Remote working became a widespread business practice during the COVID-19 pandemic as an organizational response to protect employees’ health and maintain business continuity. The aim of this paper is to reveal the role of social support in the relationship among NWHI, NHWI and loneliness, and work engagement and job performance. The study respondents were employees with a remote working status in Serbian companies, and a total of 226 valid surveys were collected. The PLS-SEM approach was deployed to test the hypothesized relationship between named variables. A standard bootstrapping procedure was used to reveal direct and indirect effects among latent variables. Results indicate a strong and positive direct association between social support and work engagement and job performance, while mediation and moderation of the role of social support were mostly confirmed but with some results opposite to what was expected. Social support was not able to buffer a negative home–work interaction and loneliness within remote working. The study offers insight into the role of social support and recommendations for managing the antecedents and consequences of remote working, with the aim to determine a sustainable model for extensive application, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic, but in regular times.

With the outbreak of the pandemic caused by the virus COVID-19, companies all around the world were affected and faced a new reality. In such circumstances, remote working was a necessary organizational response to the forthcoming crisis, to provide business continuity and protect their employees. For many companies, remote working is a completely new experience without any preparation period. The subject of the research is to reveal the perception and correlation between different variables, which are crucial for successful remote working implementation, within two groups of remote workers, male and female. This research highlights the differences and provides guidelines for successful remote working implementation for different genders. An original empirical research was conducted on a sample of companies that are doing business activities in Serbia and were deployed remote working for their employees during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the differences between male and female respondents toward five defined variables important for remote working: social support (SP), autonomy (A), monitoring (M), job performance (JP) and work engagement (WE) during remote working. The relationships between the indicated variables were tested by correlation analysis of 121 collected surveys.