Bachelor or Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
💡 Background
Remote work is not a new thing but it has definitely been amplified by the ongoing pandemic. There are many topics you can research in this area and there is a lot of literature available. You can research the strict relationship between remote work and productivity through statistical analysis complemented by literature research expanding on methodologies on how to measure productivity. You can use the current pandemic as natural experiment to survey or interview employees. Alternatively, you can research the topic from the company's perspective and instead interview employers and people managers who try to measure the productivity and examine how the measurements are changing. What are the effects on the prevalent monetization of time instead of results? As you can see there are many possible topics and you can choose your own focus.
🦾Who we are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focussed on doing research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership and Teams. We want to always be early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future.
🎯 Goals
- Review literature on remote work, productivity, and measurement methodology
- Interview or survey employees or employers if necessary
- Analyse gathered data
- Compare your data to the existing literature and find logical explanations
- Write a statement on the effects of remote work on individual and/or organisational productivity
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Interest in New Work / Productivity Measurement / People Management
- Passion to contribute to research of new work, change how work is perceived, and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
How remote work might improve productivity : https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200710-the-remote-work-experiment-that-made-staff-more-productive
Productivity - The Effect of Geographical Flexibility: https://journals.aom.org/doi/epdf/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.225
Changing Productivity measures: https://www.fastcompany.com/90540239/remote-work-is-changing-how-productivity-is-measured
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!