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Abstract
This article investigates changes in routine tasks and computer use in European jobs in the period 1995–2015, putting them in the context of the debates on the future of work and the impact of automation. Digital technologies not only affect employment shifts but also shape work organization. A shift-share analysis combining European Working Conditions Survey and European Labour Force Survey data assesses to what extent recent changes in tasks are the result of changes in the structure of employment (shifts in employment across jobs) or changes in the content of work itself (transformation in the task contents and methods within jobs). The results suggest contrasting trends between observed changes in tasks measures within jobs and compositional shifts in employment for routine tasks indexes. Employment structures are de-routinizing while work itself is becoming more routine. These results seem also related to the increased use of computers at work during the same period.

In planned change field previous research mostly focused on organizational level factors and their influence on the outcome of change. Organization size, history of innovations, senior management support, organizational culture, political aspects were considered as important factors influencing change process. Less attention was paid to understanding the process through which new behaviours are developed and change plans become ongoing practice. Therefore this article focuses on planned change of organizational work process. This enables to analyze change in intermediate level between organization and individual. Consequently the research question of the article is how organizational work processes change in the context of planned, purposive change in terms of process internal structure. The article sheds light on micro processes that occur inside the organizational work processes that undergo planned, purposive change. It reveals how change plans are translated into action and by doing so, if and how they got modified, adapted and changed. The planned change of organizational work process is modelled in terms of Feldman's and Pentland's (2003) theory of internal structure of organizational processes. According to proposed model of planned change of organizational work process, change of work process occurs through conceptualization and communication of change and adaptation of change (discovery and integration of new process performance). The proposition was tested using qualitative approach and embedded single case design to investigate the change of work process in organization which is implementing planned change; the design was embedded in that the unit of analysis (process change) encompassed data on three states of process (process before change, planned process, process after change) and on change implementation process. Information about three states of the process was needed in order to reveal how work process evolved and evaluate if change was effective. The evolution of process and effectiveness of ...

PurposeIn this paper, the authors report the findings of an experiment on the effectiveness of gamification on work performance in a real industrial workplace setting with monotonous, repetitive work.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted an experiment with a simple gamification application that the authors added to a given information system and compared the work performance of an experimental group (n = 16) with a control group (n = 15) over a period of one month.FindingsThe results of the authors' experiment show that gamification of the workplace leads to a measurable improvement of work performance, creates prevailingly positive emotions and increases the motivation of the workers.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors' findings provide reasons for conducting future research on the contiguity of gamification and the Hawthorne effect or similar phenomena. In this regard, it also seems necessary to take a closer look at who is really affected by a gamified environment and what the boundaries of the gamified environment are.Practical implicationsThe authors demonstrate that gamification is a useful tool for process improvement. Furthermore, our results are helpful for a more successful implementation of gamification.Originality/valueGamification has proven to be effective in a large number of application contexts, such as education, health and crowdsourcing. Despite the generally positive evaluation of its effectiveness, gamification is still thought to work differently in different contexts. Therefore, there is a gap in the literature on this topic with respect to real industrial workplaces. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the authors are among the first to have conducted a gamification experiment in a real industrial context.

How well do you understand the sweeping welfare reforms of the mid-1990s? The Transition from Welfare to Work: Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes provides a comprehensive examination of the welfare-to-work initiatives that were undertaken just prior to and following the major reform of United States welfare legislation in 1996. It will familiarize you with the intent of those reforms and show you how those interventions have been implemented. It also explores the barriers to employment that must be overcome by welfare-to-work clients, and the impact of these changes on clients, employ.

AbstractNonprofit organizations have long provided an important space for women to establish roles in public life. Using establishment‐level data on for‐profit and nonprofit organizations, we show that the proportions of women in full‐time and mission‐critical positions are higher in nonprofits. In contrast, for‐profit businesses have more women in part‐time jobs and in jobs that are peripheral to the organizational purpose. We also demonstrate that the greater proportions of women in full‐time and mission‐critical positions in nonprofits are due to the use of inclusive work processes and transparent human resource management practices. Our findings provide evidence to pursue the aspects of nonprofit organizations that expand opportunities for working women.

