IER-08-02-05-pp067--2083-Machaczka,Stopa 2022, Vol. 8, No. 2 10.15678/IER.2022.0802.05 The influence of remote work in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic on changes in human behaviour patterns within organisations Krzysztof Machaczka, Maciej Stopa A B S T R A C T Objective: The sudden occurrence of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, colloquially called COVID-19, brought about the necessity of redefining all the existing organisational patterns within companies. This article carried out an analysis of selected important changes in employee individual behaviour patterns and changes taking place in organisational structure in the context of the transition to remote work in the home office system. Addi- tionally, threats stemming from that and challenges for the managerial staff were discussed. The analysis of changes in behaviour has been done on the basis of research carried out by external institutions studying changes in organisations, which have been caused by the transition to remote work mode. Research Design & Methods: When working on this conceptual work, the Authors analysed a few selected issues concerning the organisational changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and implemented by external orgnisations or research departments of a company. They also performed a though analysis of the current publications concerning the change of the staff behaviour in a given organisation, and in a more general sense, the disappearance of the organisational culture. Findings: The results of the analysis of the examined topic point out that the change of working style from an office work to a remote work will affect the organisational culture and change the staff behaviour. Some staff members who worked on a remote basis could not take part in the creation of the current artefacts, values and basis objectives of the organisational culture, which will result in the fact that new, previously unknown behaviours, will appear in an organisation. Implications & Recommendations: As a result of the change of organisational culture and individual staff behaviours, and of the disappearance of the artefacts and organisational values caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, an organisation’s management should strengthen the staff identification with the organisation and thus, perhaps, redefine common values shared by all the staff and organisation. In order to specify the scope of the lack of common identification and individual behaviours, some research should be carried out within an organisation, identifying the necessity of re-establishing the values and new behaviours within a company. Contribution & Value Added: The paper presents possible changes within the area of organisational culture and individual behaviours of the staff, as these factors had never before been faced with such a great challenge of survival and had never before undergone such a large change as during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and also later on, when organisations continued online work. The paper is the first attempt to analyse possible changes of individual organisational behaviours and to measure the effect of remote work on organisational culture. Article type: conceptual article Keywords: remote work; behaviour patterns within organisations; organizational culture; changes in behavioral patterns; entrepreneurship; Covid-19 pandemic; teamwork, cooperation JEL codes: A13, A14, M14 Received: 14 January 2022 Revised: 22 May 2022 Accepted: 27 May 2022 Suggested citation: Machaczka, K., & Stopa, M. (2022). The influence of remote work in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic on changes in human behaviour patterns within organisations. International Entrepreneurship Review, 8(2), 67-78. https://doi.org/10.15678/ IER.2022.0802.05 International Entrepreneurship Review RI E 68 | Krzysztof Machaczka, Maciej Stopa INTRODUCTION A sudden transition to remote work, also called home office mode, has emphasised the important role modern technologies play nowadays. These technologies, provided one has all the necessary tools, such as access to the global computer network (the internet), a computer, and a source of power, enable the execution of numerous tasks from practically any place in the world. As a result of the event of a discon- tinuous character which was the worldwide SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic, many employees were sent away from offices to their homes so they could continue their everyday professional duties in conditions that provided relative safety and, above all, limited the risk of virus transmission. At that time, we had an op- portunity to observe the incredibly quick process of transition from work thus far done in a “traditional” office environment to work done remotely (Chapman, 2020; Thomas et al., 2020; Wells, 2020). Apart from important issues such as ensuring adequate task organisation and control, and maintaining overall effi- ciency, we definitely entered not only a new dimension of organisation and work, but also a new dimen- sion of carrying out work, connected with the place we did it from and the way we performed it. Overnight, casual conversations made while carrying out everyday duties, although not connected with them directly, disappeared and so did the