Working from Home: Impact on Wellbeing and Work-Life Balance

Working from home (WFH), teleworking, or telecommuting has become a new work norm since the Covid-19 pandemic. Many organisations are showing an interest in testing a hybrid work style when the pandemic is over; a mix of WFH with office-based work has the potential to improve work-life balance (WLB). Organisations across the globe quickly adopted WFH to maintain their business continuity during the pandemic. However, it co-concurred with particular occupational health and safety (OHS) concerns. Our research review shows that the frequency of WFH is significantly related to its impact on WLB. Women, specifically, are more likely to find it challenging to maintain balance between office work and domestic responsibilities. Additionally, WFH leads to personal costs for many, for example, maintaining a suitable workstation setup at home. The continuous demand for up-skilling/re-skilling due to fast improving technology and job satisfaction is another example of the risk to workers’ wellbeing. This research paper reviews the most important risk determinants of WLB due to WFH. We discuss that workplaces should align their strategies in the longer term to support employees’ wellbeing risk management. Employers, employees – women particularly – should use this rapid change as an opportunity to learn and grow.

What has time to do with risk? A preliminary communication

The reliability of risk techniques is of concern to academics and practitioners: if techniques are not reliable in their design, they cannot give reliable results. This paper briefly discusses risk velocity, which is a way of providing specificity to an understanding of risk through applying time as a lens. The research is a preliminary communication from initial Masters research. Risk velocity has been identified in the limited literature as being divided into three sections: time to cause, time to impact, and time to recover; each of which can assist an organisation to better understand their risk landscape and how risks link with business continuity planning. However, risk velocity has been the subject of limited research to validate the concept and reliability in practice, suggesting this a ‘white space’ meriting investigation (Cherry, 2010).

Occupational health and safety cases in the New Zealand District Court

Occupational health and safety (OHS) practitioners need to understand prosecutions that have been before the District Court if they are to provide informed guidance about compliance with the New Zealand (NZ) Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) to “persons having control of a business or undertaking” (PCBUs). However, if they cannot access academic databases, they may need to rely on individual reports of a few cases but may not have the time or resources to develop their own database. Those who are studying for a tertiary level qualification may also lack the time to find and catalogue more than a few cases. This short article reports on the first stage of the development and analysis of a dataset of prosecutions under NZ OHS legislation. We describe our data sources and a high-level analysis of the dataset and issues to be resolved before proceeding with further data analysis. This work also forms part of research into “grey literature” and its use in practice by OHS practitioners and professionals. We conclude by showing the disparity between prosecutions and deaths due to occupational disease and trauma (leading to an area for further research) and loop back to one of the origins for this research: the meaning of a safe system of work.

A structured approach to the concept of a (safe) system of work

The concept of a “safe system of work” (SSW), sometimes known as a “system of work that is safe”, is often a required risk control in countries that follow English common law or that have Robens-style legislation, but it sits low in the hierarchy of controls. A request for advice on what constitutes a safe system of work led to a literature search that found no commonly accepted description or generic model for a safe system of work. A literature search for SSW was carried out, including the origins of the concept and its use in statute and common law in the UK and New Zealand (NZ). Findings suggested a systems management approach to develop a tentative goal tree (part of the Theory of Constraints) to structure the themes. The goal tree was tested iteratively using a set of small-scale case studies. The literature and research showed that a safe system should control how an individual work activity is carried out as it forms part of a larger health and safety management system. The tentative goal tree was found to provide a framework within which the case studies could be analysed and compared. It appeared to be applicable to other cases in a range of workplaces and to enable testing of a planned or existing system of work to help decide if a proposed system of work was “safe”. The literature review provided background to the concept of a safe system of work and enabled development of a tentative goal tree to help plan or test a safe system of work.

Exploring factors contributing to young workers’ vulnerability to work-related harm

New Zealand has experienced significant increases in youth employment rates in the last 20 years with 40 per cent of people employed part-time. This age group has been associated with the second-highest rate of injury claims. At the current time, there is limited information on why young workers in New Zealand are more vulnerable to work-related harm. This project aimed to explore this with a convenience sample of young workers using an online survey. Participants represented a diverse ethnic population but the sample was predominately female. In total, 32.7 per cent of respondents had received no occupational health and safety (OHS) training when starting work. Fifty-seven per cent of the sample thought that OHS was valued by their employer. Interestingly, 63 per cent of the sample said they would be confident about speaking up about an OHS issue with most being willing to speak to their manager. In relation to stress, the analysis identified that there was an association between feeling stressed and being unable to follow OHS protocols (p=0.05). While this was a small exploratory study, suggestions made to improve OHS include clear and open communication between workers and employers, improved access to OHS resources and continuous and in-depth training.

The Long-Term Effects of Workplace Bullying on Health, Wellbeing, and on the Professional and Personal Lives of Bully-victims

One of the aims of this study was to give a voice to the victims of workplace bullying (WPB). Narratives or stories told by the victims allow researchers to better understand, challenge, and update outdated thinking of WPB. This paper identifies gaps in the literature regarding the long-term consequences of WPB on workers’ health and wellbeing, and how this impacts their professional and personal lives. The findings of this paper are based on a qualitative study that documented individual experiences of six WPB victims. Analysis of the findings shows how deeply rooted the issue of WPB is, opens conversations, highlights possible causes, and redefines solutions. Reflecting on Aotearoa New Zealand’s laissez-faire attitude towards WPB as well as realising the need for anti-bullying strategies, clearer guidelines, and the promotion of interventions to support employees, this study raises the awareness of the long-term consequences of WPB and its impact on victims and society.

Family businesses and employment relations: Review and suggestions for future research

This paper seeks to identify and summarise the big issues at the intersection of family businesses and employment relations business literatures. Family businesses have additional complexities compared with non-family businesses. Thus, the aim of this paper is to throw light on why this intersection is of interest in New Zealand and rationalise the need to research employment relations in the context of family businesses. We first present family businesses as an area for research by outlining the landscape of family businesses in New Zealand, followed by a review of the foundations of family business and employment relations research. We then highlight and discuss three overarching themes: familiness or family dynamics; formalisation/professionalisation; and incorporating employment relations perspectives. Finally, we conclude with future research directions and canvas potential research questions to introduce ways researchers can enhance our understanding of employment relations in family firms.

How good are jobs in New Zealand?

Based on an analysis of the New Zealand data in the Work Orientation module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) across three rounds (1997, 2005 and 2015), this paper examines how workers in New Zealand perceive their job quality. These surveys imply that New Zealanders have relatively good jobs, as shown in healthy levels of job quality and job satisfaction. They rate highly the quality of their collegial relationships at work and typically perceive the intrinsic quality of their job as better than the extrinsic quality. A key issue in relation to the latter is that they generally do not rate their advancement opportunities as high. While men, full-timers and graduates have some advantages over women, part-timers and non-graduates in extrinsic job quality, the intrinsic quality of work is more evenly experienced. In terms of intrinsic issues, the rising level of stress from 2005 to 2015 poses a concern and there is no evidence that graduates enjoy any kind of premium in the intrinsic quality of work apart from a lower level of hard physical effort.