Why too much work and too little time is hurting workers and companies—and how a proven workplace redesign can benefit employees and the bottom line
Today's ways of working are not working—even for ...professionals in good jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload , Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. Flexible work policies and corporate lip service about work-life balance don't come close to fixing the problem. But this unhealthy and unsustainable situation can be changed—and Overload shows how.
Drawing on five years of research, including hundreds of interviews with employees and managers, Kelly and Moen tell the story of a major experiment that they helped design and implement at a Fortune 500 firm. The company adopted creative and practical work redesigns that gave workers more control over how and where they worked and encouraged managers to evaluate performance in new ways. The result? Employees' health, well-being, and ability to manage their personal and work lives improved, while the company benefited from higher job satisfaction and lower turnover. And, as Kelly and Moen show, such changes can—and should—be made on a wide scale.
Complete with advice about ways that employees, managers, and corporate leaders can begin to question and fix one of today's most serious workplace problems, Overload is an inspiring account about how rethinking and redesigning work could transform our lives and companies.
Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides an insightful analysis of how and why precarious employment is gaining ground in the labor market and the role these developments have played in the decline of the middle ...class. Kalleberg shows that by the 1970s, government deregulation, global competition, and the rise of the service sector gained traction, while institutional protections for workers—such as unions and minimum-wage legislation—weakened. Together, these forces marked the end of postwar security for American workers. The composition of the labor force also changed significantly; the number of dual-earner families increased, as did the share of the workforce comprised of women, non-white, and immigrant workers. Of these groups, blacks, Latinos, and immigrants remain concentrated in the most precarious and low-quality jobs, with educational attainment being the leading indicator of who will earn the highest wages and experience the most job security and highest levels of autonomy and control over their jobs and schedules. Kalleberg demonstrates, however, that building a better safety net—increasing government responsibility for worker health care and retirement, as well as strengthening unions—can go a long way toward redressing the effects of today’s volatile labor market. There is every reason to expect that the growth of precarious jobs—which already make up a significant share of the American job market—will continue. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs deftly shows that the decline in U.S. job quality is not the result of fluctuations in the business cycle, but rather the result of economic restructuring and the disappearance of institutional protections for workers. Only government, employers and labor working together on long-term strategies—including an expanded safety net, strengthened legal protections, and better training opportunities—can help reverse this trend.
Demanding work Green, Francis
2007, 2013., 20131024, 2013, 2005, 2006-01-01, 20060101
eBook, Book
Since the early 1980s, a vast number of jobs have been created in the affluent economies of the industrialized world. Many workers are doing more skilled and fulfilling jobs, and getting paid more ...for their trouble. Yet it is often alleged that the quality of work life has deteriorated, with a substantial and rising proportion of jobs providing low wages and little security, or requiring unusually hard and stressful effort.
In this unique and authoritative formal account of changing job quality, economist Francis Green highlights contrasting trends, using quantitative indicators drawn from public opinion surveys and administrative data. In most affluent countries average pay levels have risen along with economic growth, a major exception being the United States. Skill requirements have increased, potentially meaning a more fulfilling time at work. Set against these beneficial trends, however, are increases in inequality, a strong intensification of work effort, diminished job satisfaction, and less employee influence over daily work tasks. Using an interdisciplinary approach,Demanding Workshows how aspects of job quality are related, and how changes in the quality of work life stem from technological change and transformations in the politico-economic environment. The book concludes by discussing what individuals, firms, unions, and governments can do to counter declining job quality.
The book makes a major new contribution to the sociology of employment by comparing the quality of working life in European societies with very different institutional systems - France, Germany, ...Great Britain, Spain, and Sweden. It focuses in particular on skills and skill development, opportunities for training, the scope for initiative in work, the difficulty of combining work and family life, and the security of employment. Drawing on a range of nationally representative surveys, it reveals striking differences in the quality of work in different European countries. It also provides for the first time rigorous comparative evidence on the experiences of different types of employee and an assessment of whether there has been a trend over time to greater polarization between a core workforce of relatively privileged employees and a peripheral workforce suffering from cumulative disadvantage. It explores the relevance of three influential theoretical perspectives, focussing respectively on the common dynamics of capitalist societies, differences in production regimes between capitalist societies, and differences in the institutional systems of employment regulation. It argues that it is the third of these - an 'employment regime' perspective - that provides the most convincing account of the factors that affect the quality of work in capitalist societies. The findings underline the importance of differences in national policies for people's experiences of work and point to the need for a renewal at European level of initiatives for improving the quality of work. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199230102/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Martina Dieckhoff is Post-doctoral research fellow at the Danish National Institute of Social Research in Copenhagen. Duncan Gallie is an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and Professor of Sociology of the University of Oxford. Jean-Marie Jungblut is a researcher and project leader at the Centre of European Social Research (MZES) in Mannheim. Philip J. O'Connell is Research Professor and head of the Education and Labour Market Research Division at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin. Stefani Scherer is a research fellow at Milano-Bicocca University, Department of Sociology and Social Research. Nadia Steiber is a Research Associate at the Institute of Sociology and Social Research at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Michael Tahlin is Professor of Sociology at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. Serge Paugam is Professor of sociology and Director of the Department of Doctoral Studies in Sociology at the EHESS (Paris). He is also Director of a research team on Social Inequalities in the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CNRS/EHESS/ENS). Ying Zhou is Research Officer at Nuffield College, Oxford.