Objective: To examine nurses' understanding of the surgery center about his work process in a maternity ward in Parnamirim / RN. Method: This is a qualitative, descriptive and exploratory interview and observation used the descriptive and technical information-gathering. Data collected between the months of January and February 2010 were analyzed through content analysis, thematic modality. Results: The patients were classified into five categories that point in the process of nursing work: the many insights into the management process, the implications of power relations, even as the understanding of the nursing process, continuing education and technology last seen as a necessity for the development of said process. Conclusion: Given the above, it is considered that there is an understanding of the process of nursing work in an unclear way, making them somewhat scattered and systematic components of the same, although some components of this process are recognized by the interviewees.

There is a large body of research examining work disability management and the return to work (RTW) of sick or injured workers. However, although this research makes clear the roles of the returning worker and supervisor, that of the co-workers is less well understood. To increase understanding of this topic, we have identified, reviewed, and discussed three studies that emerged from our connection with a Canadian research-training program. The first study, conducted in Sweden by Tjulin, MacEachen, and Ekberg (2009), showed that co-workers can play a positive role in RTW, but this is often invisible to supervisors. The second study, undertaken by Dunstan and MacEachen (2013) in Canada, found that RTW could both positively and negatively impact co-workers. For instance, co-workers may benefit from learning new skills, but may also be burdened by the need to assume extra work to accommodate a returning worker. The third study, performed in Belgium by Mortelmans and Verjans (2012) and Mortelmans, Verjans, and Mairiaux (2012) reported the need to include the expectations and objections of co-workers in RTW plans and implemented a three-step RTW tool that involves co-workers. Taken together, these studies highlight the social context of work, the positive role played by co-workers in the RTW process, the impacts of workplace social relations on RTW outcomes, and the benefits to all of involving co-workers in RTW plans.

Seeks to determine the impact managerial controls have on the effectiveness of virtual teams. Using an experimental design compares self‐directed virtual teams to counterparts where behavior controls are used as a method of managerial control. The data were collected using 51 student teams of three or four members each from three different countries. The results indicate that the most satisfied team members were in virtual teams with effective coordination and communication. Members of self‐directed virtual teams report higher individual satisfaction with the team and project, while different control structures had no significant impact on virtual team performance. Future research should investigate how these findings generalize to organizational workers, rather than just looking at students. This paper is just a first step investigating one type of managerial control: behavior controls. The small amount of research that has been published on virtual teams has primarily concentrated on self‐directed teams. This paper compares results of team effectiveness by looking at both self‐directed virtual teams and virtual teams with behavioral controls enforced.

The outcome of a work process depends heavily on which tasks assigned to which employees. However, sometimes-optimized assignments based on employees' qualifications may result in an uneven and ineffective workload distribution among them. Likewise, an even workload distribution without considering the employee's qualifications may cause unproductive employee-task matching that results in low performance of employees. This trade-off is even more noticeable for work processes during critical time junctions, such as in military command centers and emergency rooms that require being fast and effective without making errors. This study proposes that optimizing task-employee assignments according to their capabilities while also keeping them under a workload threshold, results in better performance for work processes, especially during critical time junctions. The goal is to select the employee-task assignments in order to minimize the average duration of a work process while keeping the employees under a workload threshold to prevent errors caused by overload. Due to uncertainties inherent in the problem related with the inter-arrival time of work orders, task durations and employees' instantaneous workload, a utilized simulation-optimization approach solves this problem. More specifically, a discrete event human performance simulation model evaluates the objective function of the problem coupled with a genetic algorithm based meta-heuristic optimization approach to search the solution space. This approach proved to be useful in determining the right task-agent assignments by taking into consideration the employees' qualifications and mental workload in order to minimize the average duration of a work process. Use of a sample work process shows the effectiveness of the developed simulation-optimization approach. Numerical tests indicate that the proposed approach finds better solutions than common practices and other simulation-optimization methods. Accordingly, by using this method, organizations can increase performance, manage excess-level workloads, and generate higher satisfactory environments for employees, without modifying the structure of the process itself.