Electronic Workplace Research Articles

Digitalization of anesthesiology and resuscitation services: multicenter questionnaire study

OBJECTIVE: To substantiate recommendations for the implementation of the concept and technologies of digitalization of the anesthesiology and resuscitation (A&R) service in multidisciplinary hospitals to solve the problem of ensuring the safety of patients and medical personnel. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study presents data on the implementation of information technology in the practice of the A&R service based on information received from 235 anesthesiology and resuscitation specialists working in leadership positions in various categories of healthcare institutions. Method of collecting information: experts independently completed the online version of the questionnaire. Sampling principle: intentional. Survey period: April 12, 2023 — August 4, 2023. RESULTS: In 87 % of hospitals the medical information system (MIS) of the A&R service is part of the hospital’s MIS. Only in 23 % of hospitals all workstations of the anesthesiologist-resuscitator are connected to the MIS. Logging into a personal electronic workplace using access rights on any of the hospital’s personal computers was confirmed by 87 % of respondents. Hospitals in which anesthesiology and resuscitation equipment are not integrated into the MIS account for 89 %. In the case of branches with a local A&R information system, equipment in 44 % of similar branches is connected to it. Only in 51 % of hospitals the A&R receives data from the laboratory information system, the integration rates with the radiological information system are even lower and amount to only 34 %. The study revealed a significant problem with the introduction of clinical recommendations, drug reference books, as well as prevention and manipulation protocols, various requirements and, in particular, scales/indices for assessing the condition of patients into the MIS. CONCLUSIONS: For the full functioning of the MIS, organizational solutions are needed that are aimed at implementing the tasks, primary and future. The development and application of modern MIS in anesthesiology and resuscitation will contribute to the further development of the specialty and ensure patient safety and adequate quality of medical care. It is necessary to unify the requirements for MIS developers according to the main components in the functionality.

Feeling the Strain: Understanding the Relationship between Stress and Physical Activity in Members of the Royal Canadian Navy.

Research finds that experiencing psychological stress can be associated with engaging in less physical activity, a critical contributor to operational readiness and overall health and well-being. As navy personnel tend to engage in lower levels of physical activity than other military personnel, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between stress and physical activity in the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) and identify moderators of this relationship. Data for this study were obtained from an electronic workplace well-being survey administered to a stratified random sample of 930 members in hard sea occupations managed by the RCN. Multivariable logistic regressions examined the associations between indicators of stress (e.g., job stress, burnout, work-life conflict, and psychological distress) and physical activity engagement; the moderating effects of demographic/military characteristics and health status (e.g., rank, gender, sailing status, general health status, and body mass index [BMI]) were examined. Navy personnel who were married or in common-law relationships and those who reported poorer overall health were less likely to be physically active. Navy personnel with lower psychological distress were more likely be active (P = .03); however, direct associations with other indicators of stress were not significant. BMI was the only significant moderator of the relationship between stress and physical activity. Specifically, for members classified as obese, higher levels of burnout and work-life conflict were associated with being more physically active. Conversely, nonobese members with elevated burnout reported less physical activity. The findings of this study support a complex relationship between experiencing stress and engaging in physical activity, which showed varying patterns based on BMI classification. Although the cross-sectional nature of the data precludes any inferences about the direction of these effects, the results suggest that some members of the RCN are more at risk of experiencing decrements in physical activity. Future research should examine the types of physical activity supports and incentives that are needed to ensure that navy personnel derive the benefits of an active lifestyle, especially in times of stress.

