Workplace Transformations Research Articles

Preparing the Workforce for Ethical, Responsible and Trustworthy AI

This article proposes a holistic multi-pronged strategy for establishing an ethical workforce ready for the rise of AI, beginning with examining the current AI landscape and projections of jobs impacted to understand organizational preparedness needs. Key elements include developing an ethical framework through stakeholder engagement outlining shared principles for responsibility; implementing comprehensive technical and soft-skills training programs; creating new dedicated ethics and data governance roles while expanding existing functions to oversee AI accountability; and integrating metrics and career pathways tied to system and process assessments through an ethical lens to drive cultural normalization. Continuous self-evaluation through qualitative and quantitative metrics aids transparency, justification of investment, and framework improvement. The goal of proactively cultivating stewardship abilities across all functions through values clarification, tailored learning, distributed responsibilities, and self-reflection is positioned as exemplary leadership guiding technology's societal impacts amid workplace transformations from emerging technologies.

Audience analytics and tensions in digital news work: evidence from Swiss news media

PurposeTracing audience preferences via audience analytics software has become a vital strategy for many news organizations to ensure their competitiveness in media markets. Extant research also confirms the growing presence of these tools in digital news work in recent years across many local and international news media. However, little is understood about the analytics-driven tensions emerging among journalists and media managers. This paper aims to address this gap by drawing on the labor process theory, which critically analyzes labor and workplace transformations under capitalism.Design/methodology/approachThe present study employs an interview-based qualitative methodology to deeply understand the factors at the base of the emerging tensions between news workers and managers brought about by audience metrics tools.FindingsResults show how some perceptions, activities and contextual triggers related to analytics could make relationships between workers and managers problematic. The pressures felt by some journalists stemmed from the way their media managers introduced, interpreted, communicated and applied analytics in the workplace, which were not tied to the quality and learning goals related to journalists’ aspirations. As our evidence suggests, the analytics-induced tensions among news workers were rather an outcome of managerial deficits than of systematic plans to exploit journalists.Originality/valueBy identifying the nature of fundamental analytics-driven tensions in newsrooms, this paper contributes to our understanding of how media managers can embrace more effective approaches toward audience analytics, workforce and organizational performance.

The Knowledge Economy and Quality of Work in the Future: An Exploratory Study

The emergence of digital technologies is transforming economic paradigms and leading to significant changes in product and factor markets, as well as how businesses operate. While these technologies enhance productivity, they also present new challenges for businesses regarding manufacturing methods, sources of competitive advantage, and market structures, impacting how work is conducted. Workplace transformations are happening at a faster pace than anticipated, raising important questions for employees, business decision-makers, and policymakers. We conducted an exploratory study to analyze the realism of the Knowledge Economy model's perspective on workplace changes. The study was based on a non-exhaustive literature review and an empirical study conducted with professionals from companies in Portugal belonging to several sectors of activity. Our research leads to the conclusion that the Knowledge Economy model, through technological innovation, has shaped the quality of work, bringing new insights and self-engagement of employees. However, digitalization might induce urgent needs for reskilling and upskilling. Therefore, it is essential to request such a challenge not only to employees but also to organizations and public authorities by investing in lifelong education and training and implementing policies, actions, and tools to facilitate the digital economy transition. Such proactive measures will propel the labor market towards greater availability of decent work, foster a more inclusive society, and promote social well-being and economic prosperity.

When Companies Make Your Day

Pre-digital organizations were established before the digital and collaborative economy. Faced with this new economy, they are carrying out organizational transformation projects that involve significant changes in tasks, working conditions, and employee well-being. A positive emotional climate can support these digital transformations. Companies have therefore developed specific change management practices focusing on happiness at work to support these digital transformation programs of work practices. This research explores the role of happiness management as a change management practice for digital transformation. Using a multiple case study method, it illustrates how happiness management practices are enacted in three French pre-digital organizations from different industries. It identifies characteristics of happiness management mobilized differently by each organization. Some combinations of these characteristics and employees' control perceptions are shown to lead to a positive emotional climate which in turn affects the success of digital workplace transformations.

It's never easy to leave our comfort zone.

Sam Foster, Chief Nurse, Oxford University Hospitals, suggests that putting the focus on both the patient and the staff experience can help leaders to overcome resistance to proposed workplace transformations.

How can we design for learning in an AI world?

