The prominent theme from the bibliometric analysis in IOP research is mental health. This indicates the dominance of the emergence of the keywords related to this theme, which is consistent with the result at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (Zambrano et al., 2021). The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health has received considerable attention because at least 10% of the population reported experiencing mental health problems (Gloster et al., 2020). The population experienced an increase in several mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from personal symptoms to symptoms related to performance and the environment, such as doubting knowledge and skills and feeling uncomfortable within the team (Vanhaecht et al., 2021). The prominent mental health problems experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic are acute stress disorder, anxiety and depression, with chest pain, physical exhaustion and sleep disturbance as common symptoms (Van Roekel, Van Der Fels, Bakker, & Tummers, 2021; Wang et al., 2021; Yang et al., 2021). There are several risk factors identified: (1) social connectivity, including social support (Gloster et al., 2020; Ye et al., 2020) and lower-level communication with friends (Tahara, Mashizume, & Takahashi, 2020); (2) demographic factors, including education level (Gloster et al., 2020), female gender (Prati, 2021) and employment status (Nam, Eum, Huh, Jung, & Choi, 2021); (3) personal factors, including self-compassion (Kotera, Mayer, & Vanderheiden, 2021), personality traits and coping (Cook, Hassem, Laher, Variava, & Schutte, 2021; Osimo, Aiello, Gentili, Ionta, & Cecchetto, 2021; Smith et al., 2021), resilience (Cook et al., 2021), work satisfaction (Tahara et al., 2020) and work engagement (Kotera et al., 2021); (4) environment and work factors, including high-risk working area (Ruiz-Fernández et al., 2020), work stressor (Hu, Dai, Wang, Zhang, Li, & He, 2021), work responsibility (Parthasarathy, Jaisoorya, Thennarasu, & Murthy, 2021), work hour (Britt et al., 2020) and organisational support (Cook et al., 2021). These mental health problems will interfere with long-term health conditions (Zara, Settanni, Zuffranieri, Veggi, & Castelli, 2021) and work functioning (Fu, Greco, Lennard, & Dimotakis, 2021).

Workplace research during the COVID-19 pandemic focused more on the area of health-related businesses. However, some researchers have also examined business areas affected by the pandemic, such as retail, hospitality, tourism (Aburumman, 2020; Childs, Gokcecik, Yoon, & Lee, 2021), manufacturing (Belhadi et al., 2021; Görlich & Stadelmann, 2020) and sport (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2020; Parnell, Bond, Widdop, & Cockayne, 2021). Following the healthcare business as focus, research participants were mostly health care workers, both nurses and physicians. Consistent with the impact of the previous outbreak, health care workers were the most vulnerable group to mental health problems (Shah et al., 2020), and they have a higher risk of experiencing long-term mental health effects (Nelson & Lee-Winn, 2020). Health care workers’ mental health problems increased because of irregular working hours, higher levels of exposure to illness, fear of infection and lack of adequate PPE, amongst others (World Health Organization, 2021; Yang et al., 2021). Anxiety and depression were mental health problems frequently experienced, with insomnia, sleeping disorders and burnout as risk factors (Chen et al., 2021; World Health Organization, 2021), and these are often reported by workers who work with COVID-19 patients (Parchani et al., 2021; Vagni, Maiorano, Giostra, & Pajardi, 2020; Van Roekel et al., 2021). During this pandemic, traumatic stress in health care workers was also related to moral injury, because they were often facing difficult conditions in making decisions (Litam & Balkin, 2021), especially those with clinical responsibility (Parthasarathy et al., 2021). Regarding the conditions, providing mental health programmes for health care workers is urgently needed, both as preventive and curative action (Crittenden, Spieker, & Landini, 2021; Yang et al., 2021). Besides developing internal ability programmes such as increasing self-efficacy (Vagni et al., 2020), resiliency (Kelly, Uys, Bezuidenhout, Mullane, & Bristol, 2021), effective appraisal and coping (Cook et al., 2021; Ji, Han, Deng, & Lu, 2021; Pearman, Hughes, Smith, & Neupert, 2020), it is essential to provide social support (Husted & Dalton, 2021; Ji et al., 2021) and health service such as telecounselling that may feasibly improve mental health conditions (Gupta et al., 2021).

