scholarly journals Post-Pandemic Office Work: Perceived Challenges and Opportunities for a Sustainable Work Environment

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 294
Author(s):  
Maral Babapour Chafi ◽  
Annemarie Hultberg ◽  
Nina Bozic Yams
Keyword(s):  
Work Environment ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Individual Performance ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Office Work ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
New Ways Of Working ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Future Work

The widespread adoption of remote and hybrid work due to COVID-19 calls for studies that explore the ramifications of these scenarios for office workers from an occupational health and wellbeing perspective. This paper aims to identify the needs and challenges in remote and hybrid work and the potential for a sustainable future work environment. Data collection involved two qualitative studies with a total of 53 participants, who represented employees, staff managers, and service/facility providers at three Swedish public service organisations (primarily healthcare and infrastructure administration). The results describe opportunities and challenges with the adoption of remote and hybrid work from individual, group, and leadership perspectives. The main benefits of remote work were increased flexibility, autonomy, work-life balance and individual performance, while major challenges were social aspects such as lost comradery and isolation. Hybrid work was perceived to provide the best of both worlds of remote and office work, given that employees and managers develop new skills and competencies to adjust to new ways of working. To achieve the expected individual and organisational benefits of hybrid work, employers are expected to provide support and flexibility and re-design the physical and digital workplaces to fit the new and diverse needs of employees.

Measuring adolescents’ emotional responses to music: Approaches, challenges, and opportunities

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tan-Chyuan Chin
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Outcome Indicators ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Future Work ◽  
The Impact

Contemporary challenges facing researchers and practitioners in measuring and understanding the various components of emotional responses to music need to be balanced with informed, active participation from young people. For researchers, measurement can encompass both process and outcome indicators that provide the capacity to monitor change over time and examine the impact of music-based interventions on mental health and wellbeing. For practitioners, measurement forms a fundamental aspect of the needs analysis so that therapeutic sessions can be tailored to suit individuals’ needs. This chapter presents information about the types of methods and factors that need to be considered for future work measuring emotional responses to music in young people. The benefits and challenges of utilizing mixed-methods approaches will also be considered. This chapter concludes that a considered, integrative approach of measurement will provide richer insight into research on the role of music in the lives of young people.

scholarly journals Remote Working in a Public Bureaucracy: Redeveloping Practices of Managerial Control When Out of Sight

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Hartner-Tiefenthaler ◽  
Melanie Goisauf ◽  
Cornelia Gerdenitsch ◽  
Sabine T. Koeszegi
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Logics ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Work Setting ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Managerial Control ◽  
Potential Threat ◽  
New Ways Of Working ◽  
Public Bureaucracy ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Future Work

This article examines managerial control practices in a public bureaucracy at the moment of introducing remote work as part with a new ways of working (NWW) project. The qualitative study builds on 38 interviews with supervisors and subordinates conducted before the advent of COVID-19. By interpreting interviewees’ conversations about current and anticipated future work practices in the changing work setting, we reveal tacit and hidden practices of managerial control that are currently prevalent in many organizations introducing remote working. Three constitutive moments of the organization’s transformation to NWW are analytically distinguished: (i) how implicit becomes explicit, (ii) how collective becomes self, and (iii) how personal becomes impersonal. Our findings emphasize that the transition to NWW must take into account prevailing institutional logics and must reconnect to a fundamental and often neglected question: What does doing work mean within the particular organization? Negotiating this fundamental question might help to overcome supervisors’ uncertainties about managerial control and provide clarity to subordinates about what is expected from them while working remotely. Finally, we discuss how the transition to NWW may serve as both an opportunity and a potential threat to established organizational practices while highlighting the challenge supervisors face when the institutional logics conflict with remote working.

ORGANIZATION OF INTERNAL CONTROL IN A REMOTE WORK ENVIRONMENT

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (8) ◽  
pp. 73-79
Author(s):  
NGUYEN THI HA MY ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Work Environment ◽  
Internal Control ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
Internal Control System ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Ministry Of Finance

With the rapid development and widespread use of technology, business processes are being transformed. One of the consequences of the implementation of technologies into the business is the partial transition to remote work, which made it necessary to reflect the corresponding changes in the internal control system (IC). The article is devoted to the analysis of the main shortcomings identified during the transition to the remote mode, in response to which measures are proposed to adapt the IC to the conditions of remote work. Identifies the following areas for improvement of the internal control system. In response to the identified areas successful practical examples are analyzed and potential measures are proposed in the context of the elements identified in the COSO conceptual framework and methodological documents of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation.

scholarly journals The Evolution of Gambling-Related Harm Measurement: Lessons from the Last Decade

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (9) ◽  
pp. 4395
Author(s):  
Matthew Browne ◽  
Vijay Rawat ◽  
Catherine Tulloch ◽  
Cailem Murray-Boyle ◽  
Matthew Rockloff
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Health Utility ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Psychometric Evidence ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Utility Metrics ◽  
Gambling Harms ◽  
Related Harm

