Research Proposal Sample: Remote Working and Employee Retention in UK SMEs

Model Answer

Introduction and Background

The shift toward remote and hybrid working accelerated sharply following the COVID-19 pandemic, and survey evidence suggests the change has proved durable rather than temporary: Office for National Statistics data indicate that a substantial proportion of UK employees continue to work from home for at least part of the week, a marked and sustained increase on pre-pandemic levels (Felstead and Henseke, 2017; Office for National Statistics, 2023). For large organisations, this shift has been extensively studied, but small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which account for the majority of private sector employment in the UK, face distinct constraints: limited dedicated HR capacity, tighter budgets for workplace technology, and less formalised policy infrastructure than larger employers typically possess (CIPD, 2022).

At the same time, UK SMEs report persistent difficulty retaining staff in a competitive labour market, with recruitment and retention consistently identified as a top people-management concern among SME employers (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2023). Existing research on remote working has produced genuinely mixed conclusions about its effect on organisational outcomes of this kind. Some studies find that flexibility improves job satisfaction and, indirectly, retention (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007), while others highlight risks of professional isolation, reduced visibility for career progression, and blurred work-life boundaries that could equally damage retention over a longer period (Kelliher and Anderson, 2010; Wang et al., 2021).

Almost none of this research, however, focuses specifically on the SME context, where informal management practices and closer manager-employee relationships may alter how remote working is experienced compared with large corporate environments and their more formalised structures. This proposal addresses that gap directly, focusing on how remote working arrangements relate to employee retention intentions within UK SMEs, and on what specific HR and management practices moderate that relationship in practice.

The stakes of this question are not merely academic. Replacing a single employee is estimated by CIPD (2023) to cost UK employers a significant multiple of that employee’s salary once recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity are accounted for, a cost that falls disproportionately hard on SMEs with thinner margins and less capacity to absorb temporary understaffing than larger competitors. If remote or hybrid working arrangements are contributing to, or protecting against, staff turnover in ways that remain poorly understood at the SME level, then closing this evidence gap has direct commercial as well as academic value for the organisations this research is designed to inform.

Research Aim, Objectives and Questions

Aim. To investigate the relationship between remote working arrangements and employee retention intentions in UK small and medium-sized enterprises, and to identify the management practices that strengthen or weaken this relationship.

Objectives:

• To measure the association between remote or hybrid working arrangements and employees’ intention to remain with their current SME employer.
• To examine the mediating role of perceived organisational support and manager trust within this relationship.
• To identify which specific management practices, such as communication frequency, autonomy and informal check-ins, are associated with stronger retention intentions among remote and hybrid workers.
• To develop practice-relevant recommendations for SME managers seeking to sustain retention under remote or hybrid working arrangements.

Research Questions:

1. Is there a significant relationship between remote or hybrid working arrangement and employee retention intention in UK SMEs?
2. Does perceived organisational support mediate the relationship between working arrangement and retention intention?
3. Which management practices are most strongly associated with retention intention among remote and hybrid SME employees?

Brief Literature Context

Two theoretical traditions inform this proposal. The first, drawing on job demands-resources theory, treats remote working as a job resource that can increase autonomy and reduce commuting-related strain, thereby improving job satisfaction and reducing turnover intention (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007). Allen, Golden and Shockley’s (2015) systematic review broadly supports this position, concluding that telecommuting was associated with modestly higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intention across the studies they reviewed, though the authors cautioned that effect sizes were generally small and were moderated by the extent of telecommuting, whether occasional or full-time, and by whether the arrangement was voluntary or imposed on employees.

The second tradition is more cautious, emphasising the potential costs of remote working for social integration and career development within an organisation. Kelliher and Anderson (2010) found that employees using flexible working arrangements often responded with an “intensification of effort”, working longer or harder to demonstrate continued commitment and offset reduced visibility to managers, a pattern that, if sustained over time, could plausibly increase burnout and undermine the very retention benefits that flexibility is assumed to deliver. Wang et al. (2021), writing during the pandemic-driven shift to mandatory remote working, similarly identified communication ambiguity, work-home interference and a loss of everyday social interaction as recurring challenges, though they also found that employees with higher autonomy and clearer role expectations reported meaningfully better remote working outcomes, pointing to management practice, rather than remote working itself, as the more decisive factor overall.

