Speaker
Description
As teleworking persists beyond the pandemic, it continues to reshape individuals’ daily routines and social interactions. While teleworking reduces face-to-face contact with colleagues, it eliminates commuting time and offers greater flexibility, potentially increasing engagement with family and friends. However, few studies have applied a personal network approach to understand how teleworking restructures everyday social ties.
In this study, we use personal network data to examine how teleworking shapes the frequency of interactions across different types of close ties, as well as the compositional and relational characteristics of individuals’ ego networks. We also assess whether these patterns are moderated by personality traits, drawing on the social dimensions of the Big Five model.
Utilising data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel, we compare teleworkers and commuters in terms of contact frequency and core personal network composition. We find that, contrary to expectations, teleworkers report significantly smaller personal networks, though they maintain higher contact frequencies, especially with family ties. Personality traits are directly associated with ego network characteristics in largely expected ways, and we find some evidence of interaction effects between personality and teleworking status in shaping social outcomes.
These findings highlight how teleworking can alter private-sphere social networks and demonstrate the relevance of individual dispositions in understanding the broader social consequences of remote work.
Keywords/Topics
Telework
Ego network analysis
Social interaction
Wellbeing
Work-life balance
