Remote work in cities: Assessing the effectiveness of public utility services

Abstract

Remote work is such a reengineering of an organization’s culture and management system. Public utility sector organizations are in an extraordinary situation because their primary goal, the current and continued satisfaction of social needs, partly determines innovative behavior. The lack of classic market determinants, such as profit orientation and private ownership, slows the adjustment to the new conditions. That’s why organizing remote work is challenging for human resource managers and team leaders in the public utility sector. Therefore, the article assesses the effectiveness of the management in the public utility sector during remote work. The most important conclusions are: (1) The full and effective integration of remote work practices remains an ongoing challenge, (2) The dominant form of goal control is task control (not direct control) during remote working, and (3) The organizational structure is flattened and flexible during remote work implementation.1. Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the need for widespread communication, learning, and working remotely. Barriers to remote communication related to awareness, acceptance, technical inadequacies, and hardware and software interoperability gaps, among others, were broken down. However, in doing so, new challenges emerged, including those related to management effectiveness. These changes are accompanied by several global trends that radically change socio-economic reality and human-space relationships. In the context of remote work, research has identified several particularly significant trends: the app-driven economy (Hasselwander, 2024; Morris & Murray, 2018; Nieborg et al., 2020), the sharing economy (Rifkin, 2014; Sundararajan, 2017), and the on-demand economy (Lin et al., 2025; Maselli et al., 2016; Sedkaoui & Khelfaoui, 2020). These interconnected economic paradigms have fundamentally altered how work is organized, delivered, and managed in the digital age, creating both opportunities and challenges for remote work implementation. One of the transformational forces behind the emergence of a global app economy has been the global spread of mobile media. By the early 1980s, the term “app” had become commonly used (Morris & Murray, 2018, p. 4). In the following years, the global popularity of apps made them great business, quickly becoming one of the most frequent ways users interact with software. “Apps are insinuating themselves further and further into the patterns of our everyday lives and becoming more habitual and second nature in the process” (Morris & Murray, 2018, p. 5). The applications become a habit, and users fluctuate between conscious routine and unconscious action, voluntary and involuntary, and creative and mechanical actions, thus becoming the main place of power and ideology (Chun, 2016, p. 8; Codagnone et al., 2018). As “the latest iteration of the software commodity,” mobile applications, or “apps,” have become both mundane and ubiquitous (Morris & Murray, 2018, p. 3). In an unusual way, they allow the democratization of life in all areas, from entertainment to work, business, social, or public activities. On the other hand, some researchers believe that we are dealing with hypercapitalism (Nieborg, 2021, p. 1) or App Imperialism (the dominance and control exerted by a few powerful app platforms over the digital ecosystem) (Nieborg et al., 2020). Applications integrate mobile hardware and personal software in a completely different way than desktop computers; they trigger a common understanding of technology, convenience, and the need to use it. All this makes us eager to move a significant part of our lives to the virtual world, e.g., work, education, health, entertainment, sports, shopping, market and non-market services. The app-driven economy is reinforced by another megatrend, the sharing economy (Sundararajan, 2017). Access to goods and services is as strong a basis for market functioning as ownership. However, the sharing of goods in the virtual space additionally makes it possible to achieve a state of zero marginal cost, completely changing the logic of costs and prices in both the public and private sectors (Rifkin, 2014