Jurisdictions around the world have a self-declared mandate to reduce gambling-related harm. However, historically, this concept has suffered from poor conceptualisation and operationalisation. However, recent years have seen swift advances in measuring gambling harm, based on the principle of it being a quantifiable decrement to the health and wellbeing of the gambler and those connected to them. This review takes stock of the background and recent developments in harm assessment and summarises recent research that has validated and applied the Short Gambling Harms Screen and related instruments. We recommend that future work builds upon the considerable psychometric evidence accumulated for the feasibility of direct elicitation of harmful consequences. We also advocate for grounding harms measures with respect to scalar changes to public health utility metrics. Such an approach will avoid misleading pseudo-clinical categorisations, provide accurate population-level summaries of where the burden of harm is carried, and serve to integrate gambling research with the broader field of public health.

scholarly journals Adoption of Satellite Offices in Response to a Pandemic: Sustainability and Infection Control

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 8008
Author(s):  
Seungbeom Kim ◽  
Yooneun Lee ◽  
Byungchul Choi
Keyword(s):  
Infection Control ◽  
Work Environment ◽  
Fuel Consumption ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Carbon Emission ◽  
Work Environments ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Simulation Experiments ◽  
Office Environment ◽  
Potential Risks

The office environment has changed rapidly due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Companies consider various types of remote work environments to contain the spread of the virus. Among them, a satellite office is a type of remote work environment where a number of employees are allocated to their nearest office. The benefits from satellite offices are twofold: The significant reduction of travel distance also reduces the amount of carbon emission and fuel consumption. In addition, dividing employees into smaller groups significantly reduces the potential risks of infection in the office. This paper addresses a satellite office allocation problem that considers social and environmental sustainability and infection control at work. In order to evaluate the effect of different satellite office allocation, quantitative measures are developed for the following three criteria: carbon emission, fuel consumption, and the probability of infection occurrence at work. Simulation experiments are conducted to investigate different scenarios of regional infection rate and modes of transportation. The results show that adopting satellite offices not only reduces carbon emission and fuel consumption, but also mitigates business disruption in the pandemic.

scholarly journals The first 10 years of the international coordination network for standards in systems and synthetic biology (COMBINE)

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Waltemath ◽  
Martin Golebiewski ◽  
Michael L Blinov ◽  
Padraig Gleeson ◽  
Henning Hermjakob ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Data Model ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Stakeholder Workshop ◽  
Software Engineers ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Modeling In Biology

AbstractThis paper presents a report on outcomes of the 10th Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) meeting that was held in Heidelberg, Germany, in July of 2019. The annual event brings together researchers, biocurators and software engineers to present recent results and discuss future work in the area of standards for systems and synthetic biology. The COMBINE initiative coordinates the development of various community standards and formats for computational models in the life sciences. Over the past 10 years, COMBINE has brought together standard communities that have further developed and harmonized their standards for better interoperability of models and data. COMBINE 2019 was co-located with a stakeholder workshop of the European EU-STANDS4PM initiative that aims at harmonized data and model standardization for in silico models in the field of personalized medicine, as well as with the FAIRDOM PALs meeting to discuss findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data sharing. This report briefly describes the work discussed in invited and contributed talks as well as during breakout sessions. It also highlights recent advancements in data, model, and annotation standardization efforts. Finally, this report concludes with some challenges and opportunities that this community will face during the next 10 years.

Challenges and Opportunities in Collaborative Vulnerability Research Workflows

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 420-424
Author(s):  
Ryan Mullins ◽  
Deirdre Kelliher ◽  
Ben Nargi ◽  
Mike Keeney ◽  
Nathan Schurr
Keyword(s):  
Human Performance ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Workflow Model ◽  
Human Vulnerability ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Reasoning System ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
New Research ◽  
Future Work

Recently, cyber reasoning systems demonstrated near-human performance characteristics when they autonomously identified, proved, and mitigated vulnerabilities in software during a competitive event. New research seeks to augment human vulnerability research teams with cyber reasoning system teammates in collaborative work environments. However, the literature lacks a concrete understanding of vulnerability research workflows and practices, limiting designers’, engineers’, and researchers’ ability to successfully integrate these artificially intelligent entities into teams. This paper contributes a general workflow model of the vulnerability research process, and identifies specific collaboration challenges and opportunities anchored in this model. Contributions were derived from a qualitative field study of work habits, behaviors, and practices of human vulnerability research teams. These contributions will inform future work in the vulnerability research domain by establishing an empirically-driven workflow model that can be adapted to specific organizational and functional constraints placed on individual and teams.

Health, happiness and your future: using a “men’s group” format to work with homeless men in London

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-418
Author(s):  
Kate Thompson ◽  
Pippa Brown ◽  
Stephanie Vieira
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Psychosocial Issues ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Homeless Men ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Future Work ◽  
The Impact

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe an intervention with a group of homeless men from the Horn of Africa, service users of the Horn of Africa Health and Wellbeing Project in London. The group was conceived by the second author who noted the presence of significant psychosocial issues for her clients, but equally their reluctance to access mainstream mental health or social care services. Design/methodology/approach Designing the group and introducing it to the men involved threw up some challenges which are explored, and the impact of the group on participants is evaluated. Findings Overall both the participants and the facilitators evaluated the group positively and it appeared to have led to lasting change for some of the group members, and this is described. The authors argue that this sort of group may be a more acceptable way to work on psychosocial issues than something more directly focused on mental health intervention. The group protocol is outlined along with suggestions for future work in this area. Originality/value This intervention represents a creative alternative to more mainstream psychological interventions for homeless or exiled men.

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