Connected Disconnect : Challenges to Organizational Communication in Work from Home During and after COVID

Purpose: For numerous employees, work from home (WFH) was triggered by COVID and will likely continue post-pandemic. WFH often imposes information & communication technology (ICT) as the exclusive means of organizational communication (OC). This paper evaluates shortcomings of ICT as the channel of OC (ICT-COC) between employee and client/other externals, supervisor/seniors, juniors, and peers within and outside the team.Approach: This work leverages qualitative responses from a pilot study involving 28 Indian white-collar employees engaged in 8 industries, representing diverse task and organizational conditions. Technology Acceptance Model’s (TAM) tenets of Perceived Ease of Use (PEU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU) are blended with media characteristics perspectives to identify limitations of ICT-COC. Findings: Regarding PEU, vis-à-vis in-person interactions, ICT-COC requires additional effort to learn new communication skills by message senders, understand the message by receivers, and coordinate group interactions. Meanwhile, major constraints to ICT-COC's PU are its being largely unsuited for brief and serendipitous exchanges, conveying non-verbal cues thus forming and nurturing relationships, handling ambiguity and complexity, and supporting some situations of employee learning. Implications: The paper highlights limitations of ICT-COC and consequent disadvantages to employee wellbeing, productivity, performance, and career advancement; and to organizational culture, innovation, collaboration, and work coordination.Originality: The work integrates TAM and media characteristics perspectives to examine diverse forms of communication between a wide network of stakeholders. Indian experiences exemplify circumstances of developing countries also high-context and multi-active cultures