Experiences of Relatedness during Enforced Remote Work among Employees in Higher Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for an opportunity to read and comment this paper. The topic is relevant and a longitudinal data collection is a good starting point.

The structure of introduction is not clear. Also argumentation could be improved. Time format needs concentration throughout the paper, also in introduction. However, you have collected relevant studies to support your story.

SDT is a nice theory, but your paper  focuses only one piece of it. I wonder whether you could build your key theory differently.

As related to Covid, you could build and strenghen "social isolation" as a concept. This might bring an umbrella term to this paper.

The method section. You refer to a discursive-narrative approach. However, the results section does not fit to this, but rather a content analysis.

What this means: "The length of the text document was altogether 45 pages".  What kind of questions were asked in the survey good be added as well, at least the main categories how the survey was built.

The results. The main categories do not speak the same language, e.g., leadership practices. Your question in a survey reflects also practices to be improved, but in your main categories the practices speak a different story compared to others. More or less, it could an outcome to resolve some of the problems.

Several language mistakes throughout the paper.

Author Response

Thank you for the valuable feedback concerning the article:

Experiences of relatedness during enforced remote work among employees in higher education

We have made corrections according to it:

Referee 1:

The structure of introduction is not clear. Also argumentation could be improved. Time format needs concentration throughout the paper, also in introduction. However, you have collected relevant studies to support your story.

• We have rewritten the introduction and made improvement to argumentation, e.g. some concrete ideas for the future according to our results.

SDT is a nice theory, but your paper  focuses only one piece of it. I wonder whether you could build your key theory differently.

• Regarding SDT, I think it’s a valid question, but we also think that there are grounds for choosing to focus on relatedness only, since it was in such a big role and so compromised during the time of enforced remote work (because of social isolation specifically). We also chose to focus on it for appropriate framing of research questions and data – with this one need only, there was already a lot to look into considering this is a qualitative study, it would have been challenging to study all three needs in two time points and report the results in appropriate scope and depth.
• And SDT as a theory is very well established and widely studied, one of the leading theories on human motivation and well-being, also very relevant in the working life context, so we think that is a good reason to choose it as a background theory, if we are interested in employee occupational well-being, and of course it affects productivity too.

As related to Covid, you could build and strenghen "social isolation" as a concept. This might bring an umbrella term to this paper.

• We considered the use of different concepts and decided to use the concept “relatedness” because it hasn’t been use in this context before and we believe we got deeper in our analysis by focusing on one concept

The method section. You refer to a discursive-narrative approach. However, the results section does not fit to this, but rather a content analysis.

• We have formulated more clearly that our method is not only content analysis although content analysis plays a big role in this kind of qualitative analysis.

What this means: "The length of the text document was altogether 45 pages".  What kind of questions were asked in the survey good be added as well, at least the main categories how the survey was built.

• We have re-written this part and added information of the quantitative categories
• Quantitative data has already been widely used as we added in the manuscript, so this manuscript focused on qualitative experiences, where the data was also large and of high quality to be used in a scientific article.

The results. The main categories do not speak the same language, e.g., leadership practices. Your question in a survey reflects also practices to be improved, but in your main categories the practices speak a different story compared to others. More or less, it could an outcome to resolve some of the problems.

• We have reformulated the research question so the results are fitting better what we really have studied and found. We have also changed the name of leadership practices – category to fit better the SDT-theory.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript reports university employees’ experiences of relatedness during enforced remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The topic is important and interesting. However, I find that the paper has multiple weaknesses where I question what the contribution of the paper to the broader literature is.

Why was the quantitative data from the questionnaire not reported? Why is it not presented here as a multi-method study?

The structure of the presentation of results is not clear. Please work with subheadings, e.g. including the categories and clearer presentation of the T1 and T5 results in comparison. 

Minor: There are various layout errors throughout the document

Author Response

Thank you for the valuable feedback concerning the article:

Experiences of relatedness during enforced remote work among employees in higher education

We have made corrections according to it:

This manuscript reports university employees’ experiences of relatedness during enforced remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The topic is important and interesting. However, I find that the paper has multiple weaknesses where I question what the contribution of the paper to the broader literature is.

• Like we have mentioned in our article, so far there are only limited number of studies presented about the effects of remote work to interaction. Our study helps to understand what effects remote work has to relatedness.

Why was the quantitative data from the questionnaire not reported? Why is it not presented here as a multi-method study?

• Quantitative data has already been widely used as we added in the manuscript, so this manuscript focused on qualitative experiences, where the data was also large and of high quality to be used in a scientific article.

The structure of the presentation of results is not clear. Please work with subheadings, e.g. including the categories and clearer presentation of the T1 and T5 results in comparison. 

• We have added subheadings to the results and add the comparison when is has been relevant.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript shows no improvement with regard to the first recommendations. There are fundamental scientific errors in the conduct and presentation of the qualitative study results. The methodological procedure is still not described according to scientific standards.

Author Response

Please find here attached the coverletter

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The methodological information is still incomplete, for example the presentation of the study design is missing. The presentation of the interview results does not comply with the requirements for scientific publications. Please include the checklist for qualitative studies. The tables are not clearly arranged. The reference to the text passages is difficult to understand.

Author Response

Please find attached our cover letter describing the changes made.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf