COVID-19 and Beyond: Employee Perceptions of the Efficiency of Teleworking and Its Cybersecurity Implications

The main idea of this research is to examine how teleworking has affected employee perceptions of organizational efficiency and cybersecurity before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research is based on an analytical and empirical approach. The starting point of the research is a critical and comprehensive analysis of the relevant literature regarding the efficiency of organizations due to teleworking, digital information security, and cyber risk management. The quantitative approach is based on designing a structural equation model (SEM) on a sample of 1101 respondents from the category of employees in Montenegro. Within the model, we examine simultaneously the impact of their perceptions on the risks of teleworking, changes in cyber-attacks during teleworking, organizations’ capacity to respond to cyber-attacks, key challenges in achieving an adequate response to cyber-attacks, as well as perceptions of key challenges related to cybersecurity. The empirical aspects of our study involve constructing latent variables that correspond to different elements of employee perception; namely, their perception of organizational efficiency and the extent to which the digital information security of their organizations has been threatened during teleworking during the pandemic.