The pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus led to an extensive, and rather immediate, situation of a substantial number of employees being “forced” to work from home. Even if the technology was developed for enabling this “new” type of telework, not all employees or managers were prepared for this abrupt introduction. The pandemic represented a crisis that needed the resolving of Knowledge Management issues, while maintaining a reasonable level of production. This posed managerial issues, such as maintaining communication with the employees, as well as maintaining the focus on the production, customers and other stakeholders. Our paper shows how the management in two different organizations, one public and one private, perceived the crisis and its challenges, and how they handled the various stages of the crisis. The managers have experienced the issues described in the literature of telework, Work From Home (WFH), remote work and flexible work, such as resolving to empowering leadership (EL), installing the employees with trust and autonomy and recognizing the loss of informal communication. They struggle to acquire an overview of the employees’ well-being, at the same time as they experience a decrease in sick leaves and an increase in production. © The Authors, 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Knowledge management during a long-term crisis: Challenges with distributed employees