atmosphere created by people undertaking their tasks within the defined com- pany strategies, which generated so-called team spirit (see Wziętek-Staśko & Krawczyk-Antoniuk, 2020). Specific jargon – words describing situations, processes and activities, understood only by the employees of a given organisation, also started to quickly disappear from the office landscape. It appears that if the pandemic had lasted only a few months, not much would have changed in the area of communication, cooperation or – more broadly speaking – human behaviour in organisa- tions (Kansal, 2021). However, in the face of the protracted pandemic, it is now worth considering and conducting research into what will change or should change if the remote work model affecting a change in hierarchical systems stays with us for a longer time or – which seems highly probable – permanently. Can the office really be “transferred” to employees’ homes? What will later be brought from homes to offices? What about organisational culture: can it be maintained in the “remote” mode all this time? Does an employee working from their home office still create the same organisational culture or does it change to such a degree that the very same employee now takes part in creating a new culture within their employer’s organisation? This article attempts to find an answer to the question of how working in contemporary conditions, i.e. mostly in the home office system, will affect a change in important individual human behaviour within organisations. Moreover, it is aimed at indicating the main trends pointing to major challenges organisations will have to face in order to maintain, among others, team coherence, the right em- ployee motivation, the quality of their work, its efficiency, and, above all, those components which are included in every company’s team spirit. LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORY DEVELOPMENT The importance of a strong organisational culture in maintaining coherent employee behaviour From retrospective analyses of achievements and knowledge in the scope of meaning and types of or- ganisational culture (among others Cameron & Quinn, 2015; Collins & Porras, 1994), we know that this culture plays a major role in shaping a company’s competitive advantage on the market (Barney, 1986; Muratović, 2013; Naranjo-Valencia et al., 2012). Such crucial areas as strategy, a well-chosen market niche, technology, carefully selected skilled, educated and motivated staff, as well as capital, that gen- erally speaking, all provide the potential for unique competitive advantages, are unarguably essential for the development of every company. However, it takes more than that for any given company to succeed. Of key importance is the right approach to creating an original business model for the organi- sation – a specific mechanism allowing for the generation of indispensable added value which, in turn, is the effect of skilfully connecting all elements making up an organisation and providing it with the necessary cohesion in activity and the ability to constantly counteract the threat of entropy. The factors indispensable for creating the aforementioned cohesion include an appropriately shaped and strong The influence of remote work in particular during COVID-19 on changes in human… | 69 organisational culture, as well as appropriately formed in its context human behaviours (Raghuram, 2021). Organisational culture and intra-organisational behaviour create a force which helps eliminate uncertainty by providing all participants with one system of interpretation thereby creating social order within a given organisational system through a clear definition of what is expected of people, and what the rules of communication, cooperation and participation are. Such clarity of rules guarantees the con- tinuity of operation and attitudes, laying the foundations of basic values and principles. Around this solid framework, strong teams can identify with the organisation and engage in building a shared vision of the company’s future (Cameron & Quinn, 2015). Nowadays, in the era of globalisation and the pro- liferation of organisations around the world, organisational culture should be understood as something more permanent than that which can be changed by the culture of a given country or its local norms and values. A healthy, permanent and universal organisational culture can represent such features, norms, attitudes and values which will always form a part of broadly understood social culture, and yet at the same time it will be open to the influence of the community in which it exists. Therefore, it will be embedded in its employees’ culture and connected with it. This is how any culture should “behave” when it is thriving and consciously built by an organisation. Science and organisational practice know ways to motivate employees and to create a positive and effective internal culture within the traditional system. Now, during the pandemic, but probably also in the time after the pandemic, when most em- ployees will still be working from home, creating a system which will continue to ensure high efficiency of the organisation and which will not, at the same time, neglect the crucial role of the human factor in creating the organisation of the future is becoming a serious challenge for organisations. At the