The Role of Organizational Design in the Future of Work

and now let me officially welcome one and all on behalf of the nice future work initiative thank you for joining us during our inaugural webinar on the role of organizational design in the future of work my name is sarah thamers and i will be your moderator now before we jump into the anticipated content for today's webinar i'd like to say a few words about the nash future of work initiative which was launched in 2019 to address the ongoing and accelerated changes impacting the workplace and work all of which present both challenges but also opportunities for tomorrow's workforce our vision is quite simple and very much aligned with that of niosh which is to prepare workers for a safer healthier and more productive future now to tackle the novel and often complex issues that workers face the initiative advocates using the total worker health approach which is a synergistic holistic expanded transdisciplinary really approach that aims to look at how the workplace and work impact and therefore can be modified to improve workforce outcomes not just on but also off the job and the initiative very much is meant to be a collaborative effort made up of different parts and pieces and individuals both within the walls of niosh and increasingly beyond as well now one of the first steps we wanted to undertake with the initiative is to develop a set of future work priority topics as you see before you this is the graphic that we developed you see at the top we have issues that impact all three of the workplace work and workforce and then below to the left of your screen top to down you see our nine priority topics each one to the right having its associated subtopics divided again into these three groupings of workplace working workforce and this was meant to be developed to serve as a guiding framework for research and practice activities and if you'd like to learn more about our priority topics i would encourage you to please take a look at our website as we have a foundational paper there that really outlines these in much more detail than we certainly would be able to cover in one webinar now the nice future work initiative and work group have a number of ongoing and upcoming activities including launching this very webinar series we will be hosting three webinars a year each year for the next three years so a total of nine each one focus on one of our nine priority topics beginning of course today with organizational design and as you see on your screen the two additional ones will be focused on this year are artificial intelligence and demographics and again if you'd like to learn more about this series or the initiative i encourage you to visit our website now without further ado let me please introduce you to your two speakers for today first we will hear from dr jessica streit jessica is a research psychologist and deputy director of the office of research integration at niosh now in this role she works closely with nash's associate director of research and integration to leverage innovation and promote strategic alignment and collaboration among both the intramural and extramural research communities to advance the niosh mission jessica also serves as a scientific program official for niosh's national occupational research agenda intramural research competition and is a member of niosh's healthy work design and well-being cross-sector program she has contributed to the development of a national occupational research agenda on healthy work design and well-being as well as one on total worker health jessica completed a professional certificate in strategic foresight from the university of houston just last year and has co-authored publications examining occupational safety and health risks and hazards faced by workers today and in the future of work second we will hear from dr leslie hammer leslie is a professor in the oregon institute of occupational health sciences at oregon health and science university as well as co-director of the oregon healthy workforce center which is one of the six total worker health centers of excellence funded by niosh she is also a professor of psychology at portland state university and associate director of the portland state university occupational health psychology graduate training program she is a leading expert on work and family and occupational stress more generally and serves regularly as a consultant on occupational stress and well-being workplace issues she specializes in the health effects of supportive supervision at work and the health consequences of occupational stress and work family conflict and has extensive experience in designing implementing and evaluating work site interventions and supervisor training she conducts applied research that focuses on workplace interventions aimed at improving supervisory leadership skills and in turn the impact of such trainings on both supervisor and worker performance stress health safety and well-being and with that jessica thank you for joining us today and let me turn this over to you please great so before i get started sir i just want to do a check and make sure you can hear me and see the slides indeed thank you jessica you're good to go perfect well thank you all for joining today it's a pleasure to participate in niosh's inaugural future of work webinar and to present alongside dr leslie hammer to discuss the topic of organizational design which is really an important concept that affects worker health safety and well-being today and will undoubtedly continue to do so into the future for the next 15 minutes or so i will talk a little about niosh's current organizational design priority topics for the future of work initiative and i'll also describe nash's current research portfolio in this critical occupational safety and health research area but before i move on i would like to offer special thanks to dr naomi swanson who collaborated with