Online discourse on remote work challenges during the pandemic – trace data study and future directions

The COVID-19 pandemic led to governments imposing restrictions on mobility and socialization of people. These restrictions pushed organizations to hastily adopt remote work. As pandemic evolved unpredictably, there was uncertainty surrounding duration and conditions of remote work. This forced workers to continuously adjust to deal with emergent challenges. This context provides a natural setting to study an impact of prolonged remote work at scale. We explored online discourse on Reddit about remote work during the period from January 2020 and January 2022. We used topic modeling of trace data to inductively understand the discourse, and categorize it into seven themes. This was followed up with preliminary qualitative analysis of top posts in each theme. We identified three research directions for the future work.