The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic introduced several challenges and negative consequences to healthcare systems, economies, and social lives. In response to the pandemic and to control the spread of the infection, many countries enforced precautionary measures such as social distancing and lockdowns [1]. These measures prevented the continuation of life as normal in different aspects, including work life. Thus, governments and industries all over the world adopted teleworking to continue business operations despite enforced precautionary measures and to mitigate the economic or financial consequences of the pandemic [2,3]. As a matter of fact, across the globe, an increased uptake of teleworking was observed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic [4-6].

Teleworking is an alternative work arrangement in which employees use information and communication technologies to perform their job duties in a location other than primary workplaces [7]. Teleworking has been adopted in times of crisis, disasters, and pandemics—such as COVID-19. Teleworking during a crisis holds different meanings to employees compared to “voluntary” teleworking and it is thus important to understand how employees experience and perceive teleworking in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Studies documenting experiences and views towards teleworking mainly use self-reported data through surveys. Validated employee-reported surveys are widely administered to examine experiences and perceptions towards teleworking. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, various surveys have been developed to document perceptions towards COVID-19 and teleworking. These surveys had diverse foci and purposes, such as assessing organizational readiness, the effectiveness of teleworking, the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking, qualities required for teleworking, teleworking adaptation, and experiences and perceptions towards teleworking [5,6,8-11].

In a literature search, we found that Moens et al. [8] designed a survey questionnaire on the experiences of teleworkers as well as perceptions towards teleworking given the COVID-19 pandemic. This survey questionnaire was found to have evidence of reliability and validity in Flemish employees.

Saudi Arabia is among the countries that adopted teleworking fastest and hence was able to considerably sustain the socioeconomic conditions in the country. Nevertheless, as per our knowledge, no previous studies have documented experiences of teleworking in Arab countries. Nonetheless, the Arabic language is the official language of 30 countries and states, and is spoken by more than 400 million people, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa [12]. To the best of our knowledge, there are no translated versions of the survey in any language. Furthermore, there is currently no evidence supporting the use of the survey for Arabic-speaking populations. The aim of the study was to adapt the survey to Arabic and determine the validity and reliability of the Arabic version of the survey in a sample of the Saudi population experiencing teleworking.

A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted to explore employees’ experiences and perceptions towards teleworking during COVID-19 pandemic. Convenience snowball sampling was utilized across the main geographical regions of Saudi Arabia. An online questionnaire was created using QuestionPro and disseminated via different social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Snapchat). The confidentiality of participants’ personal information was guaranteed, and informed consent was required before participation in the study. The data collection started during the partial curfew in the country, on June 8, 2020, and lasted for 2 weeks.

The aim of the study was to adapt the teleworking questionnaire developed by Moens et al. [8] to Arabic and to determine the validity and reliability of the Arabic version of the questionnaire in a sample of the Saudi population. The results of the study indicated that the Arabic version of the teleworking questionnaire had high reliability and good validity in assessing experiences and perceptions toward teleworking. No published studies have utilized the same survey tool as this study. However, previous studies using different teleworking survey tools have reported Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.65 to 0.84 [15,16].

The sample of this study was diverse in terms of demographic variables. Of the study population, the majority were women, married, aged between 31 years and 40 years old, and held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Our sample showed an almost equal representation of the private and public sectors. The sample was very similar to the Saudi labor market except in terms of gender participation in the labor market and sector employment. In the third quarter of 2020, women participation in the Saudi labor market was limited to 30%, and about 83% were employed in the private sector [13].

Since Arabic is the official language in many countries, creating an Arabic version of the instrument studying perception and experiences of teleworking was necessary. Our findings are comparable to any pertinent study based on the translation and validation of a questionnaire in a local context. Moens et al. [8] carefully designed the questionnaire on the topic under consideration. We adopted 2 constructs of teleworking: (1) the perceived impact of teleworking during COVID-19 crisis on various life and career aspects and (2) the perceived impact of the COVID-19 crisis on self-view of telework and digital meetings. For the first constructs, we observed interesting findings while dealing with negative items. The reliability was good when the same Likert score was used as given in the original paper [8]. However, the reliability coefficient increased notably when the items’ scores were reversed. Reverse coding of negative items in a set of positive items is cautiously recommended in the literature [17]. The factor analysis also clustered these 4 negative items in 1 factor. The psychometric properties of both constructs were good. However, these findings are not comparable to any study on teleworking, as we could not find psychometric measures for instruments on this topic. However, these psychometric measures were compared with other questionnaire studying similar topics. For instance, Ta’an et al. [18] also reported a Cronbach’s alpha value of more than 0.8 in the scales and subscales of their Arabic-translated questionnaire on workplace effectiveness. We also found excellent reliability of both constructs. The psychometric measures in their 6-factor model are comparable to those of our study in both constructs. The high CFI and TFI values and low RMSEA and SRMR values confirmed the validity of the items in the constructs. The convergent and discriminant validity of our first construct indicated that the negative items had low validity.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the only study to report a validated tool in Arabic to measure experiences and perceptions of teleworkers during a crisis. The availability of this validated tool is significant given that Arabic is the official language of 30 countries and states. Teleworking has been recognized as an alternative working mode during a crisis. While the validated survey examined perceptions and experiences during COVID-19, its use can be extended to capture experiences and perceptions during other crises that prevent the traditional working mode.

The study participants were limited to Saudi Arabia, which is one of the largest Arabic-speaking countries. Since this study had to be conducted in a short span of time to capture work experiences during the peak COVID-19 era. Later, the teleworking policies were relaxed, so we could not conduct test-retest reliability. Further studies would be necessary to cross-culturally validate the tool in other Arabic-speaking countries.