me to author this presentation so at its most fundamental level the term organizational design refers to both the physical and functional infrastructure supporting the work that must be done and these structures have a major influence on where when and how work will be performed historically organizational design included a fixed work schedule at a dedicated facility where workers had direct supervision by a managerial chain from a single employer and this was true for most occupations regardless of their associated industry today many workplaces and work schedules are more complex in design than this historic model due in large part to advances in information communication technologies sometimes called icts for short the popularity and availability of icts like cellular phones and wi-fi enabled devices now make it possible for a significant number of jobs to be completed from almost anywhere at virtually any time of day and consequently remote working and teleworking or telecommuting have become more widely accepted practices and in this past year we saw a monumental surge in work from home arrangements during the covet 19 pandemic many just-in-time research studies trying to get a grasp on work from home rates have occurred in the last 11 months with estimates suggesting as much as 43 percent of the u.s workforce has been engaged in some type of home-based work arrangement since march 2020 and 75 percent of executives surveyed have reported that these work from home experiences have been successful now while some employers have already begun the shift toward in-office requirements for their workers and many anticipate reinstituting in-person work for most if not all their employees at some point in the future new studies also suggest that employers are more open now than they were pre-pandemic to the idea of blended work environments that include some mix of in-office and at-home work time in fact some recently published estimates indicate 16 or more of the u.s working population will continue to work from home on a regular basis even after the pandemic passes and we re-equilibrate to a new normal and while this figure may not seem impressive at first it's certainly a considerable jump from the estimated 3.4 percent who regularly worked from home in 2019 and so with this information in mind we can see that the future of work stands to become an increasingly complex mix of jobs relying on a combination of traditional and flexible ways of working which creates both challenges and opportunities for the occupational safety and health community niash's future of work initiative like sarah already mentioned prioritizes the study of future organizational design driven challenges and opportunities into what can conceptually be collapsed into four main areas the physical work environment the work non-work interface stress prevention and organizational leadership and so we'll spend the next few minutes looking at each of these in a little more detail first there is a strong body of literature substantiating the link between the physical work environment and worker well-being and organizational performance regardless of where or when or how they work workers today need access to health protecting design features such as ergonomically designed workstations and work tools personal protective equipment and hazard free work environments and these needs will undoubtedly continue into the future there are questions however around how safe working environments will be provided maintained and continually evaluated in the future of work as our definition of what constitutes the workplace expands and the boundaries around what is considered the work environment become more and more fluid there is evidence for example that remote workers may be at increased risk of injury because home offices are frequently configured without ergonomic reviewer consultation in addition remote workers are often unable to take advantage of health enhancing features and opportunities that we might find in a well-designed central work facility offices set up in an individual worker's home or automobile are unlikely to include features like smart ventilation systems work related automated safety mechanisms sit stand or active workstations and comprehensive on-site exercise facilities so without the requirement of reporting to a central facility with a cafeteria workers access to nutritious food options during workday meal and break times may also be more limited in the future as facilities are modernized or constructed and as work spaces become more flexible employers and occupational safety and health professionals will need to think about creative strategies to promote health equity among all worker groups regardless of where or when they work and as the profile of the physical work environment continues to change so too will the landscape of the work non-work interface in coming years it is anticipated that workers will face a growing need to concurrently manage work and personal life responsibilities recently flexible work arrangements have become one of the most popular mechanisms for enhancing worklife fit so much so that employers and workers may assume that flexible schedules will somehow be a magic cure-all for work-life balance and integration issues in reality research on the consequences of workplace flexibility have actually yielded mixed results on one hand a large number of studies highlight the positive effects of flexibility including increased job performance satisfaction autonomy creativity and opportunities for historically disadvantaged groups but on the other hand multiple studies have also noted that more flexibility can exacerbate work family conflict and increase work related stress by further blurring the boundaries between the work and personal life domains in addition jobs consisting primarily of remote work often require intense use of information communication technologies and it is easy for extended