Fast improvements in computing power and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms enable us to automate important decisions that shape our everyday lives, and drive workplace transformations. It is predicted that many people will find themselves unprepared to deal with high degrees of change and uncertainty, increasingly posed by AI in some sectors. A critical educational challenge involves figuring out how to support young generations to develop the capabilities that they will need to adapt to, and innovate in, a world with AI. This article argues that both educators and learners should be involved not only in learning but also in co-designing for learning in an AI world. Further, they together should explore the knowledge, goals and actions that could help people shape future AI scenarios, and learn to deal with high degrees of uncertainty. A key contribution of the paper is a re-conceptualization of design for learning in an AI world, which explores a problem space of educational design, and illustrates how educators and learners can work together to re-imagine education futures in an AI world. As part of this problem space, the paper discusses underpinning philosophies (the capability approach and value creation), a high-level pedagogy (with an emphasis on co-creation), pedagogical strategies (speculative pedagogies), and pedagogical tactics (AI scenarios). It then proposes a design framework (ACAD) to support educators and learners' discussions about design for learning in an AI world. This participatory design approach aims to sensitize people for what education may mean, for whom, and how learning with AI may look like, and it highlights the active engagement of educators and learners in co-designing a future they desire, to help shape learning and living in an AI world.

Helping nurses to provide optimum care in the second wave of the pandemic.

Emeritus Professor Alan Glasper, from the University of Southampton, discusses a King's Fund review that investigates how workplace transformations can enhance the delivery of compassionate and high-quality care.

Dimensions of Human Resource Management Evolved with the Outbreak of COVID-19

The COVID-19 can be blamed for the greatest workplace transformations after 2020. This outbreak in this 21st century will break the existing system i.e. working, exercising, shopping, communicating, educating, and learning. This change will slowly force the organization to make modification to our human resource policies and strategy. The point need to be noted that this “social distance” is the change factor that created in the history for transformation. The work from home is the new dimension evolved with the outbreak of COVID-19. It is the flexible task based work culture approach supported by information communication system. However, this approach is not suitable for the manufacturing industries other than sales management, marketing, customer contact etc. It is more suitable for service industries. Yet, data protection, confidentiality, line management, pay-roll bases and extended job management are the challenges for it. The work from home is the method assigned to employee in their own consent based on their convenience of task performance.

Neo-Taylorism in the Digital Age: Workplace Transformations in French and German Retail Warehouses

The paper analyzes how digitalization in conjunction with changes to the economic environment are affecting the nature of low-skilled jobs in the logistics sector; in particular, job content and the working and employment conditions attached to those jobs. On the basis of expert interviews and company case studies in French and German retail warehouses, the authors investigate whether the adaptation of these jobs corresponds to the more general ‘neo-Taylorist’ transformation of workplaces discussed in the literature and seek to identify those factors that are helping to stabilize or modify this trend. Drawing on the comparative labour relations literature, which distinguishes between different types of workers’ power resources (institutional, associational and structural), the study examines how and to what extent employees and their representatives renegotiate or influence techno-organizational choices. By focusing on firms headquartered in France and Germany, we can shed some light on whether the institutional power of organized labour may enable them to foster trajectories other than the kind of ‘digital Taylorism’ we see in liberal market economies. The findings point, however, to a general convergence on digitally enhanced ‘Neo-Taylorism,’ which is characterized by deskilling and intensification of performance control. The limited cross-country variation can largely be explained by the very similar effects across countries of ‘lean’ supply-chain transformation and the trend toward outsourcing and offshoring, which negatively affect workers’ structural power. Moreover, associational resources are negatively affected by the deskilling trend. Meanwhile, the findings provide some evidence of a beneficial impact from the institutional power of worker representatives in both countries: in particular, the rights to veto and co-determine performance management systems. These rights have not altogether helped prevent the shift toward neo-Taylorism but have contributed to somewhat less intense forms of neo-Taylorism.

Workplace design + space utilisation = talent retention : How understanding space usage can fund workplace transformations to deliver the offices our talent really wants

The ‘war for talent’ is on and the workplace is the battlefield. This paper will explore how corporate real estate (CRE) and workplace executives can leverage cutting-edge technologies such as the smart building, the Internet of Things (IoT) and space utilisation sensor technologies to understand their workplace in real time, all the time. Empowered with this data, CRE and workplace can confidently deliver insights throughout the workplace design process that can transform the way their organisation works. Next-generation workplace design technologies such as 3D modelling and augmented reality (AR) can be used to involve the building occupants, allowing them to shape the design towards delivering a workplace that talent needs today. When these innovative workplace and design technologies come together, CRE and workplace executives can be empowered to spearhead change throughout the organisation. This will result in a better workplace more aligned to serve the talent that the organisation so desperately needs in order to thrive.