A related strand of literature examines retention specifically, rather than the broader satisfaction and wellbeing outcomes discussed above. Turnover intention research has long established that job satisfaction, organisational commitment and perceived support are among the strongest predictors of an employee’s stated intention to leave, a relationship that predates the shift toward remote working but that plausibly interacts with it. If remote and hybrid arrangements affect satisfaction and perceived support, as the studies above suggest, then a downstream effect on retention intention is theoretically well grounded even though it has rarely been tested directly with SME employees as the sampling frame, a gap this proposal is positioned to close.

This distinction between the arrangement itself and the way it is managed is echoed in CIPD (2022) practitioner research, which found that UK employees under hybrid arrangements reported higher engagement when managers maintained regular one-to-one contact and made deliberate efforts to include remote staff in informal communication, relative to hybrid employees whose managers relied solely on scheduled formal meetings. This suggests perceived organisational and managerial support may function as a mediating mechanism between remote working arrangement and retention-relevant attitudes, a relationship rarely tested with SME-specific data to date. Felstead and Henseke (2017), using earlier UK Labour Force Survey data, additionally found that homeworkers reported both higher job satisfaction and greater work intensity simultaneously, underscoring that remote working’s effects on employee outcomes are unlikely to be uniformly positive or negative but instead depend heavily on how the arrangement is implemented and supported by line managers.

A smaller but growing strand of UK practitioner and consultancy literature has begun to focus specifically on SMEs, generally converging on the view that SME leaders often adopt remote and hybrid policies reactively, in response to employee expectations or competitor practice, rather than through a deliberate evaluation of the arrangement’s likely effect on retention or performance. This reactive adoption pattern, while understandable given SMEs’ limited HR resource, makes it more difficult for SME leaders to identify which specific elements of their remote working policy, if any, are actually driving employee outcomes, reinforcing the practical as well as academic value of the empirical evidence this proposal aims to generate.

Taken together, the literature suggests that remote working’s effect on retention in UK SMEs is unlikely to be direct, but is more plausibly mediated by perceived organisational support and shaped by specific, identifiable management practices, a relationship this proposal is designed to test empirically within an SME sample that the existing literature has largely overlooked.

It is also worth noting that SME employees may experience remote working differently from their large-organisation counterparts for structural reasons beyond management style alone. SMEs typically offer fewer internal career pathways, meaning employees who feel disconnected from informal office-based networking may perceive fewer opportunities for advancement while working remotely than an equivalent employee in a large corporate hierarchy with more formalised promotion routes. This structural difference has not, to the researcher’s knowledge, been directly tested in the remote-working literature, and represents a further, more specific gap this proposal is designed to help address through its SME-focused sampling frame.

Methodology

Design. The study will adopt a cross-sectional, mixed-methods design combining a quantitative online survey with a small number of semi-structured follow-up interviews, consistent with recommended approaches to applied organisational research of this kind (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2019). The survey component will test the proposed relationships between working arrangement, perceived organisational support and retention intention across a reasonably sized sample, while the interviews will provide explanatory depth on which specific management practices employees associate with feeling supported, addressing a limitation of purely quantitative designs identified in the reviewed literature.

Sample and Participants. The target population is employees of UK SMEs, defined as organisations with fewer than 250 employees, currently working under a remote or hybrid arrangement of some form. A target sample of 200 survey respondents will be recruited via professional networking platforms and partner SME employer networks, using purposive sampling to help ensure reasonable representation across sectors and firm sizes. From survey respondents who indicate willingness to participate further, between ten and twelve will be purposively selected for follow-up interviews to achieve variation in tenure, role seniority and industry sector. An a priori power analysis indicates that a sample of 200 provides adequate power to detect a small-to-medium effect size in the planned regression analysis, consistent with effect sizes reported in comparable organisational research (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007), while remaining a realistic recruitment target for a self-funded Master’s dissertation within a nine-month timeframe.

Data Collection. The survey will measure working arrangement, categorised as fully remote, hybrid, or occasional, retention intention using an adapted turnover intention scale, and perceived organisational support using a shortened version of the Survey of Perceived Organisational Support (Eisenberger et al., 1986). Semi-structured interviews, lasting approximately thirty to forty minutes and conducted online, will explore participants’ experiences of specific management practices in greater depth, guided by a topic guide developed directly from the survey’s management-practice items. Both instruments will be piloted with a small group of five to eight SME employees prior to full deployment, to check question clarity and survey length, with minor wording revisions made in response to pilot feedback before the main data collection phase begins.

