Effects of Working from Home on Job Performance: Empirical Evidence in the Saudi Context during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article deals with interesting and current issues. The literature review is very exhaustive and the research conducted provides interesting conclusions. The article, however, has significant drawbacks.
The article is not prepared in accordance with the template for Sustainability (e.g. references in the text should be numbered, there is no information about Author Contributions, Funding and Data Availability Statement).
The big disadvantage of the article is its carelessness. The following are examples of a lack of care that detracts from its scientific value:
- in line 417-418 the "percent" or "%" is missing for the numbers 59.6 and 40.4;- remarks related to Table 2: What does the number "15" (lower right cell) refer to? The word "percent" (or "%") is missing in some places in the table, there is no sample size, and there are empty cells in the table,
- line 434 "To measure" the goodness of the CFA model fit (...) where does the quotation mark end? - Table 1 is incomprehensible, there is no reference to it in the text, what do the numbers in it refer to? - lines 128-131 - the last sentence is incomprehensible: Recent study conducted by Bichel et al. (2021) has pointed that the pandemic has accelerated the number of employees who work from home from 16% pre-pandemic to 65% during the pandemic in the USA. In UK this percentage reached 45% in April 2020. However, this percentage did not exceed 5% of workers already working from home before the pandemic. - the article is sloppy in terms of editing, e.g. unnecessary spaces in lines 146-148, writing some words with unnecessarily capital letters (Working from Home, line 158 'While Some ...'). Why are hypotheses 1-6 bold and italicized and hypotheses 7-10 not? It has to be standardized. The authors' lack of diligence is annoying. - lines 158-160: The sentence is incomprehensible: 'While Some companies like Twitter have instituted remote working permanent policies which supported by the results of Kazekami (2020) study which suggested that appropriate teleworking hours increase labor productivity, while longer hours have the opposite effect ' - lines 374-376: the last sentence is a repetition ('Figure 1 shows the theoretical research framework and hypotheses. The model proposes that WFH is particularly related to job performance through staff attitudes and perceptions. It also suggests that WFH is positively related to job performance through attitudes and perceptions'). As I understand it, the authors first conducted a pilot study among students, and then the actual research among employees. However, this should be written immediately to avoid any doubts (lines 388-389). The research method is not well described: how much did the research sample total when it was conducted, the number of respondents and the dates given by the authors refer to the students and the pilot study.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments. I have followed your comments and suggestion.
Please see the attached checklist.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Greetings,
The paper is good but needs to be corrected. The introduction should emphasize the objectives and contribution of the paper. Citing literature throughout the paper is not good. Use square brackets [1], not Nakrošienė et al., 2019 still go with the numbers. Edit the tables throughout the text a little to make them clearer. After the results you need to write a selection of discussions. The references at the end of the paper are in the order in which they were used in the paper and not in alphabetical order.
All best.
Author Response
Thank you so much for your comments.
Please see the attached file of the checklist.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I repeat my two comments from the previous review:
Firstly, there is no informationa about Authors contribution to the article. Please see the excerpt from the Sustainability template: ‘Author Contributions: For research articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided. The following statements should be used “Conceptualization, X.X. and Y.Y.; methodology, X.X.; software, X.X.; validation, X.X., Y.Y. and Z.Z.; formal analysis, X.X.; investigation, X.X.; resources, X.X.; data curation, X.X.; writing—original draft preparation, X.X.; writing—review and editing, X.X.; visualization, X.X.; supervision, X.X.; project administration, X.X.; funding acquisition, Y.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.” Please turn to the CRediT taxonomy for the term explanation. Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work reported.’.
Secondly, there is still no reference to Table 1 in any sentence of the article. What do the numbers in the table refer to, e.g. 61, 246? It is not known. It needs to be clarified.
Author Response
Here I attached the response to the minor corrections checklist
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Greetings,
The authors followed all the suggestions. The paper should be accepted now.
All best
Author Response
reply to the comments from the reviewer
Kind regards
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