work availability to become normalized when employees are all equipped with mobile devices that are connected to an organization's network systems so this can lead to increased feelings of telepressure which is an unhealthy internal state characterized by a constant preoccupation with work in recent studies telepressure has been associated with increased burnout elevated stress levels and poor sleep practices among workers there's also a fundamental difference in self-governed flexibility which includes workers abilities to vary their daily schedules and take leave as needed and employer sanctioned flexibility which includes things like on-call work schedules these two different forms of flexibility can have very different effects on workers physical and mental health not surprisingly more negative outcomes and greater work-life issues have been reported by on-call workers because this type of schedule fails to enhance worker control over the work experience and can actually make working hours far less predictable now along with work scheduling access to employer-sponsored leave such as paid time off for vacations illnesses and dependent and elder care plays a critical role in managing the work non-work interface there are a number of factors that influence workers access to paid leave a handful of examples are called out on the slide here including work arrangements occupation industry or profession union presence and membership employer size and location and changes in employment status in the future paid leave programs stand to become even more complicated due to the rise of non-standard employment arrangements and multinational employers we're also seeing an increasing number of job changes that a worker experiences in a lifetime today the average worker holds 12.3 different jobs by age 52 and this number is projected to continue to grow into the future employment disruptions that are caused by these types of job changes can lead to considerable fluctuations in a worker's access to benefits like paid leave including gap periods where the benefit is wholly absent which have obvious work-life fit implications so clearly research evaluating the health effects of flexibility and access to employer-sponsored leave will be paramount in the future of work now along with the work non-work interface work stress is another increasingly important safety health and well-being issue that is highly affected by organizational design factors according to recent studies published by the american psychological association approximately two-thirds of us adults identify work as a significant source of stress this is highly alarming due to the myriad of associated negative health outcomes which range from psychological issues like burnout anxiety depression and frustration to physical ailments like back and headaches sleep disturbances fatigue and digestive system malfunctions research suggests workers will experience more frequent and more intense emotional and mental stress from work in the future some of the major contributors to the growth of the work stress epidemic are anticipated to be an increased blurring of work-life boundaries greater demands for work availability and flexibility and decreased human connections due to remote working in the use of robots at work so starting now and continuing into the future we'll have a need for research investigating the antecedents and consequences of work stress in addition the critical need for studies that design implement and evaluate interventions to reduce and prevent work-related stress will almost certainly continue into the future and this is true today organizational leadership will continue to play a key role for worker safety health and well-being in the future optimistically new ways of working will provide opportunities for innovative health-promoting leadership strategies that can support and empower workers by demonstrating respect appreciation and health awareness by distributing rewards fairly communicating clearly and advocating for job control and autonomous decision making and along similar lines the importance of corporate social responsibility which involves prioritizing societal interest over profits will continue to grow into the future in a competitive market fueled by limited resources employers who embrace corporate social responsibility practices will be positioned to benefit from innovation cost savings brand differentiation and engagement by both customers and employees in addition a growing body of research supports the role of corporate social responsibility as an important psychosocial risk management strategy because it enhances the quality of working life by supporting safe work environments and ethical labor practices instituting diversity and inclusion policies and providing workers with access to continuing education community engagement opportunities and affordable child care there are already a number of resources available for businesses and organizations who are interested in increasing the social responsibility of their operations including the iso 26000 social responsibility standard pictured here so today's need for additional structured investigations and evaluations of worker and organization level outcomes associated with corporate social responsibility and other sustainability policies and practices will continue into the future the publication and dissemination of such findings is critical to growing the evidence base in favor of this alternative way of approaching the process of doing business so as we have seen many organizational design priorities in the future of work will not be completely new or unanticipated hazards instead they will be continuations or extensions of psychosocial factors that are already recognized as salient today and to that end niosh has been building a strong portfolio of research on these priority topics for many years today this research is part of niosh's healthy work design