Based on dominant keywords, specific workplace issues can be categorised into two categories. Firstly, workplace mental health consists of mental health problems and related variables, namely burnout, occupational stress, fatigue and workload. Secondly, general workplace changes because of the COVID-19 pandemic covered job insecurity, work from home (WFH) or remote work, leadership, job satisfaction, work engagement, work or task performance, entrepreneurship, work–life balance and productivity. In the context of this pandemic situation, mental health issues as the first category are related and centred on the issue of burnout. Most workers experience burnout during pandemics (Denning et al., 2021) with predictors such as demographic, personal health problems, work environment and personal factors. Demographic factors include gender, parental status, marriage status (Duarte et al., 2020), educational level (Shoja et al., 2020) and age (Littzen, 2021). Personal health problems consist of insomnia, somatic symptoms (Rodríguez-López, Rubio-Valdehita, & Díaz-Ramiro, 2021), stress and depression (Duarte et al., 2020) that were confirmed or suspected with COVID-19 infection (Sarboozi Hoseinabadi, Kakhki, Teimori, & Nayyeri, 2020). Work environment factors are work change (task, setting and team) (Rodríguez-López et al., 2021; Sklar, Ehrhart, & Aarons, 2021), COVID-19 exposure at work (Sarboozi Hoseinabadi et al., 2020), salary reduction (Duarte et al., 2020), hospital resources (Sarboozi Hoseinabadi et al., 2020), work overload (Rodríguez-López et al., 2021; Shoja et al., 2020), the shift of work (Shoja et al., 2020), period of working hours (Dimitriu et al., 2020) and workload (Dimitriu et al., 2020). Personal factors include negative coping strategies (Crescenzo et al., 2021), risk concerns (Sousa, Almeida, & Leal, 2021), job expectations (Rodríguez-López et al., 2021), job stress (Sarboozi Hoseinabadi et al., 2020), lower job dedication (Huang et al., 2021), emotional intelligence (Olatunji, Idemudia, & Owoseni, 2020), life satisfaction and resilience (Di Trani, Mariani, Ferri, De Berardinis, & Frigo, 2021). Most of the studies were conducted on healthcare workers, whilst others provide a different point of view by examining burnout in participants from fashion retailing workers (Rodríguez-López et al., 2021) and social workers (Garcia, 2021). Concerning the cases, several suggestions arise to prevent and minimise the burnout effect, such as by building positive attitude and social support strategies (Crescenzo et al., 2021), utilising boundaries at work (Rapp, Hughey, & Kreiner, 2021), decreasing workload, promoting procedural justice and professional identification (Correia & Almeida, 2020).

Meanwhile, most studies focused on problems, and the other research provided alternative solutions to dealing with workplace mental health problems. The first solution is a personal-oriented solution that works on individuals psychologically and physically. Psychologically, research shows that strengthening hope and optimism is one of the keys in dealing with coronavirus-related anxiety problems (Prazeres et al., 2020). Physically, individuals are encouraged to remain active to overcome work fatigue, because a sedentary lifestyle (as predominantly practised during the pandemic) increases worker fatigue (Koohsari et al., 2021). The second solution is a social-oriented solution that works on building social support. Tahara et al. (2020) describe that participants who experienced poorer mental health conditions during this pandemic tend to seek social support. The pandemic as a stressful condition may drive individuals to reactivate dormant ties as a coping mechanism (Yang, Soltis, Ross, & Labianca, 2021). The third solution is a system-oriented solution that focuses on policy and systems in the workplace. Modification to the work environment is important to minimise mental health problems and burnout. Tan et al. (2020) suggest that organisations provide adequate training, avoid long shifts of more than 8 h and promote safe work environments, especially for health care companies. Modification in work design, suggested by Sklar et al. (2021), implies that organisations should limit task, setting and team-related work changes to the extent possible. Emotional support in the work environment also needs to be fostered by implementing the stepped care model (Price, Becker-Haimes, & Benjamin Wolk, 2021).

