Sentiment Analysis to Explore User Perception of Teleworking in Saudi Arabia

Due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, many public and private organizations from different sectors in Saudi Arabia were forced to enforce teleworking as the main work arrangement. This paper seeks to understand the experience and attitude of the public toward remote work by analyzing Twitter data from March 2020 to July 2021 by using "Mazajak" the online Arabic analyzer. A corpus of 39,523 tweets with hashtags mentioning the teleworking program in Saudi Arabia was obtained. The results indicate that neutrality was the most prevalent sentiment with 58.21%, followed by positive sentiment with 30.67%. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes in the tweets with positive and negative sentiment. Flexibility, teamwork, teleworking preference, and learning were the major themes related to positive sentiment, while themes related to negative sentiment were private sector, companies, and fake.