end of 2020, IPSOS (IPSOS, 2021) carried out a survey among organisational employees for the World Economic Forum. The survey, which was conducted in 28 countries and among 12 823 em- ployees, shows that the pandemic has already immensely influenced the mental state of active pro- fessionals. The selected results of the survey are presented in the figure below. Figure 1. The results of ‘Work during the pandemic’ IPSOS survey Source: own study based on survey results of (IPSOS, 2021). Currently, thanks to intensive research, we know that because of long-term exposure to function- ing solely in remote working conditions, employees have experience serious crises. They are looking for their work-life balance. They are looking for new rules which will give them solid foundations for living in this new and different reality. Therefore, how will the behaviour of employees change? Will it be possible to maintain the right level of motivation to create, among others, innovative organisations? Will the organisational culture created in the existing work system survive? And finally, should employ- ees themselves influence the evolution of contemporary organisational culture or – looking at the 50% 32% 46% 50% 44% 49% had to work from home worked more than before of the surveyed reported lowered productivity of employees reported trouble finding work-life balance of the surveyed work unconventional hours – for example very early I the morning or late at night of employees working from home report feeling lonely and isolated 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70 | Krzysztof Machaczka, Maciej Stopa question from a different perspective – should it not be the organisations themselves who now take a particular effort to modify their systems of organisational culture to provide space for maintaining and developing the right patterns of employee behaviour? When referring to the role of organisational culture and, at the same time, looking for answers to the questions raised earlier, we should take a closer look at a definition of organisational culture, for example the one suggested by Flamholtz and Randle. According to the researchers, “it consists of the values, be- liefs, and norms which influence the thoughts and actions (behaviour) of people in organisations” (Flamholtz & Randle, 2018, p. 28). The authors of this definition assume that “values are what the organ- isation considers to be the most critical in regard to its operations, its employees, and its customers” (Flamholtz & Randle, 2018, p. 28). Taking into consideration that not all employees stay together in one building but work from their homes for many months and contact one another only when necessary – without casual interactions, they decide about their priorities and how they achieve their targets them- selves – we can firmly propose that the present behaviour of people in organisations is going to change (Vu et al., 2022). Moreover, their beliefs and performance standards are going to change, and thus, or- ganisational culture itself is going to also change. According to the definition of culture suggested by M. Bower, it is “a way we do things which surround us” (Kliber & Wyrwicka, 2012, p. 31). Therefore, the transition from offices to employees’ private spaces and changing one’s working environment has con- sequences in the form of changes in organisational culture and the basic behaviour of employees. The groundwork for organisational culture is most frequently laid by the founders of a given organisation (Król & Ludwiczyński, 2020) – as happened in Walt Disney’s studio, where, through his way of being and managing, the founder initiated a certain culture which later “spread” across the entire organisation. Organisational culture might as well form gradually through overcoming diffi- culties and the building of a company – as was the case with Coca-Cola. It can also by consciously developed by the management – as was seen in Google (Cameron & Quinn, 2015). Obviously, one condition is that the culture should be accepted by the company employees, as it needs to equally resonate with their own values and behaviour. If the employees only “tolerate” what the manage- rial staff impose on them, their behaviour will not become part of the organisational culture. How- ever, if the culture is accepted and harmonises with what the employees think and contribute, it becomes a permanent part of the organisation and its determinant. Let us look at another definition of organisational culture: according to Pocztowski, “it is an ingrained pattern, shared by members of a given organisation, of assumptions, values, norms, and methods of dealing with experiences which have been devised, discovered or created in the devel- opment of the culture and which are manifested in certain behaviour patterns of its members, and its components are: assumptions, values, norms, attitudes, myths, rituals, symbols, and a language” (Pocztowski, 2018, p. 44). Schein presented those components of organisational structure on three levels, shown in the figure below. Analysing the three areas of realising organisational culture, we can observe that it includes perma- nent elements (basic cultural assumptions) as well as those which can change more quickly over time (artifacts and values). During the time when employees meet regularly and can