The second category implies general workplace changes during the pandemic, ranging from worker level to policies. At the worker level, millions of jobs were lost because of the pandemic (International Labour Organization, 2020). It not only impacted job insecurity but also affected emotional and mental health conditions (Lin, Shao, Li, Guo, & Zhan, 2021; Obrenovic, Du, Godinic, Baslom, & Tsoy, 2021), job performance (De Angelis, Mazzetti, & Guglielmi, 2021) and well-being (Stankevičiūtė, Sanchez-Hernandez, & Staniškienė, 2021). At the policy level, immediate action at the beginning of the pandemic was related to preventing the COVID-19 from spreading by applying for WFH, which has brought a different way of working (Hartner-Tiefenthaler, Goisauf, Gerdenitsch, & Koeszegi, 2021). Interestingly, besides side effects like worsening presenteeism (Shimura, Yokoi, Ishibashi, Akatsuka, & Inoue, 2021) and increasing emotional exhaustion (Chong, Huang, & Chang, 2020), workers perceived more productivity during WFH (Zappalà, Toscano, & Topa, 2021), and it decreased psychological and physical stress responses (Shimura et al., 2021). Some research highlights that the effectiveness of WFH depends on leadership (Shockley, Allen, Dodd, & Waiwood, 2021) and managerial control policies (Hartner-Tiefenthaler et al., 2021; Irshad et al., 2021).

The pandemic has accelerated digitalisation and automation in various business areas, either in technologies that relate directly to the virus treatment or in areas that assist people to adjust to the crisis conditions (Brem, Viardot, & Nylund, 2021). It is dominated by telemedicine in health care (Rivest, Caron, & Desbeaumes Jodoin, 2021), e-learning in education (Alqahtani & Rajkhan, 2020) and teleworking in almost any kind of business (Zhang, Yu, & Marin, 2021). The absorption of telemedicine in the first year of the pandemic increased by 50% compared to the same period in the previous year (Koonin et al., 2020) and provided a variety of services from physical to mental health problems (Thippaiah, Harbishettar, Kumar, & Pandurangi, 2020; Watts et al., 2020). A meta-analysis showed that telemedicine is effective for some mental health interventions and reduce client waiting time compared to traditional therapy (Bennett, Ruggero, Sever, & Yanouri, 2020). In the workplace context, during the pandemic, the employee assistance programme (EAP) transformed into telehealth because it was primarily delivered virtually (Couser, Nation, & Hyde, 2021). Nevertheless, virtual EAP or telehealth still faces a low adoption rate for many reasons, but eventually many clients become more familiar with the new modes of delivery (Couser et al., 2021).

The keyword frequently appearing in research methods is ‘cross-sectional study’. As one of the most widely used designs in applied psychology research (Austin, Scherbaum, & Mahlman, 2004), the cross-sectional study is particularly suitable for estimating the prevalence of behaviour or disease in a population (Sedgwick, 2014). The advantages of this design include simplicity, data acquisition speed, cost-effectiveness, short data collection period and minimal participant burden (Sedgwick, 2014; Taris, Kessler, & Kelloway, 2021). This design has an eminent advantage for data collection in COVID-19 research because most participants have direct exposure to COVID-19 handling. Several researchers compare different types of workgroups, including those based on demographics (Duarte et al., 2020; Tahara et al., 2020), position and responsibilities (Denning et al., 2021; Sarboozi Hoseinabadi et al., 2020) and personal factors (Tahara et al., 2020). Therefore, the researchers used cross-sectional designs because they are well-suited for testing assumptions about the relationships of interest and provide a clear impression of the state of affairs in an organisation or amongst a group of workers at a given point in time (Taris et al., 2021). The other keywords that emerged in this cluster are ‘survey’ and ‘questionnaire’. The methods are frequently used during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the ease of collecting extensive data in a faster way and the possibility to continue online collection during the restriction period (Singh & Sagar, 2021). However, Singh and Sagar (2021) raised several concerns about the methods that could impact the scientific quality of survey findings.

Several countries that appear as the dominant keywords in COVID-19-related workplace research include the USA and China. Both countries had the worst outbreak records at different times and contribute considerably to COVID-19 research (Wang & Tian, 2021; Zhai et al., 2020). By 2021, the USA’s research contributed 21.3% of the total world research and focused on intervention and vaccines, whilst China has reached 20.7% that emphasised clinical features, virology and immunology, epidemiology, detection and diagnosis (Wang & Tian, 2021). As the top two COVID-19 research contributors, China showed notable works in the early pandemic, especially in clinical features and complications, such as Huang et al.’s (2020) work, since the first case was found in Wuhan, but by July 2021 China was overtaken by the USA (Wang & Tian, 2021).