion and Conclusions paragraphs.
• We thank the reviewer for this comment. The decision to analyze the invariance of the scale on gender followed a careful analysis of the recent literature concerning remote working, especially during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this context, gender has assumed a fundamental role in promoting well-being and remote job satisfaction (e.g., Lyttelton et al., 2022; Shockley et al., 2021). One of the main gender-related issues concerns household management and family care, a role that, historically, in Western cultures has been entrusted to women. The flexibility afforded by remote working is one of the most important resources for meeting work-family demands (Troup & Rose, 2012). However, although some research conducted during the pandemic period has shown that there has been a progressive and more equitable distribution of housework and childcare between men and women, most of the extra-work activities have remained the woman's responsibility, causing work overload (e.g., Farré et al., 2020; Queisser et al., 2020; Sevilla & Smith, 2020). There is still conflicting evidence about the viability of remote working as a strategy for reducing father-mother disparity in family management (for a review, see Allen et al. 2015; Glass & Noonan 2016). The thinning of home-work boundaries, linked to gender expectations, may lead working mothers to more frequent episodes of work multitasking or more frequent interruptions in favor of child management (Yavorsky et al., 2021). This differentiation of roles also coincides with different ways of experiencing the domestic environment and its spaces. During the analysis of the factorial structure of the scale, we, therefore, asked ourselves whether these experiences, and domestic roles, and time spent within the living environment could also influence the perception of comfort in those environments which, in the context of remote working, have seen the overlap between very specific functions (e.g., kitchen, bedroom, etc.) and functions related to work activity. We have included some of these references in the text to justify our choice (Lines 347-353).
• Study 1 was sampled using the snowball method. After completing the questionnaire, students in a course taught by 3 of the authors were asked to recruit a variable number of students. The sample is therefore made up of students from various Italian universities and different degree courses (Lines 178-180).
• Done (Table 4; page 8)
• Thanks for the suggestion. We conducted a series of MANOVAs to test for differences in 5-factor scores and the overall score based on gender, age, and educational attainment. No statistically significant difference emerged from the analyzes (Lines 418-422).

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for addressing all my comments from the first round of review. The added correlation matrix and the convergent validity results with self-rated engagement, stress, and job satisfaction all help provide a more detailed report of the validity for this new measure. I do not have any further comments or questions for the authors.