Challenges and Opportunities of Electronic Workplace Surveillance in the Public Sector in Zimbabwe

Workplace surveillance is taking the world of work by storm and is becoming the flavour of the moment as a form of scientific supervision. This study sought to unpack the challenges and opportunities of electronic workplace surveillance systems in a selected Public Sector Organisation in Zimbabwe. The study adopted qualitative research using a sample size of twenty-one participants drawn from a population of 105 employees. Primary data was collected through semi-structured questionnaires and interviews, and secondary data was gathered using company records. Findings revealed various forms of surveillance including but not limited to the use of closed-circuit television (CCTV), biometric logging, vehicle tracking, telephone tapping email, and internet monitoring. Opportunities identified centered on the possibility to increase productivity, enhancing security, curbing abuse of organizational resources, and curbing sexual harassment and bullying at the workplace. Challenges identified were the invasion of privacy, the perpetuation of power dynamics, exertion of stress, emotional labour, the killing of innovation spirit, and erosion of trust between employees and employer. The researchers recommend crafting a robust surveillance policy that clears set guidelines, and parameters and provide remedial pathways in the public sector.

Reforming the institute of notary institute in the modern conditions of European integration

The scientific article is devoted to the process of reforming and improving the notary institution in accordance with international standards. Consideration of ways to reform the notary as a complex problem should ensure the success of such reform and stable functioning of the system. Taking into account the needs of civil circulation, we can talk about the relevance of the topic raised in the article, its scientific and applied nature and unconditional connection with notarial practice. 
 The notary reform is primarily a benefit for people, because the implementation of the planned will save time and money of citizens and businesses, ensure the availability of notarial actions, overcome corruption in the field of justice, create reliable protection against fraud, significantly save the state budget, and finally move to the standards of the European Union. 
 Today, significant economic and political changes are taking place in Ukraine, which significantly affect the process of notary reform.
 The implementation of the reform involves three strategic steps. Firstly, the introduction of an electronic notary system. This project is designed to improve the quality of notarial actions by reducing the time to perform the action and protecting the notarial document from forgery.
 In particular, the large-scale digitization of notarial activity involves: the rejection of keeping paper books of notary activities; reducing the number of documents that a person must submit to perform a notarial act; automation of a number of processes in the activity of notaries; effective information interaction between state information resources; maintaining a notarial archive in electronic form.
 A full technical and economic analysis of E-notary has already been prepared. It is planned that the first stage of the «pilot» with the notary's electronic workplace will be launched by the end of 2020.
 The next step is the transition to a single notary. This will make it possible to consolidate the unified status of a notary in Ukraine, abandoning the system of dividing notaries into public and private ones, as was done in many European states. The transition to a single notary office will involve the gradual termination of the activities of state notary offices, and therefore will allow a significant reduction of state expenses for their maintenance, which will contribute to the saving of budget funds. A concept of measures has been developed that will guarantee the availability of basic notarial actions for socially vulnerable sections of the population. The number of actions that notaries can perform will also be significantly expanded. The notary will have the right to register marriages, divorces, provide evidence, etc.
 And the third step is self-regulation of the notary profession. An important aspect in the implementation of the transition to a unified notary is the transfer of a number of powers to the body of professional self-government of notaries, in particular: to exercise control over the organization of notary activities, record keeping, compliance with the rules of the Code of Professional Ethics of Notaries, to organize an increase in the professional level of notaries, as well as to create conditions for an even territorial distribution of workers places of notaries, so that citizens from the most remote corners of our country have access to notarial acts. Certain steps in the direction of self-regulation have already been taken. We have changed the composition of the Higher Qualification Commission of the Notary. Now, its composition includes only 3 representatives of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine and 11 private notaries, that is, control over the decisions of the HCPC has already been transferred to the notary community. The implementation of the reform will make it possible to lay a solid foundation for the formation and development of a Latin-type notary in Ukraine, which is a world standard in the field of protection of the rights and legitimate interests of citizens.
 Reforming is a long process that depends not only on the aspirations of the Ministry of Justice and notaries, but also on the political and socio-economic situation in the country.

