Home Workplace


Book Description

Reap the benefits of the home workplace revolution with this practical resource that guides managers and employees through working from home either full or part-time. If you are charged with establishing or executing a home-work policy in your business, t




The Future of the Office


Book Description

A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BUSINESS BOOK OF 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of "new normal." Now comes the hard part. Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obvious. What should both groups do? In a prescient new book, The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli lays out the facts in an effort to provide both employees and employers with a vision of their futures. Cappelli unveils the surprising tradeoffs both may have to accept to get what they want. Cappelli illustrates the challenges we face by in drawing lessons from the pandemic and deciding what to do moving forward. Do we allow some workers to be permanently remote? Do we let others choose when to work from home? Do we get rid of their offices? What else has to change, depending on the approach we choose? His research reveals there is no consensus among business leaders. Even the most high-profile and forward-thinking companies are taking divergent approaches: --Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies say many employees can work remotely on a permanent basis. --Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others say it is important for everyone to come back to the office. --Ford is redoing its office space so that most employees can work from home at least part of the time, and --GM is planning to let local managers work out arrangements on an ad-hoc basis. As Cappelli examines, earlier research on other types of remote work, including telecommuting offers some guidance as to what to expect when some people will be in the office and others work at home, and also what happened when employers tried to take back offices. Neither worked as expected. In a call to action for both employers and employees, Cappelli explores how we should think about the choices going forward as well as who wins and who loses. As he implores, we have to choose soon.




Home-Based Work and Home-Based Workers (1800-2021)


Book Description

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the home as a workplace became a widely discussed topic. However, for almost 300 million workers around the world, paid work from home was not news. Home-Based Work and Home-Based Workers (1800-2021) includes contributions from scholars, activists and artists addressing the past and present conditions of home-based work. They discuss the institutional and legal histories of regulations for these workers, their modes of organization and resistance, as well as providing new insights on contemporary home-based work in both traditional and developing sectors. Contributors are: Jane Barrett, Janine Berg, Eloisa Betti, Chris Bonner, Eileen Boris, Patricia Coñoman Carrilo, Janhavi Dave, Saniye Dedeoğlu, Laura K Ekholm, Jenna Harvey, Frida Hållander, K. Kalpana, Srabani Maitra, Indrani Mazumdar, Gabriela Mitidieri, Silke Neunsinger, Malin Nilsson, Narumol Nirathron, Åsa Norman, Leda Papastefanaki, Archana Prasad, Maria Tamboukou, Nina Trige Andersen, and Marlese von Broembsen.




Telework in the 21st Century


Book Description

Technological developments have enabled a dramatic expansion and also an evolution of telework, broadly defined as using ICTs to perform work from outside of an employer’s premises. This volume offers a new conceptual framework explaining the evolution of telework over four decades. It reviews national experiences from Argentina, Brazil, India, Japan, the United States, and ten EU countries regarding the development of telework, its various forms and effects. It also analyses large-scale surveys and company case studies regarding the incidence of telework and its effects on working time, work-life balance, occupational health and well-being, and individual and organizational performance.




Creating the Productive Workplace


Book Description

The built environment affects our physical, mental and social well-being. Here renowned professionals from practice and academia explore the evidence from basic research as well as case studies to test this belief. They show that many elements in the built environment contribute to establishing a milieu which helps people to be healthier and have the energy to concentrate while being free to be creative. The health and well-being agenda pervades society in many different ways but we spend much of our lives in buildings, so they have an important role to play within this total picture. This demands us to embrace change and think beyond the conventional wisdom while retaining our respect for it. Creating the Productive Workplace shows how we need to balance the needs of people and the ever-increasing enabling technologies but also to take advantage of the healing powers of Nature and let them be part of environmental design. This book aims to lead to more human-centred ways of designing the built environment with deeper meaning and achieve healthier and more creative, as well as more productive places to work.







Improving Workplace Quality


Book Description

A consensus has developed in workplace studies around the concept of ‘well-being at work’ in an awareness that such apparently distinct aspects as health and safety, discrimination, labour market integration, and work-life balance converge in the workplace and are best treated as one complex phenomenon. This important book offers twelve contributions by distinguished international scholars from a range of disciplinary domains, providing an in-depth analysis of ongoing changes in the world of work and their impact on personal well-being. The contributors place specific workplace experiences in a comparative perspective, examining policy and regulatory initiatives and judicial rulings at national, regional, and international levels. The case studies are drawn from Italy, France, the United States, Russia, and developing countries. The essays examine recent legal developments in such topical issues as: – atypical and non-standard work; – child-care leave; – company-level welfare provisions; – disability; – harassment; – low-wage workers and employment benefits; – misperception discrimination; – public policy in care services; – unemployment and mental health; and – work/family conciliation policies. Providing a detailed overview of recent developments in policy and jurisprudence in a comparative perspective regarding discrimination, work-life balance, and workers’ integration into the labour market – as well as a guide to best practices in promoting well-being at work – this book will prove indispensable to labour and employment law practitioners, as well as to work organization, occupational medicine, mental health, and human resources professionals.




Twenty-First Century Workplace Challenges


Book Description

In Twenty-First Century Workplace Challenges, Edna Rabenu examines current and future challenges to psychological relationships in the workplace due to shifting environmental conditions such as mass migration, globalization, the advent of cyber entities, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Rabenu’s incisive analysis offers new solutions for employees, workers, managers, and organizations.




Workplace Strategy for the Flexible Office


Book Description

Workplace Strategy for the Flexible Office will give you the theoretical understanding and the practical tools needed for creating and implementing a workplace strategy as you move towards a new office or way of working. Using both the physical design of the workplace and the way of working as jumping-off points, Aram Seddigh presents five research-based principles that guide your thinking when developing workplace strategies, and how this work can be carried out. These principles are Right-sizing, Diversify, Facilitate Collaboration, Increase Adaptability, and Insights Through Participation. Together they form the Workplace Adequacy Framework. In the first part of the book, you'll gain insight into the current state of research in the field, with a theoretical model to deepen your knowledge. The next part presents a method and a practical review on how to develop and apply a workplace strategy. The final part of the book shows how workplace strategies could be executed by two different organisations - a tech company and a production company - with differing conditions. This book focuses on hybrid and flexible ways of working (like activity-based working, for example), but the method can also be applied to other ways of working. The book can be used as course literature in the education of workplace strategists and related roles, as well as for architects, project managers, change managers, workers within HR and real estate departments, facility managers, real estate consultants and similar professions whose work involves office design and new ways of working.




Class and Social Background Discrimination in the Modern Workplace


Book Description

This book exposes how inequalities based on class and social background arise from employment practices in the digital age. It considers instances where social media is used in recruitment to infiltrate private lives and hide job advertisements based on locality; where algorithms assess socio-economic data to filter candidates; where human interviewers are replaced by artificial intelligence with design that disadvantages users of classed language; and where already vulnerable groups become victims of digitalisation and remote work. The author examines whether these practices create risks of discrimination based on certain protected attributes, including ‘social origin’ in international labour law and laws in Australia and South Africa, ‘social condition’ and ‘family status’ in laws within Canada, and others. The book proposes essential law reform and improvements to workplace policy.