Abstract:

It is quite obvious nowadays that technology and digitalization influence the life of everyone, everywhere in the four corners of the world. In a general context, mastered change in the ways of working normally has to stimulate positive outcomes for employees and customers alike. In the current circumstances, due to COVID-19, new ways of working have sprung up massively and in an unexpected and unusual way around the globe. This sudden and radical change for certain organizations has had a lot of consequences on companies and employees, whether or not they are warned, ready, and trained for the change. Particularly, one couldn’t expect if employees would be able to work efficiently from home during the lockdown period and schedule their workday despite having a workspace where the family is strongly present. Certainly, family could be beneficial for the employee’s work-life balance. Indeed, being surrounded by the people we love can be a good motivation to be more efficient. At a first stage, previous research showed that telecommuting arrangements may make employees capitalize on their autonomy and flexibility. However, new ways of working may be stressful for individuals due to the lack of face-to-face contact with the work colleagues. It is important, at this point and depending on the current circumstances, to investigate how new ways of working influence the employees’ experience. That is specifically why we firstly propose to study the construct of employee experience - as an HR concept - in COVID times. Furthermore, knowing that the employee experience is inseparable from the customer experience (committed and satisfied employees fully contribute to a successful customer experience), it is necessary to study the exchange between the employee (supplier of a product/service) and the customer/consumer and their experiences before, during and after the exchange. For this reason, this paper proposes to secondly investigate the construct of customer experience – as a marketing concept - by applying it to education in COVID times. Given that teachers are considered as educational employees and students can be seen as educational customers and/or consumers, a key value would be to focus on the teacher’s and student's perceptions of their interactions with the educational institution throughout their distance teaching and learning process in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this research investigates in a qualitative exploratory approach how COVID-19 has affected teacher experience as an employee and student experience as a customer and the implications of the new ways of working beyond the current crisis. By applying management theories and business concepts to distance teaching and learning outcomes, this proposed design reveals the underlying dimensions of the different new ways of working outcomes on employee and customer experience constructs in the education sector through a study based on 40 observations carried out during COVID-19 period.

Keywords:

Teacher Experience, Student Experience, Employee Experience, Customer Experience, COVID-19.