and well-being program a tripartite effort which addresses the domains of total worker health work organization and stress related disorders and economics and as noted on its webpage the mission of niach's healthy work design and well-being cross-sector program is to protect and advance worker safety health and well-being by improving the design of work management practices and the physical and psychosocial work environments the healthy work design and well-being program sponsors niash's priority strategic goal of promoting safe and healthy work design and well-being this priority goal is currently supported by 15 intermediate goals which specify desired actions on the part of external stakeholders using niosh research findings and outputs these intermediate goals are dispersed across virtually all industry sectors and focus on topics such as non-standard work arrangements stress fatigue musculoskeletal disorders substance use and misuse worker mental health obesity and other chronic diseases and vulnerable worker populations at present niach has 53 funded activities in the healthy work design domain these include a variety of research surveillance intervention and training activities across niace's intramural and extramural research portfolios and along with all other niosh research programs healthy work design and well-being releases an annual one-page summary of highlights for those who would like to learn more about its recent accomplishments in january 2020 the healthy work design and well-being council which is co-chaired by niosh research program leaders and external stakeholders released the national occupational research agenda for healthy work design and well-being this document which is available for free internet download identifies the most relevant issues and research gaps in healthy work design and worker well-being that agencies and organizations across the nation should address through 2026 those priorities are organized into seven objectives which focus on changing worker demographics work arrangements technology and work chronic health conditions working hours and sleep organizational practices and the work non-work interface additional information on niosh's healthy work design and wellbeing program is available from any of the links listed here and we've included a list of the references that we consulted during the development of this presentation for those who may be interested in reading more on any of the topics that we've discussed today so far so with that i will thank you all very much for your time and attention and turn the floor back to sarah as our moderator for today thank you very much jessica well now we will hear from leslie leslie will give you a moment to get your slides squared away but then the floor is yours thank you again for joining us sarah can you see my slide because i actually had two different ones on my lap on my laptop so i'm hoping i'm showing the right one can you see it yes we can see it and we can hear you loud and clear okay well let's hope this will be close if it's the wrong one it only has one um spelling error in it so that's the only difference anyway um thanks so much for inviting me and i'm happy to be here this is um really exciting to be in this inaugural um webinar on um the future of work and specifically focusing on organizational design and which is really the area that is closest to my heart i will be talking today about my research and also about practice related to um healthy work design and now i'm going to try to advance forward which is not happening so let's see if i can do this there we go perfect so i am i am the co-director of the oregon healthy workforce center as sarah introduced me as and really gave a wonderful um description of my background i'm also um with portland state university and the coder or the associate director now of the occupational health psychology program i'm part of the oregon institute for occupational health sciences at oregon health and science university as well and so we are one of seven research institutes at ohsu and so the oregon healthy workforce center is located within the institute my co-director of the oregon health workforce center is ryan olson and as i said today i'm going to be talking about some research and then practice as well my background really has been in kind of a combination of focusing on work life work family issues and also supervisor training to support workers and help reduce stress and improve well-being and i have spent the past 15 years developing training and for supervisors and that's what i'm really going to talk about today so this comes at the the future of work initiative in focusing on healthy leadership as well as work life as well as reducing stress and burnout for employees i really focus on prevention and that is important to um to realize that when we talk about leadership training even though it's training of leaders it is from an organizational perspective and it is considered a primary prevention so in addition to the healthy leadership focus i will then talk more specifically about two projects one is the safety and health improvement program which was developed as part of the oregon healthy workforce first cycle of funding and then i'm going to talk about how we adapted this for the u.s forest service

