# Acting Instead of Reacting--Ensuring Employee Retention during Successful Introduction of i4.0
## 3 Materials and Methods  
To test, a secondary data analysis was performed with the study described in detail elsewhere [32]. However, the aspects relating to working from home were not analyzed before. The survey, by means of online questionnaire, was launched in June 2020, to collect data from a sample of individuals aged 18 years and above with a sample size of N = 1050, by Bilendi GmbH on behalf of Welda. A representative sample of inhabitants in Germany was recruited. The questionnaire-based survey was conducted between 8 June and 15 June in the year 2020. Using email, the company contacted individuals in their database by means of stratified sampling. In the inviting email, the purpose of the study was explained. When individuals clicked on the link to the study, they received further participant information which included a confidentiality statement. After reading this, study participants were asked to give informed consent by filling in a form. Only those who provided informed consent were allowed to continue to the questionnaire. The reason for this methodology and advantages of its choice were that the research questions could be investigated at high quality and there was easy access to the sample even in times of restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main aim was to be able to generalize the findings to the larger population and to overcome bias in typical respondent behaviors.  
Different subject areas were collected, such as socio-demographic data, work situation, perceived stress in times of lockdown, and perceived changes in the \"new\" everyday life. For the wording of the analyzed questions, see Tables 1 and 2 The way of designing the questionnaire, in order to generate the necessary data to achieve the research objectives, was determined by a theory-based and co-creative process: the last author performed a scoping review of the literature and, in exchange with potential future study participants, items and response formats were piloted and partially adapted. The validation of the questionnaire was performed by means of face validity and pilot analyses due to limited options to cross-validate the measures with other items.  
Overall, 60% of the sample reported being employed (625 individuals; not employed: 40%), and only these were contained in the following analyses. Of these, 302 (48.3%) were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 323 (51.7%) were working on-site as usual. Characteristics of these two groups are outlined in Table 1 and were tested for significant differences with frequency analyses (determining Chi\({}^{2}\)) and mean differences (MANOVA, reported below).  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Sample** & **Worked from Home** & **Worked on-Site** & **Total** & **Bivariate Test Statistic** \\ \hline Gender & - & - & - \\ Female & 137 (45.4\%) & 160 (49.5\%) & 297 (47.5\%) & - \\ Male & 165 (54.6\%) & 163 (50.5\%) & 328 (52.5\%) & Chi\({}^{2}\)(1) = 1.09; \(p\) = 0.30 \\ \hline Age (years) & M = 38.53 (SD = 13.01) & M = 44.92 (SD = 12.75) & M = 41.61 (SD = 13.26) & F(1) = 23.27; \(p\) \(<\) 0.01 \\
18–29 years & 82 (27.2\%) & 38 (11.8\%) & 120 (19.2\%) & - \\
30–39 years & 80 (26.5\%) & 60 (18.6\%) & 140 (22.4\%) & - \\
40–49 years & 56 (18.5\%) & 75 (23.2\%) & 131 (21.0\%) & - \\
50–59 years & 53 (17.5\%) & 104 (32.2\%) & 157 (25.1\%) & - \\
60–69 years & 16 (5.3\%) & 37(11.5\%) & 53 (8.5\%) & - \\
70+ years & 15 (5.0\%) & 9 (2.8\%) & 24 (3.8\%) & Chi\({}^{2}\)(5) = 47.48; \(p\) \(<\) 0.01 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Characteristics of individuals working from home (home office, mobile work, etc.) and those working on-site (office, supermarket, hospital, etc.) regarding socio-demographic variables.