form formal and infor- mal relationships, their language, behaviour, and habits (physical artifacts), including language, behav- iour and habits connected with the culture of a given organisation, are formed and enhanced, and all new and regular interactions will support those behaviour patterns. The culture of the entire organisa- tion will form and develop thanks to those interactions. Thanks to those organisational behaviours and all employees’ attitudes, which are indicative of their values, organisational culture will emanate and create a competitive advantage on the market. Physical artifacts also include dress code (Koźmiński et al., 2014), which is the way of dressing in each organisation. Dress code is applicable in the office of a given organisation and in formal meetings. However, what will happen if all employees are locked up in their houses for many months? When employees only meet online, frequently with their web cameras turned off, the dress code will probably not be followed in accordance with the organisation guidelines because, after all, the employee is at home, not in the office. Natural sustaining and escalation of a given artifact and part of the culture of the company will cease. Eventually, also behavioural artifacts related to certain behaviours in meetings, for example, shaking hands, will also no longer be applicable. When The influence of remote work in particular during COVID-19 on changes in human… | 71 a business moves meetings into an online space, organisations lose space for presenting their culture to other organisations. Organisational culture until now emanating through those artifacts and behav- iours (verbal, behavioural, physical), will begin to disappear. The present living organisational culture – made so by employees’ personal values and behaviours – will cease to intermingle with values repre- sented by individual employees; the values written down by the organisation will become mere words which will not be enacted in space or in relationships between organisations. It should also be empha- sised that the lack of regular office meetings will bring to an end all symbolic aspects of organisational culture artifacts understood in the context of a given organisation. Moreover, an informal “network of meanings”, formed by the employees of a given organisation and described in a broader context of the entire culture by Geertz (see Wąchal, 2010), will cease to be created. Artifacts Espoused Values Basic Underlying Assumptions Visible, yet hard to decipher elements of organisational structure (verbal, behavioural, physical) Elements of organisational culture on a higher level of awareness, related to, among others, attitudes towards work, authority, status, customer, quality, profit, loyalty, and norms, i.e. the realisation of values. Invisible, unconscious, taken-for-granted elements of organisational culture, related to, among others, the surrounding, truth, human nature, and social relations. Figure 2. Levels of organisational culture according to E.H. Schein Source: own study based on (Schein, 2004). Schein emphasises that organisational culture is created in the process of adapting an organisation to its surrounding and in the process of internal integration (Pocztowski, 2018); therefore, as each day passes without the process of internal integration and escalation, there will be more and more atti- tudes and values represented by individual employees in organisational culture, and fewer and fewer of those distinguishing the given organisation. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The importance of work conditions and organisation for generating the behaviour patterns of employees Norms and behaviours presented by employees in an organisation stem directly from what a given community appreciates and treats as appropriate and valuable (Koźmiński et al., 2014). Nevertheless, if employees do not meet frequently enough and have no opportunity to share their experiences, emo- tions and opinions because online meetings are limited to current tasks and duties, then it is virtually impossible to bring out what is really important and valuable for these people. Everyday reality is lim- ited to carrying out current tasks, but the space for expressing oneself and presenting what one values and respects and, by extension, what one lives by and what one’s values are, is lacking. Due to the fact that the world of business has moved from offices to the online space, diversity is fading; electronic mail and virtual conversations (without webcams) resemble meetings of two robots acting similarly and having the same personalities, needs and attitudes. Differences in spontaneity, openness to chal- lenges, communication, or ways of preforming the same tasks are impossible to be found, as everyone 72 | Krzysztof Machaczka, Maciej Stopa carries them out individually and does not share their methods and adopted solutions with others. Therefore, with every week of working in the home office system, organisation-specific behaviours disappear. Everyday briefings, during which employees used to find out about their tasks for the day, also practically disappear. The manager does not need to say who was absent because the group can easily see that. In remote work, the team does not know who is in front of their computer and can actively participate