Exploring Public Sentiment on Enforced Remote Work During COVID-19

Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, many employees have been strongly encouraged or mandated to work from home. The present study sought to understand the attitudes and experiences of the general public toward remote work by analyzing Twitter data from March 30 to July 5 of 2020. We web scraped over 1 million tweets using keywords such as telework, work from home, remote work, and so forth, and analyzed the content using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Sentiment analysis results show generally positive attitudes expressed by remote work-related tweets, with minor dips during the weekend. Topic modeling results uncovered themes among tweets including home office, cybersecurity, mental health, work-life balance, teamwork, and leadership, with minor changes in topics revealed over the 14-week period. Findings point to topics of particular concern regarding working from home and can help guide hypothesis generation for future research.

Automated summary

This study analyzed Twitter data to understand public attitudes and experiences towards remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show generally positive attitudes towards remote work, with themes including home office, cybersecurity, mental health, work-life balance, etc. These results can guide hypothesis generation for future research.