Who decides where we work - the individual, the collective or the institution? Narratives of legitimizing hybrid work practices

We examine how knowledge workers use narratives to legitimize their hybrid work practices in post-Covid-19 work life. We identify three narratives, the 'individualist', the 'collectivist', and the 'institutionalist', as alternative perspectives of hybrid work that people draw on to legitimize their workplace choices to support performativity and well-being. This study contributes to research on organizational policy implementation by explaining how narrative constructions are used to legitimate different choices within same organizations that go through a transition from forced remote work to hybrid work. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Working Remotely in the New Normal: Towards a Conceptual Framework for Managing Employee Well-Being

The world of work is currently undergoing a revolution that will fundamentally change the way we live, work and relate to one another. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the new normal compels organisations to move to digital modes which allow for remote work. HR scholars anticipate that the future will see more remote-friendly and digital work norms, which will influence employees' well-being. The question is, how should HR professionals manage employee well-being in the new normal? The purpose of this chapter is to contribute towards a conceptual framework for managing the well-being of knowledge workers in the new normal. It was achieved by conducting a systematic review of the existing literature on remote work, its effect on the well-being of knowledge workers and HR initiatives that organisations could adopt to organise and manage remote work in the future. The author anticipates that the conceptual framework will assist HR professionals in developing digital wellness interventions to manage the well-being of remote workers. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Transformer Models for Activity Mining in Knowledge-Intensive Processes

Mining useful information to analyze knowledge-intensive business processes requires data that describes activities of knowledge workers. Emails are widely used in organizations to provide support in the functioning of knowledge-intensive processes. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has increased reliance on technologies such as email to help facilitate communication within organizations to make up for the lack of face-to-face contact. In this work, we propose an activity mining technique, which receives an incoming email message, classifies the sender's intent and translates it into a set of business process activities. Specifically, we leverage deep learning language models to first classify the email body into a group of intents, which are then mapped to related activities. To our knowledge, we propose the first transfer-learning based solution for mining activity information from emails. The effectiveness of our solution was evaluated on real-world data coming from email exchanges between knowledge workers. Our results based on unsupervised experiments and a field study show that transformer models can be used to semantically label emails and that mapping activities to matched intents is highly accurate. © 2023, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Trait emotional intelligence and flourishing: The mediating role of positive coping behaviour

Orientation: Personality and emotion-related predispositions cause individuals to respond differently to environmental stressors, resulting in different wellness outcomes. Research purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the mediating role of positive coping behaviour in the association between trait emotional intelligence and flourishing. Motivation for the study: Research shows that emotionally intelligent people experience higher subjective well-being and psychological functioning. Yet, few studies have examined the pathway through which trait emotional intelligence leads to improved well-being, especially in times of uncertainty and change. Research approach/design and method: A cross-sectional survey design was used to collect quantitative data from a convenience sample of knowledge workers in South Africa. The participants' self-evaluations were measured using the Assessing Emotional Scale, the Positive Coping Behaviour Inventory and the Flourishing Scale. Statistical analyses included the use of descriptive statistics, the assessment of model fit, the evaluation of bivariate correlations and mediation analyses. Main findings: The results show that the significant association between trait emotional intelligence and flourishing is attributable to the positive coping behaviour capabilities of emotionally intelligent individuals. Practical/managerial implications: In a work environment characterised by the unknown and unpredictable, organisations should remain focused on enhancing employees' emotion-related abilities and personal psychosocial resources. Contribution/value-add: By focusing on the mediating role of positive coping behaviours in the relationship between trait emotional intelligence and flourishing, this study contributes to existing knowledge regarding the pathway through which specific dispositional characteristics influence well-being outcomes at work.

How does working from home during COVID-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

Our study examines the effects of the sudden shift to WFH on three specific aspects of managerial work: how managers allocate their time across different activities;whether the incidence and length of different activities (e.g., meetings) changed;and whether the changes in time allocation and activity structure varied according to the type of organization employing the manager. We use this evidence to inform and inspire the discussion of two questions related to the development of human-computer interaction (HCI) technology. In particular: 1) can HCI technology reduce (or even eliminate) the possible additional burden that managers experience due to the shift to working from home? And 2) can HCI technology help take advantage of opportunities for improving managerial productivity and wellbeing that are made possible by this shift? Our findings indicate that the forced transition to WFH created by the COVID pandemic was associated with a drastic reduction in commuting time. Managers did not reallocate the "extra" time to personal activities, rather reallocating the time gained from commuting toward more time spent in meetings. These results suggest an attempt to to recoup some of the extemporaneous interactions that typically happen in the office. Furthermore, managers employed by larger organizations - i.e. managers whose typical interactions are likely to be more complex and include a broader number and variety of people - were disproportionately affected by WFH arrangements during the COVID pandemic. We find that this group ended up spending more time in work-related meetings, and less time in personal activities, relative to managers employed by small/medium-sized organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Extending the use of the Belief Action Outcome model during COVID-19 pandemic: Technology access review on locational disparities and inequalities for knowledge workers.