Covid-19 and Employee Surveillance

While working from home is not a new concept, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has, for many in the workforce, rendered it the ‘new normal’, concomitant with enhanced use of workplace surveillance technologies to monitor and track staff working from home. Even prior to the global pandemic, organisations were increasingly using a variety of electronic surveillance methods to monitor their employees and the places where they work, whether it be in an office building or remotely. This technology traverses various facets of the work environment, including email communications, web browsing, the use of active badges for locating and tracking employees, and the gathering of personal information by employers. The application of these technologies, nevertheless, raises privacy concerns, which are exacerbated when work is undertaken in employees’ own homes, a phenomenon that has become more prevalent due to Covid-19. This article addresses the issue of electronic workplace monitoring, its implications for employees’ privacy and the role of collective bargaining in addressing this emergent practice, which has also been given new impetus during the pandemic.

Use of social media at work: a new form of employee voice?

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook have become some of the most powerful communication tools both inside and outside of the workplace. While much of the focus has been on the potential negative and destructive (‘dark’) consequences of social media at work, less attention has been given to the harnessing of social media in a constructive (‘smart’) way to enhance human resource management (HRM). In the context of this special issue on technology and HRM, this paper takes an exploratory approach to examine the relationships between social media use and job satisfaction using data from the Australian Electronic Workplace Survey. We find that the level of job satisfaction is a factor in the desire to use social media to voice concerns related to work, but this effect is only found for Generation Y employees. However, we find social media is not commonly used to voice concerns related to work and this suggests that it is an untapped resource which could provide management with an immediate or ‘real’-time understanding of workplace issues.

Electronic monitoring and surveillance in the workplace

Purpose– Electronic monitoring and surveillance (EMS) practices provide new challenges in the workplace. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between EMS in the workplace on employees’ trust in management.Design/methodology/approach– This paper is based upon data from the 2012 Australian Electronic Workplace Survey of 500 randomly sampled employees. Controlling for a range of personal, job and workplace characteristics, the data were analysed using OLS and ordered probit regression.Findings– The regression analyses identified that EMS has, on average, a negative relationship with trust in management. The authors further differentiated the sample to examine the potential impact of EMS on trust between manual and non-manual employees. The study found the relationship between EMS and trust in management was only evident for manual workers.Research limitations/implications– Future research should investigate the extent to which employee attitudes, commitment and engagement are impacted, and the individual-level and organisational-level outcomes of EMS. Causal inferences are necessarily limited and the research does not address managers’ underlying motives. Although self-reported data on EMS reflect objectively measured characteristics of the organisation.Practical implications– EMS can have negative effects on the employment relationship through the loss of trust in management, especially for manual workers. Tangible effects may flow from this through withdrawal behaviour such as employee exit from the organisation.Social implications– The findings of this study provide evidence to add to the debate on the extent and impact of EMS in the workplace and its impact on employees, the employment relationship and productivity.Originality/value– Workplace surveillance is one of the most contentious issues facing employers, workers, unions, government and legal experts. However, little research has been undertaken on the effects of EMS on important job-related attitudes such as trust. The current paper remedies some of these deficits.

Toward a Cohesive Interpretation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act for the Electronic Monitoring of Employees

Professor Levinson proposes a cohesive interpretation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) designed to protect employees’ fundamental right to privacy in their electronic communications. The difficulty of new technology outpacing the law’s ability to protect employees’ privacy from electronic monitoring by employers is widely acknowledged. Yet, scholars have generally overlooked or dismissed the potential of the ECPA to provide privacy protection for employees in the electronic workplace, calling instead for reform through the legislative process. Nevertheless, despite increasing calls from a broad range of entities for stronger privacy protections, passage of new legislation designed to adequately protect employees is, at best, not close at hand, and, at worst, unlikely. On the other hand, several recent cases suggest that the courts are beginning to interpret the ECPA in ways that accommodate the changes in technology. Indeed, despite the admittedly limited scope of its coverage, the ECPA can and should be interpreted to provide employees some significant level of protection for their electronic communications. This article describes the details of how this can be done.