When Gendered Logics Collide: Going Public and Restructuring in a High-Tech Organization

Gender scholars argued that gendered organizations theory needs updating as organizational logic has shifted amid neoliberal workplace transformations. This qualitative case study of a high-tech firm reveals how features of the traditional work logic remain resilient. I analyze the gendered implications of a high-tech startup restructuring and going public, finding the flexible organization to bureaucratize, implementing specialized jobs and a hierarchy with standardized career ladders. Going public creates conflicting gendered logics that place women at a structural disadvantage, relegating them to low-status, narrow jobs while simultaneously demanding masculine ideal worker norms of visibility and self-promotion. Despite networking, women experience job insecurity and a glass ceiling, while men are assumed ideal workers and advance. By tracing one high-tech firm’s restructuring from a startup to public company, I demonstrate how the collision of new and traditional workplace logics perpetuates gender inequalities.

Suicide voices: testimonies of trauma in the French workplace

Workplace suicide has become an urgent social concern internationally with rising numbers of employees choosing to kill themselves in the face of extreme pressures at work. Yet, research on this...

Changes in production concepts emphasize problems in work-related well-being

Recurrent changes in work life, although necessary for competitive and financial reasons, seem to increase time pressure, stress, health complaints and safety problems of workers. The dynamics of recent workplace transformations are not sufficiently understood from the perspective of everyday work, particularly by health and safety experts. In this paper, the Activity Theoretical Approach is used to reconceptualize work-related well-being in situations of rapid change. The key concepts in this paper are production and service concepts and their asynchronies. Many asynchronies were observed in the analysis of the two cases of different types of organizations. These asynchronies are a major challenge for experts on well-being, especially since continuous change has now become an inseparable part of work life.

Return to Gender: An Analysis of Women’s Disadvantage in Postal Work

The workplace is a crucial locale for understanding three important issues in contemporary debates on gender and organizations; the processes by which work becomes gendered, the origins and nature of gender segregation and the role of trade unions in delivering gender equality. This article presents data from a study of workplace transformations in Royal Mail, and demonstrates the dynamic interplay of factors over time, which have sustained postal work in the UK as a gendered occupation and continues to disadvantage women in the workforce. The article shows that the position of women in postal work has been historically and contemporaneously linked to the relations between the trade union, management, male and female workers. The data illustrate that the power relations between the main actors have sustained the dynamic of women’s disadvantage. Furthermore, the processes that have sustained postal work as a gendered job continue to segregate men and women’s work at the level of the workplace.

Between Classes: A Conference on Academic Labor

The university works because we work! That was the refrain at a confer ence on the crises facing academic labor at New York University on No vember 16, 1996. Faculty, graduate students, and university staff convened to report on working conditions and propose solutions to their problems as laborers in American academia. Graduate students related their efforts on many campuses to build organizations to protect their jobs as research and teaching assistants. Support staff rallied around New York University's clerical workers, whose campaign for a closed shop coincided with the conference. Adjunct faculty stressed their struggles to enter the university work force in better than casual subsistence conditions. Full-time faculty voiced concerns about threats to faculty unions, tenure, and full-time teach ing positions in the university while supporting the efforts of students, adjuncts, and staff to join them in the ranks of recognized and respected university workers. Despite the spirit of the participants, the picture presented at the conference was bleak. As the opening session affirmed, the American university is in crisis?and its workers are the first to experience its trou bles. Speakers dismissed the notion that the university is a liberal bastion in a landscape of bleak workplace transformations. Instead, insisted Carol Knox (United Auto Workers), the university is catching up to other industries in threatening its workers' compensation and job security. David Montgomery (Yale University) went further: He contended that univer sities are leaders in the casualization of professional work. Their adminis trators are ardent practitioners of the lust for privatization, responding to often-artificial budget crises not by defending needs but by whittling at jobs and academic programs. They measure success at the bottom line, not in the classroom. Juan Flores, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York, remembered that his job once involved building community, directing research projects, and tying them to the community. Now he mainly fights to defend diminishing resources and to distribute them as fairly as possible. He has become a hatchet man for the administration's downsizing schemes, he complained. Constant cri