Remote working has played an increasingly important role in accelerating alternative workplaces. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic emergency demands, this paper seek to demonstrate the resilience of knowledge workers and their ability to work remotely, despite the uneven distribution of enabling infrastructure during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The Belief Action Outcome (BAO) model for information systems was used to support the study as this underexplored theory was found to be worthy of further testing in real-world situations. This qualitative study used a range of sources consisting largely of search data from major online journal databases. The findings highlight that knowledge workers can successfully work from alternative workplaces and still deliver the required outputs, despite socio-economic problems such as locational disparities and inequalities in access to technology. The same technologies that empowered knowledge workers to transform their work locations during the COVID-19 crisis, however, are the same to enable certain sectors of society whilst hindering other cohorts residing in under resourced locations. Therefore, the benefits of working remotely cannot favour everyone because of the existing inequalities and disparities. Applying the BAO model in this context implies environmental issues are likely to play a growing important role in future when decisions are made around alternative workplace and adoption of IS/IT systems. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted working patterns and accelerated the trend towards working in alternative workplaces than the traditional office/factory premises, there are notable implications around this shift. The study confirmed the related behaviours, opportunities, and barriers (social systems and organisations), as well as the structures (both societal and organisational) of the BAO model. In addition, certain aspects of both the remote workers' and organisations' adoption behaviour were changed to a greater extent and more rapidly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a contribution, this qualitative study reveals in more detail the yet uncharted remote workers' beliefs.

The medium-term perceived impact of work from home on life and work domains of knowledge workers during COVID-19 pandemic: A survey at the National Research Council of Italy.

Objective: The study aimed to investigate perceptions and determinants of the overall impact on life and work domains among a community of knowledge workers after 18 months of forced work from home due to the pandemic. Methods: A cross-sectional study with a retrospective assessment was conducted early in 2022 at the National Research Council of Italy. Five single-item questions explored the perceived impact on life domain while a 7-item scale the impact on the work domain. Bivariate analyses and multivariate regressions were used to evaluate the associations between impacts and some key factors defined by 29 ad hoc closed questions. Results: More than 95% of the 748 respondents reported a perceived change in at least one item of the life domain. For each of these items, although a large group of subjects has reported that working from home had no impact (from 27 to 55%), in the rest of the sample the positive evaluation (from 30 to 60%) clearly prevailed over the negative one. Overall, most of the subjects (64%) rated the impact on the work experience positively. Relationship with colleagues and participation in the work context were the items where the greatest number of negative rates was concentrated (27 and 25%, respectively). On the other hand, positive perceptions prevailed over both negative perceptions and lack of impact perceptions on the subjects of organizational flexibility and quality of work. The frequency of work-room sharing, home-work commute time and changes in sedentary lifestyle, have been identified as common explanatory factors of perceived impacts on both domains. Conclusion: Overall, respondents reported positive rather than negative perceived impacts of forced work from home in both their lives and work. The obtained results suggest that policies to promote the physical and mental health of employees, strengthen inclusion and maintain a sense of community are necessary to improve workers' health and prevent the effects of perceived isolation on research activities.

Organisational Factors Affecting Knowledge Retention in a Public Organisation

Knowledge is a strategic resource for any organisation to maintain optimal operational efficiency and competitiveness. Knowledge could be in the knower's mind (tacit) or codified and stored in knowledge repositories for retrieval when needed (explicit). Knowledge retention in organisations is becoming a global concern as the shortage of professionals or knowledge workers persists. Organisations over the years have focused on investing in activities leading to knowledge creation, improving technological capabilities, and increasing performance with less attention given to knowledge retention. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated this concern leading to the exit of more knowledge workers from organisations voluntarily or involuntarily. The current study seeks to investigate the role of organisational factors on knowledge retention in public organisations using the water sector in a South African metropolitan city. This study seeks to deepen the knowledge management scholarship by viewing knowledge retention as a system rather than a process or strategy only, as explored by most studies. The water sector is a knowledge-driven sector that utilises heterogeneous knowledge (engineers, hydrologists, technicians, IT specialists) to achieve its mandate, making it information and knowledge-rich. This study intends to use the knowledge-based view as a sensitising lens to explore how a public organisation systemically integrates and coordinates its heterogeneous knowledge resources to ensure that knowledge is retained as well as maintain optimal operational efficiency. The basic assumptions of the knowledge base view are that knowledge is the most strategic resource in an organisation, and its coordination facilitates optimised efficiency. The study will adopt a pragmatist paradigm to uncover the role of organisational factors on knowledge retention. A purposive sample of supervisors and managers in the water sector will be interviewed. Qualitative data will be collected, and qualitative methods will be used to analyse the data. © 2022, Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All rights reserved.