in ongoing projects on a given day. The table below shows selected areas of changes in behaviour patterns as a result of employees’ transfer from offices to working in the home office system. Table 1. Changes in employees behaviour after switching to the remote work system Source Change in employee’s behaviour pattern lack of experiencing organisational culture by the employee every day decrease in organisation culture awareness and identification lack of contact with other employees in the office lack of business behaviour models, dress code style, benchmark for the risk taken, models of behaviour conducive to getting a promotion and pay rise onboarding of new employees in isolation from behaviour and relationships with the employees in the team and without interactions with other departments lack of opportunity to get to know the organisation culture, close relationships and other employees’ attitudes to their duties lonely remote work from home losing life-work balance, working extreme hours (early morning and late at night) - loneliness-induced stress cutting costs in the organisation (because of the pandemic) stress connected with the risk of losing one’s job Source: own study. Looking closely at the changes which have and still are taking place in employees’ everyday behav- iour as a result of converting their work to the dominating or sole model of remote work, we can see considerable challenges in this area for company management. One such challenge for managers will undoubtedly be maintaining the right balance of creativity and innovativeness in employees. A lack of office face-to-face meetings, a lack of feeling of solidarity and group strength, decreased trust (partic- ularly towards people who have just joined the organisation and whom other employees have not had the chance to meet in informal circumstances apart from online meetings) will, beyond doubt, nega- tively affect growth in teams’ innovativeness (Łużniak-Piecha & Bobrowska, 2020). Extensive research entitled Polish business in times of pandemic, concerning the behaviour of employees in organisations, was carried out by Obłój and his team (Obłój et al., 2021). The research clearly shows that over the long-term, remote work may lead to “the erosion of intra-organisational bonds, a decrease in creativity and innovativeness, a reduction of motivation and a limitation of learning possibility” (Obłój et al., 2021). Unfortunately, most companies are not optimistic about their future and for many leaders the pandemic has turned out to be one of the most difficult professional experiences. Numerous compa- nies observe the situation (the wait-and-see attitude) and do not take any significant strategic deci- sions which affect the employees’ fears about the future of their organisation. At the same, the sur- veyed emphasise the fact that they miss having a physical presence in the company and the social interactions associated with that. The attitudes mentioned above translate directly or indirectly into a decrease in the level of creativity and innovativeness in employees. Another challenge for the managerial staff will be maintaining the right level of motivation in em- ployees (Becker et al., 2022). It is obvious that previously just the presence of a superior in the office was enough to keep the employees ready to carry out their duties. During the pandemic, “the boss” only shows up during a phone call or video call scheduled in advance. A major proportion of employees certainly work full time, although we can presume that not all of them do. This phenomenon arises from different levels of employee motivation. On the other hand, redundancies in companies, resulting from the poor financial situation brought about by the pandemic, make some employees work longer hours and with greater engagement. The influence of remote work in particular during COVID-19 on changes in human… | 73 The behaviour of employees in an organisation stems from their mental and physical condition. An employee in a corporation or a big company can look after their physical health by taking advantage of gym or swimming pool (provided they are not closed due to epidemiological reasons) membership as well as access to private medical health care offered as part of the company’s benefit’s package. In times of pandemic, mental health turns out to be equally, if not more important than physical well- being. All possible forms of employee integration have disappeared; celebrating birthdays, team’s suc- cesses or other important events in the organisation used to provide the opportunity for relaxation, joy and spontaneity. They allowed stress levels to be lowered, private interests to be shared, and often provided an opportunity to meet members of employees’ families. Not to mention going to the office and coming back home: every day, during the commute, employees experienced numerous social in- teractions. Going to work through a park or going out to lunch with colleagues was natural. All these elements of everyday reality were eliminated overnight when the switch to remote work became nec- essary. In times of pandemic, it is down to an employee’s self-discipline whether they go for a walk, engage in a physical activity (e.g. running), go to a park or riverside etc. so as to lower their level of stress through exercise and contact with