Loafing in the 21 st century: Enhanced opportunities—and remedies—for withholding job effort in the new workplace

The electronic workplace, a greater emphasis on knowledge work and teams, and the increased relevance of managing impressions of work performance are among factors that relate to higher levels of withholding effort among problem employees in the 21 st century. This article considers these three factors in the context of dominant organizational forms—low-cost operators, global competitor corporations, and high-involvement firms—and how each can lead to lower on-the-job effort. Remedies are offered for new forms of withholding effort such as cyberloafing, as well as hiding lack of effort in virtual teams and through impression management. In addition, a different way of considering the problem of lower job effort is proposed through examination of how a work ethic and a leisure ethic can be synthesized to enhance organizational creativity, innovation, and performance.

Managing Electronic Workplace Surveillance to Respect Employee Autonomy

Electronic surveillance of employees in the workplace presents both opportunities and risks to contemporary managers. Some of the moral risks associated with electronic workplace surveillance are well-known and discussed in the literature. A lesser-known risk, which is explored and addressed in this article, is the threat that electronic surveillance poses, when used inappropriately, to employees’ personal autonomy. This article elaborates the concept of personal autonomy, illustrates how electronic workplace surveillance might be used to violate personal autonomy, and suggests some management strategies that could be used to avoid such violations.

Employees' behaviour towards surveillance technology implementation as an information assurance measure in the workplace

Based on Deterrence Theory (DT), Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and Self-Regulation Theory, this study is dedicated to better understanding the causes of employees' reactions to recent popular surveillance devices in workplace. Unlike previous studies, this paper takes another role of such surveillance technology into account: the means of information assurance recognised by employers. The three theories from different disciplines are used to explain complex human reactions by clarifying major conceptions in the electronic monitoring workplace such as perceived control and illusion of control. A research framework is proposed to call for future empirical research.

Internet Usage Monitoring in the Workplace: Its Legal Challenges and Implementation Strategies

ABSTRACT With the introduction of any new technology, there is also the potential for its misuse, yet no U.S. federal or state statute currently prohibits employers from monitoring their electronic workplace. In this article, we review surveillance technologies and discuss the related federal and state laws along with U.S. judicial decisions. Implementation strategies to help employers defuse or avoid the negative aspects of monitoring are provided.

The role of control and other factors in the electronic surveillance workplace

Many office workers use computers and the Internet not only to get their daily jobs done but also to deal with their personal businesses. Therefore employers nowadays monitor their employees electronically to prevent the misuse of the company resources. The use of electronic monitoring in organizations causes issues of trust and privacy. This study is dedicated to developing a conceptual model on the two issues under electronic monitoring. Control, considered as the essence of the definition of privacy as well as the foundation of the control model in the theory of procedural justice, plays an important role to people’s privacy concerns and trust. People’s perceived‐self, as essential in the group‐value model in the theory of procedural justice and in the cultural studies, also plays an important role to people’s privacy concerns and trust. This study presents research hypotheses on trust and privacy under electronic surveillance based on the two models of the theory of procedural justice, social identity theory, and cultural studies.

Electronic Monitoring to Promote National Security Impacts Workplace Privacy

This paper explores electronic workplace monitoring in light of the USA PATRIOT Act—federal legislation with a national security focus that expands the likelihood of electronic workplace monitoring to assist government investigators. The paper examines federal laws that cover the privacy rights of at-will employees in the context of electronic workplace monitoring, including recent cases that have narrowed employee privacy rights. The paper argues that business justifications for electronic workplace monitoring have been bolstered by national security concerns, resulting in decreased expectations of privacy in the workplace for at-will employees. There are persuasive arguments that employers should exercise restraint in the use of information obtained through electronic monitoring in discipline and discharge decisions related to at-will employees. These arguments in favor of exercising restraint flow from the text of the USA PATRIOT Act and consider the risk of discrimination lawsuits.

WORKPLACE PRIVACY — FRANCE: ELECTRONIC WORKPLACE PRIVACY IN FRANCE

Electronic workplace privacy has emerged as a legal issue in France, coinciding with growth in the use of Internet, including its most popular feature, electronic mail, in the working environment. The article explores French policy towards the issue and where matters stand at present.

