Examining Remote and on-site Work Practices During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic from a Business Ethics Perspective: A Case Study of Bursa

During the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work practices gained momentum and legally recognized by the with the implementation of the “Remote Work Regulation.” This research aims to examine how employees effected to different working models during and after the Covid-19 pandemic analyze their working conditions from an ethical perspective, with particular emphasis on analyzing diffenrences in ethical perceptions related to justice, equality, workload, orgazinational responsibility and work-life balance between those who had opportunity to access remote work practices and those who did not. The study was pursued within a qualitative research framework using a comparative case study design through semi-structured interviwes. For the field study, interviews were conducted with 22 white collar office employees—11 who had worked remotely and 11 who had never worked remotely— across 5 different locations in Bursa of a multinational company active in the automative suply industry. Inaddition, the Remote Working Regulation and the company’s internal remote working protocols were examined within the scope of document analysis. The derived data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings suggest that employees assess remote working practices differently from an ethical persceptive. Participants working remotely identified disadvantages in terms of career devolopment, visibility and organizational ties, whereas on-site employees evaluated their roles within the framework of organizational necessity. Both groups prioritized the importance of employee consent in decion-making processes and experessed a more conducive attitude toward hybrid working models in the long term. By addresing the ethical dimension of remote working and on-site practices from a multidimensional perspective, this study contributes to the literature and to organizational practices.