Sharing Knowledge in the Social Media Era: Strengths and Weaknesses for Knowledge Workers

Sharing knowledge is a very critical process for professional knowledge workers as it enables the creation and accumulation of individual and organizational knowledge. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and social media platforms to boost formal and informal knowledge sharing among knowledge workers is inevitable, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has forced digital transformation. This study aims to examine the strengths and weaknesses of social media platforms for sharing knowledge by assessing its characteristics from knowledge management (KM) and information security perspectives. Hence, the study assesses the capability of social media platforms as a KM platform in terms of reach, depth, richness, aggregation, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Based on the literature review, the main strengths of social media platforms are reach, richness, and availability, whereas some weaknesses are related to confidentiality and depth. The findings of this research can help researchers in this area, and help organizations and decision-makers set policies for sharing knowledge through social media platforms. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Green Human Resources Management Practices and Pro-Environmental Behavior of Knowledge Workers in Selected Private Organisations in Ogun State, Nigeria

This study investigated how green human resources management practices (GHRMP) related to pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) of knowledge workers in selected organisations in Ogun State, Nigeria. All the knowledge workers in the selected private organisations formed the population but for convenience and guide against contravening government social distancing rule of COVID-19, the questionnaire were sampled via email on twenty-five (25) knowledge workers in each of the six (6) organisations studied. The sample used was 150 knowledge workers. Questionnaires were administering on respondents in each of the chosen organisation. Hypotheses were tested with Pearson Product Moment Correlation. Findings indicated that positive relationship amongst GHRMP and PEB and it was rightly recommended that every organisation must encourage green human resource management that will improve its workforce pro-environmental behaviours.

Operational Adaptation and Innovation During COVID-19: Lessons Learned from Consulting and a Road Map for the Future

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed professional service firm (PSF) operations, most visible perhaps in the transition to a work from home economy. This study is a deep dive into management consulting (a common type of PSF) and describes the impact of the pandemic on short- and long-term operations. It uses a mixed-method approach to data collection (primary/secondary and quantitative/qualitative) to explain the operational adaptations that consulting firms made in response to the pandemic and the service innovations that resulted. During the pandemic, disruptions to client mix, customer experience, customer acquisition, and employee lifestyle triggered new organizational challenges in strategic planning, marketing, employee relations, and cost control. Firms responded by modifying operational characteristics (e.g., customer engagement, customization, knowledge intensity, and capital intensity). Successful operational adaptations led to service innovation (most commonly in product, strategy, delivery, and marketing). The study finishes with an exploration of how the lessons learned in management consulting may provide a road map for other PSFs and more generalized services in a post-pandemic world.

REMOTE WORKING STRATEGY INDUCED BY COVID-19: A CASE STUDY

With the hope of regaining their pre-pandemic level of operations and certainties, companies who employ knowledge workers wonder whether working from home will be the main modality of employment going forward. The managers should understand the problems and opportunities and need to develop successful management strategies. This study analyzed the feasibility of remote working and looked for ways to improve employees' productivity while working at home. A survey was conducted on R&D engineers of a software company. Most employees reported no change in their productivity and less change in their physical health, while most employees reported an improvement in their mental health. The top four benefits of remote working are stress reduction from commuting, more freedom, location independence, and better work-life balance. The top three challenges are face-to-face interactions, dealing with distraction, and bad health habits. The top four tools that employees found necessary were face-to-face meetings at least once per month, better hardware and equipment, training and learning, and opportunities for non-work-related remote social interactions. The study indicates that regular face-to-face meetings are essential for successful remote collaboration. Also, if possible, a hybrid schedule should be considered, with remote work two or three days per week. A framework model for successful remote working programs was developed to summarize the findings of this study and to serve as a reference for decision making and further analysis. Finally, a remote work program's success can be measured through four factors: safety and regulatory compliance, environmental impact, productivity and cost reduction, and worker satisfaction. © American Society for Engineering Management, 2021