nature. If they do not do that, their mood will worsen, will- ingness to work will decline, stress will increase and extreme fatigue can and does occur, perhaps even accompanied by mental illnesses such as depression and sleeping problems. In an obvious way, those behaviours and challenges for the managerial staff will change in the course of time in the context of the ongoing pandemic and the employees being separated from the organisation. Every year, PwC Poland conducts surveys on employees’ feelings of happiness. As the recently collected data shows (PwC, 2021), employees are already aware of certain deficiencies in working only remotely, therefore 77% would choose hybrid work as a better form for their work in the future. Only 14% would like to permanently go back to the office as it was before the pandemic. Interest- ingly, the World Happiness Report 2021 (Report, 2021) indicates that in the context of feeling happy, we are globally immune to the influence of the pandemic. The level of happiness in Poland has even increased and Poland has moved from 36th to 39th position in the list of surveyed countries. This probably results from being closer with families and spending more time with children, which, how- ever, does not apply to all employees. Will culture in every organisation change to the same degree and always lose its identity? In a social sense, culture is formed for generations and cannot be permanently changed during a pandemic. Is this similar when it comes to organisational culture? To quote Sathe (Sathe, 1983), the strength of organisational culture can be measured with the degree of intensity of the following aspects: how clear, how universal and how deeply embedded it is. These three features will determine whether culture in an organisation is susceptible to periodical changes in the company or not. Clarity defines how desirable certain behaviours are in an organisation. As Sikorski writes: “the less doubt about their own cultural beliefs members of a given community have, the clearer those beliefs are” (Sikorski, 2008, p. 40). The degree of universality is the level of agreement in a group on the type of culture defined and accepted in the organisation. The more shared behaviour patterns and ways of thinking there are in a given company, the stronger its culture is (Sikorski, 2008). And lastly, the depth of embedding is the degree to which cultural patterns have been internalised. The better employees internalise those patterns, the more firmly organisational culture is fixed within a given company. Based on the analysis of those feature, we can assume that not every culture in an organisation will be strong and deeply rooted among its employees, and neither will their behaviour. Therefore, not every culture will be equally susceptible to changes in an organisation (Li et al., 2021). Consequently, there will be organisations which, through working in home office mode, will lose their culture and behaviour pat- terns after a short time. However, there will also be companies whose culture, despite the several- month-long “separation” of employees from the company office, will still be strong and deeply embed- ded in the awareness, way of working, activities and behaviour of their employees (Spicer, 2020). In February 2021, nearly a year after the pandemic started, Ricoh Group published a survey en- titled The pandemic and the organisational culture of a company, conducted among 632 European office workers of firms employing between 250 and 999 employees (Ricoh, 2021). The survey in- cluded questions about changes in the organisational culture and how much the pandemic was 74 | Krzysztof Machaczka, Maciej Stopa changing everyday work. Nearly half of those surveyed (42%) felt their company culture had suffered during the pandemic. Employees miss working with colleagues face-to-face (65%), and 30% of Euro- pean workers are feeling pressure to be online more while working remotely. 31% of the surveyed experience difficulties staying motivated due to a lack of good communication in the team and tech- nological shortfalls. The study clearly shows that changes in employees’ current behaviour patterns are imminent, supposing they have not already started. Challenges and directions of changes in the sphere of employee behaviour in the context of the increasing role of the home office model How will employee behaviour develop after such a sudden dispersal and the transition to home office mode? It seems inevitable that an organisation, and employee behaviour with it, should include many more elements brought in by workers themselves – there should be more values, attitudes, habits and ways of communicating contributed by employees, and fewer elements imposed by an organisation with its culture and accepted customs. Definitely, not all organisations are ready to adopt only full- time remote work. According to a study conducted by McKinsey Global Institute on 2000 activities, and 800 professions in 9 countries, over 20% of workers were able to work remotely from 3 to 5 days a week as efficiently as they would in the office. Remarkably, this does not depend on the profession, but on tasks to be carried out and on specific forms of activity (Lund et al., 2020). Figure 3. Results of McKinsey Global Institute research into percentage share of time spent working remotely by sector in the United States Source: own study based on research (Lund et al., 2020). As can be seen in the Figure 3, the sectors with the greatest potential for remote work are finance and insurance, management, professional and scientific technical services and the IT/telecommuni- cations sector. Fewer prospects for remote work are in the following sectors: agriculture, accommo- dation and food services and construction. 