The COVID-19 pandemic required essentially all public accounting professionals to telecommute. However, alternative work arrangements (AWAs) such as telecommuting have long been offered by accounting firms to mitigate work-family conflict and other concerns inherent to the public accounting profession. Prior research has examined attitudes and perceptions about AWAs, but relatively little is known from the AWA adopters themselves and those who work directly with them. Given the heavy reliance on teamwork, multiple supervisors, and multiple clients in public accounting, it is not clear how telecommuting impacts critical relationship dynamics. Accounting students, though experienced with remote learning, can learn from pre-COVID telecommuters’ insights and experiences. In this paper, we interview telecommuters in public accounting as well as a non-telecommuting teammate (subordinate or superior) to develop rich insights about telecommuting’s impact from multiple perspectives. Our findings present best practices and challenges regarding telecommuting implementation within a team setting. Our results are useful to accounting educators as they advise and mentor today’s students, who are likely to enter a workforce with increasing prevalence of telecommuting post-COVID.

COVID-19大流行基本上要求所有公共会计专业人员进行通勤。但是，会计公司长期以来一直提供替代工作安排（AWA），例如远程通勤，以减轻工作家庭之间的冲突以及公共会计专业固有的其他担忧。先前的研究已经检查了对AWA的态度和看法，但是AWA的采用者本身和与之直接合作的人知之甚少。鉴于公共会计高度依赖团队合作，多个主管和多个客户，因此不清楚远程办公如何影响关键的关系动态。会计专业的学生尽管具有远程学习的经验，但他们可以从COVID远程通勤者的见解和经验中学习。在本文中，我们采访公共会计中的通勤人员以及非通勤队友（下属或上级），以从多个角度获得有关通勤影响的丰富见解。我们的发现提出了在团队环境中实施远程办公的最佳实践和挑战。我们的研究结果对会计教育工作者非常有用，因为他们可以为当今的学生提供建议和指导，而随着COVID后远程办公的普及，他们很可能会加入劳动力大军。