The expansion of COVID-19 pandemic has cast aspersions on the traditional view of work styles. The practice of remote working displaces office work to home and the third place, helping people save commuting time and restore the balance between work and life. This new style of work hasn’t been achieved without the advanced and matured digital technologies, such as mobile devices and cloud computing/networking. Below the surface, the changes in industrial structure go underway, sifting from the pursuit of physical and financial resources to the accumulation of intangible assets created by human. Intangible economy exerts a large influence on corporate strategies and human resource (HR) practices. During and after pandemic, organizations must face the double-bind policy for HR; increasing corporate-specific investment and maintaining mobility of human capital across organizations, simultaneously. Then, this paper reviews the literature of industrial and organizational psychology for the purposes of capturing the current scientific knowledge in the field and of assisting HR practitioners working in the digital and intangible economic environment. Particularly, the paper focuses on the three important topics: 1) selection and screening, 2) performance appraisal, and 3) human resource development. Regarding the selection research, impacts of HR Tech, selection via social networking services (SNS), pros and cons of web interviews, overview of interview contents, impression management in employment interviews, and the effects of gamification and simulation on selection are scrutinized. The reviews regarding key concepts of performance appraisal, new perspective of outcome distribution, and incongruence of subjective and objective ratings will follow. Finally, the paper looks at the research in training effectiveness, experiential learning, and error training as the marked topics in HR development.

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Teleworking was promoted as one of the measures to deal with the coronavirus crisis. In Japan, teleworking was originally introduced as measure for work-life balance. In this report, by examining the result of investigations performed by public institutions and private organizations under the coronavirus crisis, the contributions and the problems for the work-life balance of the teleworking were extracted. For teleworking contributes to work-life balance, four future issues were discussed, ① Right to choose time and place to work (activity-based working), ② Flextime management and the moving from the personnel management by time to by tasks, ③ Right to disconnect, ④ Adjustment of the relationships of the family when the person is working from home, and development of the support resources from outside the family.

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This study examines the medium- to long-term predictions of consumer behavior and consumer life in the post-corona era, which will come after the end of COVID-19 pandemic, from a psychological point of view. Most psychological research in recent years has focused on individual psychology and behavior. In predicting the post-corona consumer society, this study examines macro-perspective motivation in the future society from the micro-perspective needs of individual consumers, based on the technological innovations born from the first through to next-generation Industrial Revolutions. Against the backdrop of declining birthrate and aging population in Japan, these predictions of consumer behavior are discussed from a multifaceted perspective, from the existence of human beings, the crisis of dignity, and the socio-economic mechanism to the accelerated technological innovations such as AI, AC, and bioscience.

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which was first discovered in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has evolved into a global pandemic owing to its highly infectious nature. The spread of the infection has drastically restricted people’s behaviors and accelerated a switch in their ways of life and working patterns, particularly, their transition to remote working or teleworking scenarios. In terms of the business continuity planning (BCP), the focus has been on controlling the spread of the infection. Although the introduction and availability of vaccines should lead to an eventual return to normalcy, the end result remains uncertain. With the well-established new normal, a return to where we were before the occurrence of COVID-19 will take time. This study therefore focuses on various problems emerging due to the new working patterns and ways of life that have been implemented from the health and safety perspective; moreover, it considers the ideal approach to occupational health and safety and BCP during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, with recommendations from various fields of industry, government and academia.

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This study aimed to examine the effects of self-regulation strategies on behavioral and psychological changes when working from home (telework), as well as the effect of supervisors’ leadership and trust of supervisors as determinants of self-regulation strategies. The survey was conducted among 73 employees in a Japanese IT company, and 50 of them who teleworked after the spread of COVID-19 were later analyzed. The results of the analysis showed that first, teleworking had no change in productivity, motivation, or information sharing among colleagues, but it rather reduced work stress and improved work-life balance. Second, the results of the factor analysis on self-regulation strategies revealed five sub-strategies. Furthermore, the results of multiple regression analysis showed that among the five sub-strategies, the goal strategy was effective in improving work motivation, and the task and monitoring strategies were effective in improving teamwork and information sharing among colleagues. Third, as a determinant of the self-regulation strategy, supervisor task-oriented leadership had no effect on self-regulation strategies. However, trust of supervisors had a positive relationship with self-regulation strategies. The results of this study suggest the effectiveness and importance of self-regulation strategies in teleworking.

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This study examines the effect of working conditions changes under COVID-19 on work engagement (WE) from the view of the JD-R model using data from two waves survey. The survey was conducted with white-collar employees (sample sizes for each wave are T1 =1,497 and T2 = 1,129), and both survey data were combined and used for analysis. The results of the quantitative analysis showed four findings: First, changes in communication affect WE, and second, the application of telework contributes to the improvement of WE under the COVID-19 situation but doesn't work only introducing telework; that is, it is necessary to consider the continuity of the practice to improve the WE. Third, the effect of communication on WE by teleworkers is stronger than that of non-teleworkers. Fourth, not only each job resource affects WE, but it also has the complementing function.