0 50 100 Finance and insurance Management Professional, scientific, and technical… IT and telecommunications Education Wholesale trade Real estate Government and administrative support Utilities Arts, entertainment, and recreation Healthcare and social assistance Retail trade Mining Manufacturing Transportation and warehousing Construction Accommodation and food services Agriculture Total Potential share of time spent working remotely by sector in the United States (%) Theoretical maximum Effective potential (no loss in productivity) The influence of remote work in particular during COVID-19 on changes in human… | 75 Therefore, the future probably lies in so-called hybrid work, which allows working from the office on some days of the week. Nevertheless, depending on their sector, some teams will be able to remain working at their “private offices/desks” at their employees’ homes. These new employees, changed, different, will come back on some days to the offices in their organisations. Will they find the same organisation they left before the pandemic, and will the organisation recognise the employees it has not “seen” for such a long time? Employees with new behaviour patterns will not only create the at- mosphere in the company, but also its new culture. Thanks to the synergy of current behaviour ac- cepted in the organisation and new ones brought in by workers coming back to their offices from time to time as well as natural amalgamation, this culture will probably become better and more efficient; employee bonding within a given organisation will be reinforced as every employee will have their own measurable contribution to creating the company’s values through creating its culture. In the case of a poorly developed organisational culture, the direct and stronger influence of employee behaviour could result in positive changes. The culture of an organisation will become more coherent and more closely connected with its creators – in this case employees – and with the right steering by the man- agement it could become part of a great asset for the company. In deeply rooted cultures, it will be important to listen carefully to employees, and to whatever new they have brought into the company after the pandemic; to understand and identify their values or the expected new behaviour patterns, as well as to implement them into the organisation’s culture. Summing up, it should be emphasised that the time of the pandemic shall greatly influence changes in organisational culture. The magnitude of that influence will depend on how strong the culture was to start with in a given company. Where the organisation was only beginning to form, its culture – fresh and newly implemented – will be considerably modified and the influence of the employees’ values and beliefs will be strong. On the other hand, in companies with a robust culture created over decades, the only values which will change might be those which evolved among the employees. That said, bigger or smaller changes will undoubtedly come. Those managers who closely watch how values and beliefs change in their employees, will find it easier to implement those changes. Changes in organisations during and after the pandemic will probably be indispensable. As C. Sikorski writes: “in order for an organisation to react flexibly to changes in its surrounding, its cul- ture should be flexible and open, or, in short -weak” (Sikorski, 2008, p. 46), as it is precisely culture, according to Schein, that is responsible for resisting changes (Mycielska, 2020). This is good news for those organisations which have not yet built a strong and deeply rooted culture. Due to the worldwide pandemic, many new challenges and tasks have appeared directly con- nected with organising employees’ working time (Iwashita, 2021). The managerial staff will most likely be faced with challenges concerning motivating those members of the organisation who work remotely, and creating space and opportunity for innovative teams whose members know and trust one another. Moreover, it should be emphasised that during and after the pandemic, not every sector of the economy will be able to move to working online; yet, each of them is capable of sin- gling out some tasks and forms of activity which can be done remotely. Organisational culture, especially if not strongly embedded and still in the process of maturing, should undergo a transfor- mation, as a result of which it will be founded more on employees’ values, and less on the occa- sionally imposed values of the organisation. Some individual employees’ behaviour will also change. There will be fewer artifacts and behaviour from the organisational space, and many more brought in by individual employees. The managing staff should take special care to create a coherent organ- isational culture directed at the values of employees and the organisation itself. CONCLUSIONS The worldwide pandemic connected