and further more broadly and then i will be talking about some future directions first of all the importance of leadership training i i can't i really can't express how important this is because training leaders to be supportive of workers has shown to be a very critical mechanism for improving health and well-being and decreasing stress of workers and what i have done over the past 15 years is develop training with the help of of funding from nih from cdc niosh from the department of defense and with the help of a lot of colleagues um developing training programs and then evaluating the effectiveness of those training programs using randomized control trials and the training programs have focused on training leaders supervisors managers on how to better support workers around different domains the family supportive supervisor training was the first training that um was developed with my colleague ellen kosic and we focused on training supervisors how to better support workers on work life integration and that led to improvements in job satisfaction reductions in turnover and also improvements in reports of physical health from there i developed the ship training which is a safety supportive supervisor program training it's really the safety and health improvement program that was part of the first cycle of the oregon healthy workforce center developed in collaboration with donald truczillo and i'll talk more about that as i move ahead and then the veteran supportive supervisor training was developed as part of the study of employment retention for veterans with the support of department of defense funding there we developed training based on the prior two trainings and trained supervisors in civilian workplaces how to better support returning service members and that then led into the military employees sleep and health study in the match study where we developed sleep supportive supervisor training and integrated it with fssb training currently i'm involved in a study of active duty um service members training them on really the supervisors that then that that really actually platoon leaders on how to better support their soldiers around psychological health and well-being all of these programs have been very extensive they've taken multiple years they have developed training that is easily accessible and available now and they have been done in conjunction with a large number of collaborators as i mentioned ellen kossik um ryan olson kent anger um cynthia moore todd bodner donald truxillo tory crane steve shay jennifer dimaff krista brockwood and many others many other graduate students and post-docs um the this is important work because we really do show that aiming at the supervisor as primary prevention teaching supervisors how to be better supportive in certain realms certain domains leads to improvement in health outcomes well-being outcomes safety outcomes for employees so it reduces occupational stress improve improves well-being and recently i wrote a chapter with two graduate students jaylene allen and jordan leslie focusing specifically on how supervisor training um can lead to improvements in employee health and well-being and reductions in stress again a critical mechanism so that safety and health improvement program are ship which as i said was developed as part of the first cycle of the oregon healthy workforce center the details of this actually can be obtained in publications which i have listed at the end as well as on our implementation website and that website is yourworkpath.com and this is part of the our institute in our center and you can access the different components of this and other training programs we are have developed toolkits to make them available to employers because we're at the intersection of science and practice i'm not interested in just doing the science so much of what's important to me is to make sure that this moves out and it gets used in workplaces to improve employees experiences workers experiences at work so there's a one-hour computer-based training as well as a two-week behavior tracking program facilitated team sessions and then follow-up discussions as part of this ship program what we have found in our research and when we evaluated the effectiveness of ship we found it had direct effects improvements on physical health in the in terms of blood pressure we also found that it had direct that it had direct effects and moderating effects on employee outcomes moderating effects were actually that it was more effective when the leader member relationship or the leader member exchange as measured by lmx was low so if it would they didn't have a a very strong um very effect effective leader group relationship to begin with this training was more effective so it was more effective where there was need and what we found is that when there was need that greater need when lmx was low we saw improved reports of family supported supervisor behaviors by employees improved reports of team effectiveness and improved reports of work life effectiveness those publications are noted below as well since we developed this as part of the oregon healthy workforce center part of our first cycle we were then very interested in translating this to move forward in other other realms this was initially developed as um with the city of portland um and there there were municipal city workers in the water bureau and the bureau of portland bureau of transportation mostly they were they had um jobs that were most similar to construction workers so they were in the field although they were permanent they were um had they were permanent positions in um in the city we wanted to modify this and translate it for other more general types of occupations and so we did that also as part of our work with the oregon healthy workforce center and then what we did was we actually translated it for a specific use translated it for the u.s forest service so this resulted this was really the the result of um some work that i had been doing with the forest service and with the safety director of our region six in the forest service forest service and we first conducted a needs assessment and to learn more about what the stressors were what the experiences were of these um forest service workers they were in they were working in the forest some of them worked on fires um they had they had jobs that were really um isolated uh so the if you see the um the items in red were really the the variables that we focused on for the modification of ship we focused on these issues related to high stress high work family