Analysis Approach. Survey data will be analysed in IBM SPSS Statistics (Field, 2018) using multiple regression to test the direct relationship between working arrangement and retention intention, followed by a mediation analysis using bootstrapped indirect effects to test whether perceived organisational support mediates this relationship, consistent with the analytic approach used in comparable organisational research (Wang et al., 2021). Interview data will be analysed using thematic analysis following the six-phase approach set out by Braun and Clarke (2006), with resulting themes triangulated against the quantitative findings to identify which specific management practices employees most strongly associate with retention intention.

Ethics. The study will be submitted for university ethics committee approval prior to recruitment, following the British Psychological Society’s Code of Human Research Ethics as an applicable standard for social research of this kind (British Psychological Society, 2021). Participation will be voluntary and based on informed consent, with a clear and unconditional right to withdraw at any stage. Given that participants are discussing their current employer, particular care will be taken to anonymise organisational and individual identities in reporting, and no identifying data will be shared with participating employers under any circumstances. Data will be stored securely and processed throughout in accordance with UK GDPR requirements.

Limitations. The proposed design has acknowledged limitations. Purposive rather than random sampling limits the statistical generalisability of findings to the wider UK SME population, and reliance on self-reported retention intention, rather than observed staff turnover, means the study captures stated intention rather than confirmed future behaviour. The cross-sectional element of the survey also limits causal inference regarding the direction of the relationship between working arrangement and retention intention. These limitations are considered proportionate to the scope of a Master’s dissertation and are addressed, in part, through the triangulating interview strand.

Timeline

The project is planned to run across nine months from ethics approval to submission, as summarised in Table 1 below. Data collection is scheduled across two stages to allow the survey to close before interview participants are identified and formally approached. A brief contingency allowance is built into Phase 3 to accommodate the typically slower response rates associated with SME employee surveys relative to large-organisation samples.

Expected Contribution

This study will make three main contributions. Empirically, it will provide UK SME-specific evidence on the relationship between remote working and retention, addressing a gap in a literature that has focused predominantly on large organisations with dedicated HR functions. Theoretically, by testing perceived organisational support as a mediator, the study responds to calls in the literature (Wang et al., 2021) for research that explains the mechanism through which remote working arrangements translate into employee outcomes, rather than treating the relationship as a simple direct effect.

Practically, the identification of specific, transferable management practices associated with stronger retention intention will provide SME owners and managers, who typically lack dedicated HR resource, with actionable guidance for sustaining retention under remote and hybrid arrangements. Findings would be of particular relevance to CIPD-aligned HR practitioners and SME trade bodies seeking evidence-based guidance on the management of hybrid and remote teams, and could usefully inform future, larger-scale research extending this design to a broader cross-sector SME sample beyond the scope of the present study.

Finally, at a sector level, the study’s findings could feed into wider policy discussion around SME support. Government and business-support bodies increasingly promote flexible working as a recruitment differentiator for SMEs competing against larger employers on salary, but this promotion has generally proceeded ahead of robust SME-specific evidence. A study that identifies which management practices actually sustain retention under remote and hybrid working, rather than assuming the arrangement itself is sufficient, would provide a more precise, evidence-based basis for that policy conversation than currently exists.

References

Allen, T.D., Golden, T.D. and Shockley, K.M. (2015) ‘How effective is telecommuting? Assessing the status of our scientific findings’, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(2), pp. 40–68.

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) ‘Using thematic analysis in psychology’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), pp. 77–101.

British Psychological Society (2021) Code of Human Research Ethics. Leicester: BPS.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2023) Labour Market Outlook: Views from Employers. London: CIPD.

CIPD (2022) Flexible and Hybrid Working Practices: A Practical Guide. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Eisenberger, R., Huntington, R., Hutchison, S. and Sowa, D. (1986) ‘Perceived organizational support’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(3), pp. 500–507.

Felstead, A. and Henseke, G. (2017) ‘Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well-being and work-life balance’, New Technology, Work and Employment, 32(3), pp. 195–212.

Field, A. (2018) Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics. 5th edn. London: Sage.

Gajendran, R.S. and Harrison, D.A. (2007) ‘The good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting: meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(6), pp. 1524–1541.

Kelliher, C. and Anderson, D. (2010) ‘Doing more with less? Flexible working practices and the intensification of work’, Human Relations, 63(1), pp. 83–106.

Office for National Statistics (2023) Homeworking and Spending During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic, Great Britain. Newport: ONS.

Saunders, M., Lewis, P. and Thornhill, A. (2019) Research Methods for Business Students. 8th edn. Harlow: Pearson.

Wang, B., Liu, Y., Qian, J. and Parker, S.K. (2021) ‘Achieving effective remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic: a work design perspective’, Applied Psychology, 70(1), pp. 16–59.