More specifically, we suggest that working from home highlights the renewed importance of three traditional virtues: Moderation, integrity, and mercy. We suggest that virtue ethics, a well-established ethical framework to evaluate behavior in the context of business organizations (Sison et al., 2017), with its focus on human flourishing and the unity of life (Aristotle, 2000 MacIntyre, 2007) offers further insights concerning this emerging phenomenon. This question is especially important because of the growing prominence of this context.
#Move officetime to new computer professional#
Stated more generally, working from home raises new questions about how we may live flourishing lives when it is not possible to physically separate one's professional and personal lives, such that new skills are required to live these now inseparable aspects of life.Įxisting research in business ethics has not focused directly on the role of virtues within the context of working from home. But more subtle examples concern the experiences that many have had of the appearance of children or other family members in their colleagues' virtual meetings, or more simply, the difficulty of distinguishing the time for work from the time for leisure. These cases clearly show how the boundaries between private and public life are blurred due to the digitalization of work.
Toobin and Ameri were both protagonist of sexual behaviors-whose nature was judged as offensive by the public and the media-mistakenly streamed during online meetings, while Camarena erroneously began to change her clothes while her webcam was still on.
This problem was vividly illustrated in a number of dramatic examples that have made headlines around the world, such as the infamous zoom meetings of Jeffrey Toobin (Rosman & Bernstein, 2020) and of the Argentinian lawmaker Ameri (Gearty, 2020), or the online/offline confusion of Mexican senator Mícher Camarena (Brown, 2020). 1 The renewed digital and remote workplace also raises a more fundamental challenge at the individual level: It breaks down the barriers between personal and professional life, eliminating the transition from the “home you” to the “work you” (Giurge & Bohns, 2020), which are geographically, temporally, and morally merged in a single environment, with implications that this article aims to unveil from an ethical perspective.
For example, it potentially exacerbates inequality through the creation of new classes of workers: Those who can, and those who cannot work from home, with the latter often involving lower paid and more precarious positions. This new perspective on the interdependence between business and society (Bapuji et al., 2020) also raises new challenges from an ethical point of view. This new phenomenon of widespread working from home, combined with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, has had an undeniable impact on both business and society (Chowdhury et al., 2021 Ilyashova et al., 2021). This experiment would have taken many years to complete under normal circumstances however, lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic clearly accelerated this trend (Leaders, 2020). The year 2020 witnessed, on a global scale, the experiment of quickly and massively moving work online, to the point that the World Economic Forum, in its latest Future of Jobs Report, identifies those working from home as one of the three categories of workers observed in the COVID-19 pandemic context, the other two being essential workers and people forced out of their employment because of the economic crisis generated as a combined effect of the technological innovations and the pandemic (World Economic Forum, 2020, p.
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