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In this study, we quantitively examined whether the introduction of telework following the outbreak of COVID-19 reduced communication of gratitude within a Japanese company. Since the company introduced company-wide teleworking after the outbreak of COVID-19, we hypothesized that communication of gratitude decreased because of the difficulty in informal communication under teleworking. We analyzed behavioral data from an annual event held at the company, where employees send messages of gratitude freely to each other. First, results showed that the amount of the messages of gratitude per person in 2020 was smaller than that in 2019. Second, the messages was also found in the organizational newcomers who entered the company in 2020, compared with the newcomers in 2019. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice of company-wide teleworking under and after COVID-19.

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COVID-19 has provided further opportunities for organizations to hold web meetings. This study explored the factors of holding appropriate web meetings. A web survey was conducted with 412 clerical was determined by the following. (1) Concerning the groups which positively or negatively evaluated the web meeting regarding participation, the rate of the group which positively evaluated the web meeting was high. It reached over 80% when the basic information and communications technology (ICT) operation skills were high and the personal computer (PC) usage experience was 20 to 29 years. (2) Concerning the interpersonal evaluation of web meetings, 60% of the assessments were highly positive when the expertise of the communication partner was high. (3) For the technical evaluation of web meetings, 40% of the assessments were high when the ability and confidence in computers were high. (4) For the groups which positively or negatively evaluated the web meeting regarding hosting it, the rate of the group which positively evaluated the web meeting was high. It reached over 80% when the anxiety related to computer operation was low and the communication partner was highly active. Additionally, the results of the decision tree analysis and text mining suggested that individual skills and attitudes that affect technical aspects and communication issues were essential. Striving to improve and solve these problems n the early stages may lead to holding appropriate web meetings from the perspective of participants and organizers.

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This study examined how the rapid spread of telework triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has affected organizational behavior, especially teamwork. The spread of COVID-19 in 2020 led to a significant increase in telework in Japanese companies. Since telework involves non-face-to-face communication, it may have a negative impact on teamwork. We compared the teamwork of 23 teams in an organization by conducting a pre- (January 2020) and post-survey (May 2020) during the first wave of COVID-19 in Japan. We found that the proportions of telework and team virtuality increased significantly from pre-survey to post-survey. However, the teamwork and team performance data remained almost constant. Rather, on examining the data from May 2020 (post-survey), we found that team virtuality, especially technology use, had a positive correlation with teamwork. Thus, the rapid spread of telework and team virtuality does not necessarily hamper teamwork; rather, the technology-proficient teams may have excellent team processes and high team performance.

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This study was to clarify how work-from-home and telework, which were rapidly introduced in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, caused workers to experience changes in their work and personal lives, and to examine the relationships between these changes and psychological indicators. Semi-structured interviews about changes in work and personal life caused by working from home were first conducted with 56 Japanese workers who worked from home for the first time beginning in January 2020, and survey items were created from the responses. An internet survey was then conducted on 923 Japanese workers who started working from home for the first time when the state of emergency was issued in April 2020. Factor analysis was conducted, and 7 factors (with 64 items) were extracted: "difficulty in work" "easy to get work-life balance", "improvement of the working relationships", "improvement of the relationships with family", "interference from families during work", "becoming long work hours", and "difficulty in evaluating subordinates". Relationships between these subscales and job stressors, job resources, stress reactions, positive outcomes, work-life balance, and work-family conflicts were examined. Results indicated that long work hours were positively correlated with quantitative job demands, that work-from-home may improve work-related interpersonal relationships, and that improvement of the relationships with families may increase the positive spillover between work and home.

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For the prevention of COVID-19, many companies have been forced to adopt telework. There is mixed evidence showing that telework increases work-family conflict and, conversely, that it brings harmony between work and family. Little is known about how workers who transmitted to telework from on-site work responded in this unique circumstance of COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Results of an online survey using a crowdsourcing service (N = 1,412) demonstrated that workers with a higher percentage of transition to telework had higher levels of family interference with work, while no significant effect on work interference with family or stress. In addition, there was no significant moderating effect of participants’ gender or the age of their youngest child on these relationships. These results suggest that the transition to telework have increased work-family conflict during COVID-19 pandemic in Japan.

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This article is to consider new working styles after corona era by observing the actions taken by start-up company A in response to the spread of new coronavirus infection with data such as the office attendance status of employees working there. At Company A, the office attendance rate was low at the beginning when all employees were instructed to telework in principle in response to the state of emergency issued by the government, but after that, it gradually became under the control of the company. Although it rose, as a result of canceling company-wide unified control and leaving office attendance to the judgment of the department, the attendance rate was only about 25%, which is the current ratio of telework considered as the best work location mix by business side.

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This paper investigates whether the telework experience and management of work-family boundaries by workers has an effect on the work-family balance in the Corona pandemic. The analysis was divided by gender and presence of children, and the results showed that telework experienced under the Corona pandemic reduced the negative spillover only for men without children under junior high school age. On the other hand, no significant influence of telework was observed in other characteristics. Furthermore, factors affecting the work-family boundary differed for each characteristic (gender, presence of children). The results conclude that the hypothesis wherein work-family boundary management under the Corona pandemic reduces negative spillover is partially supported. Therefore, in order to improve the work-family balance, workers need to optimize time management to perform their work/family roles and make adjustments in the other life domains according to their own characteristics.

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