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Remote Collaborative Childcare in the Workplace: Sharing Childcare with Colleagues during COVID-19 Emergency

Published: 21 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The COVID-19 emergency and consequent lockdowns left many parents struggling to balance childcare and paid employment, exposing the crucial role of work-life balance policies and practices. As a consequence, co-production initiatives has seen a sharp rise, with the creation of many different grassroots activities, also related to childcare services. Although it is not clear whether these initiatives will continue after the pandemic, they provide an interesting laboratory to investigate digitally mediated co-production of services. This paper presents a case study of a grassroot initiative based on the co-production of childcare services within an organizational context. We report on how this initiative has been adapted during the COVID-19 emergency, discussing how the community of colleagues reacted to the new challenges of the pandemic, and the technological and organizational arrangements that have accompanied such changes. Results from interviews and focus groups revealed the mediating role that digital technology played in the co-production, presenting challenges and opportunities to working parents while dealing with a period of emergency and isolation. These findings suggest implications for organizations to promote remote collaborative childcare practices and support workers wellbeing and work-life balance, considering motivational and social aspects and the role of technology in fostering co-production practices.

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  • (2023)Emergent Collaborations Outside of Organizational Frameworks: Exploring Relevant ConceptsProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593778(163-173)Online publication date: 29-May-2023

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cover image ACM Other conferences
C&T '21: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech
June 2021
345 pages
ISBN:9781450390569
DOI:10.1145/3461564
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 June 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Childcare
  2. Co-production
  3. Knowledge Workers
  4. Work-Life Balance
  5. Workplace

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  • Short-paper
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  • Refereed limited

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C&T '21
C&T '21: Communities & Technologies 2021
June 20 - 25, 2021
WA, Seattle, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 183 submissions, 44%

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  • (2023)Emergent Collaborations Outside of Organizational Frameworks: Exploring Relevant ConceptsProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593778(163-173)Online publication date: 29-May-2023

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