The knowledge workout for health

The results are reported for the Training Needs Census of NHS Library Staff, the first systematic survey of the training needs of NHS library staff. The survey was undertaken by LISU (Library and Statistics Unit) and was commissioned by the NHS Executive, together with the Regional Librarians Group (RLG). The study involved all librarians working in NHS libraries and was conducted at the end of 1999. The full text of the survey report is available at the NHS Regional Librarians Group Web site (http://www.nthames-health.tpmde.ac.uk/rlg/documents/TNA_commen-tary.doc). The UK response rate was 53 per cent (represented by 1017 replies out of an estimated potential 1902). Of the respondents, 48 per cent were in the 36-50 age group with 27 per cent over 50 years and 84 per cent were female. Most were employed by a NHS Trust (65 per cent), 17 per cent worked in a Higher Education Institution, while 40 per cent worked part time. With regard to Personal Development Plans, 73 per cent did not have a PDP at the time of the survey and 79 per cent believed they would not have a plan by April 2000. The tasks most frequently undertaken were circulation desk activities, dealing with requests for information, training library users in information skills and CD-ROM/internet/database searching. Few participants are currently involved in developing or managing web sites, intranets or know-how systems. Most respondents highlighted training needs connected to using electronic resources, with 76 per cent receiving training in internet searching but a relatively high number wanting more training in this and in related areas such as information retrieval, CD-ROM and online database searching. The survey attempted to stimulate respondents away from the tradition of ‘going on a course’ to learn by asking about preferred training methods. The most popular training style was hands-on practice (60 per cent), followed by workshop/seminar (33 per cent). The same three training methods (external local courses, work-based training and in-house off work training) were the most popular across the UK. Concludes that there are several challenges for management that emerge from this study: to stimulate the desire to be trained by developing appropriate incentives; to skill and reskill people adequately for the demands of the electronic workplace; and to nurture people’s interest in acquiring a much broader perspective of the work they do and where they do it.

Effects of computer surveillance on perceptions of privacy and procedural justice.

Electronic workplace surveillance is raising concerns about privacy and fairness. Integrating research on electronic performance monitoring, procedural justice, and organizational privacy, the author proposes a framework for understanding reactions to technologies used to monitor and control employees. To test the framework's plausibility. temporary workers performed computer/Web-based tasks under varying levels of computer surveillance. Results indicated that monitoring job-relevant activities (relevance) and affording those who were monitored input into the process (participation) reduced invasion of privacy and enhanced procedural justice. Moreover, invasion of privacy fully mediated the effect of relevance and partially mediated the effect of participation on procedural justice. The findings are encouraging for integrating theory and research on procedural justice and organizational privacy.

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Electronic workplace monitoring: What employees think

It is estimated that at least 26 million Americans are electronically monitored in the workplace. Management insists that they have the right to monitor workers during time paid for by the company. Labor leaders and civil rights advocates argue that the practice violates the dignity and right to privacy of employees. In this study, 823 employees were surveyed. A great majority of the respondents felt that electronic monitoring might cause undesirable tension between managers and workers. Supervisors favor electronic monitoring more than non-supervisors do whereas non-supervisors believe to a greater extent than supervisors that electronic monitoring has a negative impact in the workplace. Supervisors and non-supervisors also differ in their beliefs about the ability of monitoring to reduce theft and create tension in the workplace, and the need to alert employees when monitoring takes place. Employees of organizations that practice monitoring object to it less then employees of organizations without electronic monitoring. Women, more than men, believe that electronic monitoring reduces theft and embezzlement.

Information Resource Management in the Electronic Workplace: A Personal Perspective on "Archives in the Information Society"

This article examines the general direction of information resource management (IRM) and computer technology applications as they influence the workplace. The author briefly explores the environmental characteristics of this new setting, including the influence of the World Wide Web, changes in information network design, and the emergence and widespread use of dynamically created, distributed, and employed information resources. He establishes this frame of reference to assess the implications of these changes for the roles and responsibilities of the archivist, and then considers the skills required on the part of the archivist to service the IRM needs of the highly automated organization and its constituency of so-called "knowledge workers."