We investigate the psychometric validity and reliability of three‐item screening measures for emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal achievement comprising an abbreviated version of ...the Maslach Burnout Inventory®. Despite its utilization in multiple studies, the shortened instrument has not been sufficiently validated in diverse settings, populations, and organizational contexts. We examine its ability to assess burnout accruing from patient care practice in a rural, underserved area. Utilizing data from a cross‐sectional survey of 308 rural‐based medical professionals, we investigate how the three short‐form subscales of the nine‐item abbreviated inventory compare with their gold‐standard parent subscales from the original 22‐item human services scale in measuring corresponding dimensions of burnout. The findings provide significant evidence that the three‐item measures are valid and reliable proxies for the long‐form subscales. The short‐form measures are highly correlated with the original subscales and display high convergent and discriminant validity. Each of the abbreviated subscales manifests the kind of high sensitivity with adequate specificity that one would expect to see in a good screening instrument. We conclude that the short‐form measures can be utilized to rapidly screen human service professionals such as rural health care practitioners for symptoms of each of the three dimensions of burnout.
The nurses' quality of work life (QWL) is critical for a sustainable nursing workforce and effective healthcare delivery. As nurses make up the majority of the healthcare workforce, their QWL is an ...important issue for both nurses and nurse managers. Therefore, nurse managers need to assess, monitor, and improve the QWL of their nurses. This study aimed to determine the impact of the nursing work environment on nurses' QWL. This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted among 330 nurses working in a private university hospital. A healthy nursing work environment and individual and institutional factors positively influence nurses' QWL. This study showed that nurses' participation in hospital affairs, satisfaction with the institution, satisfaction with the social facilities, ability to meet the institution's career goals, work unit, and perceived salary were all factors that influenced nurses' QWL. This study contributes to the understanding of the impact of nurses' work environment and individual and institutional variables on their QWL. Healthcare administration and nurse managers can help improve the quality of nurses' working lives by developing strategies to create healthy work environments.
Introduction: The quality of work life is one of the most important variables in the field of industrial and organizational psychology, which leads to an increase in individual performance and ...organizational productivity by creating organizational vitality. Today's organizations use many measures to improve the quality of work life and the vitality of employees, one of the newest methods is the use of virtual reality.
Methods and Materials: The purpose of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of virtual reality on the quality of work life and organizational vitality of employees. The research was a semi-experimental pre-test-post-test type with a control group. The sample of this research was 30 employees of Iran's New Energy Organization, who were assigned in two groups of 15 people, experimental and control. The tools of this research were Walton's quality of work life questionnaire (1973) and Kroloff's organizational vitality (2007). The experimental group of 15 people underwent the virtual reality training package during 8 sessions (10 minutes each session). After collecting the data, they were analyzed using the covariance analysis method.
Results: The results showed that the difference between the average scores of the post-test of the quality of work life and organizational vitality in the two experimental and control groups is significant (P<0.01). Therefore, it can be said that the virtual reality package has a favorable effect on the quality of work life and organizational vitality and improves the quality of work life and organizational vitality.
Conclusion: It is suggested that organizations and companies use the virtual reality package to improve quality of work life and organizational vitality of their employees.
Background & aim: Quality of work life and job satisfaction are two important components in creating a developed and capable workforce in all health care systems. The midwifery profession needs ...special attention due to its feminine nature and having many job stresses. The aim of this study was to compare the quality of work life and job satisfaction of midwives working in related and non-related workplaces to midwifery in Iran.Methods: The current study was a cross-sectional study using census sampling method, which was performed on 106 midwives (53 working in related and 53 working in unrelated workplaces) in all hospitals of Yazd, Iran in 2021. Data collection tools included demographic Questionnaire (including personal and midwifery characteristics), Walton Work Life Quality and Job Satisfaction Questionnaire. Independent t-test, Mann-Whitney test, correlation coefficient, regression analysis and Chi-square were used to analyze the data.Results: According to the results, the mean total score of quality of work life in midwives working in related workplaces (80.03±12.62) was higher than the mean of overall scores of quality of working life in midwives working in unrelated workplaces (76.94±9.11). However, this difference was not statistically significant except in two dimensions of integration and social cohesion (P=0.027) as well as development of human capabilities (P=0.002). There was no significant difference in job satisfaction of two groups (P=0.242).Conclusion: The results showed that quality of work life in midwives working in related departments are higher than midwives working in unrelated workplaces. Therefore, it is recommended to use midwives as much as possible in positions and workplaces related to their field of study.
Evaluative judgement is the capability to make decisions about the quality of work of oneself and others. In this paper, we propose that developing students' evaluative judgement should be a goal of ...higher education, to enable students to improve their work and to meet their future learning needs: a necessary capability of graduates. We explore evaluative judgement within a discourse of pedagogy rather than primarily within an assessment discourse, as a way of encompassing and integrating a range of pedagogical practices. We trace the origins and development of the term 'evaluative judgement' to form a concise definition then recommend refinements to existing higher education practices of self-assessment, peer assessment, feedback, rubrics, and use of exemplars to contribute to the development of evaluative judgement. Considering pedagogical practices in light of evaluative judgement may lead to fruitful methods of engendering the skills learners require both within and beyond higher education settings. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
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