with the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus already has and still will strongly influence individual employee behaviour and culture in organisations. Some employees working remotely will not be able to participate, in person, in creating previous artifacts, values and basic assumptions of organisational culture, which will result in the appearance of new, previously unknown behaviour patterns in the organisation, as they will be contributed individually by the em- 76 | Krzysztof Machaczka, Maciej Stopa ployees. New challenges for organisations will include looking for new and more effective ways of motivating employees, creating a space for meeting new people, and building trust in order to foster innovative teams. Analysing the research concerning the influence of remote work on employees presented in the article, it seems that it will be essential to take care of employees’ wellbeing, per- haps through offering them an opportunity to do sport or voluntary work during office hours, so that they can be relieved of their monotonous work and everyday routine tasks employees need to cope with alone, and consequently, encourage them to contact other people and give them space and motivation to leave their home offices. The article pointed to some selected changes in the area of individual staff behaviours and their effect on organisational culture. Some further empirical research in this field will be necessary as it will definitely show the areas which have changed and will also change further under the influence of the long period of remote work. The managers of organisations should re-attempt to analyse the relevance of the values with which an organisation and its staff identify. Even a larger challenge will be posed by the identification of the changes necessary to be introduced into the previous organisational culture, i.e. probably its re-defin- ing, taking into consideration the new values and priorities brought into a company by the staff after their partial return to company offices after a long period of home office. At the times of lifting the restrictions resulting from the pandemic, it will definitely be necessary to introduce more flexibility, once the staff return to work in the companies’ offices. All these changes require extensive and pro- found empirical studies in specific organisations and economy sectors. It seems also that probably some of these sectors, such as financial or managerial (Lund et al., 2020) , and, first of all, the IT sector (Nickson & Siddons, 2012) have not been significantly affected by these changes, as these branches have been working on a remote basis for many years, whilst pandemic did not mean any greater changes in everyday work for the staff of the organisations active in this field. It must be also assumed that the remote work models, worked out in specific companies will become a permanent solution in the working model of the employee teams. Therefore, remote work and its specifics, together with the necessary changes in the field of the values, culture and human relations will pose a significant chal- lenge for the effectives for the management of organisations. REFERENCES Barney, J. B. (1986). Organizational Culture: Can It Be a Source of Sustained Competitive Advantage? 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Klimat organizacyjny jako narzędzie (de)motywowania pracowników. Warszawa: CeDeWu. 78 | Krzysztof Machaczka, Maciej Stopa Authors The contribution share of authors is equal and amounted to 50% for each of them. Krzysztof Machaczka PhD, Habilitated Doctor, Associate Professor of the Cracow University of Economics. He received a doctoral degree in 2005 at the Cracow University of Economics, whilst in 2019 the degree of doctor habilitated in social sciences within the field of management and quality science was bestowed upon him. He is a part of the aca- demic staff in the Chair of International Management and the Director of the Department of Brand and Com- munication of the University of Economics in Cracow. His scientific interests include: company strategy, values and organizational culture. Correspondence to: Dr hab. Krzysztof Machaczka, Prof. UEK, Cracow University of Economics, ul. Rakowicka 27, 31-510 Kraków, Poland, e-mail: machaczk@uek.krakow.pl ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7345-122X Maciej Stopa Since 2020 he has been a doctoral student the Cracow University of Economics. He is also a coach, real estate broker and manager and also a theologian (MSc). His scientific interest comprise the management of organi- zational culture, new forms of management, including teal organizations and management through values. His professional activity involves commercial real estates; he is employed at the post of the director of real properties department in one of the Polish nation-wide commercial network Correspondence to: e-mail: stopa.mac@gmail.com ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9171-8688 Conflict of Interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relation- ships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Copyright and License This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – NoDerivs (CC BY-ND 4.0) License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Published by Cracow University of Economics – Krakow, Poland