stress so we drew on the ship training which drew on the family support of supervisor behavior training also there was a need for more better communication and then we found that there was also this um these concerns over ambiguity and concerns over job demand and lack of job demands and lack of information so we adapted the ship training for the supervisor training team education program i have lots of acronyms this is how i keep track of these different training programs step for the u.s forest service and we actually um adapted this um with some funding that was supported by my institute the oregon institute of occupational health sciences and by adapting we added this role clarity module and we updated images within the training program we consolidated some content and removed some aspects and made it um more more appropriate for the forest service so that training the step training content involved still the elements of the family supportive supervisory behavior and the safety support of supervisor behaviors which were part of ship and then we extended and developed this new module on role clarity again all of this training is aimed at supervisors and it's aimed at supervisors because we know that supervisors are key they are key for primary prevention for reducing occupational stress improving health and well-being of workers so with the step study that was actually conducted by a postdoc of mine who is now um now on her own um mckenna perry we were interested in examining the effects of the strat um the step intervention on both employees and supervisors outcomes outcomes so the prior intervention studies were all developed um in randomized controlled trials this was a quasi-experimental design because we had um weren't able to randomize forests but we went into four forests we were also exam i'm interested in examining the effect of stress on supervisors um own work and well-being moderated by their levels of demands if you recall from the needs assessment there were high levels of demands reported by the forest workers and that was not necessarily something that we had control over changing in the forest service so we wanted to see what what effect those demands had on the training itself for this training we um i we worked with 125 different employees and 67 different supervisors across four forests of the u.s forest service across oregon and washington they were mostly male and mostly non-hispanic as i said it was a quasi-experimental design with two forests assigned to intervention and two assign to controls not randomized we conducted surveys first um online and we went actually to the forest service meetings and tried to actually um collect data we had we were successful at that and then we also followed up with an online survey supervisors uh conduct um went through the training which was again a computer-based training and behavior tracking and what we found was again similar to some of our other findings that when we train these super supervisors and then we extend with this modified kind of modified training now kind of family supportive safety elements and clarity over their roles to re so this was an element of reducing role ambiguity employees reported lower psychological distress and fewer concerns about forest safety so again when we train the supervisors we see outcomes important to employees now this was interesting because we also were interested in um examining the effects on the supervisors and what we found was that the supervisors actually reported lower organizational commitment and higher work family conflict and we haven't really looked at what the training effects have on supervisors very often in the research that i've been doing um what this tells us we need to be paying more attention to supervisors we also found that burnout was lower especially for those supervisors who reported high baseline job demands i'll be talking now about the implications first of all we adapted ship and this is an effective way of improving health safety and well-being of employees and it can be across diverse occupations so we adapted it first to be more general and then then we adapted it slightly for the um for the forest service we also know now and probably before the these findings um if we really were paying attention that we need to we need to be paying attention also to the supervisors and the managers so developing um leadership and helping leaders develop their support for workers to help reduce stress of workers is important but we also don't want to stress out the leaders when we're doing it so we need to be considering how not to overburden leaders with this training into in terms of um future research what can we do we need to we need to really study how how to develop training that's going to be beneficial for workers and also beneficial for leaders and when i talk about leaders let me just clarify we've looked at frontline supervisors managers and those are primarily primarily and then sometimes higher level leaders but leadership can be in encompassing all of these different levels and it's important to consider the different levels of leadership but also understand that sometimes they have they may have differential um receptivity to the training and different rental impacts of the training on employees implementing implementation and dissemination as i said this is critical so i can tell you right now this training is effective i've been developing the trainings over the past 15 years evaluating them in rigorous rigorous randomized control trials and then also then developing training that is specific to different domains domains of health domains of safety domains of work-life stress and each of those when we've adapted it show to be effective so we need to be disseminating this information we need to be getting it out and as scientists sometimes that's difficult to do in our institute we have a whole outreach group that is responsible for connecting and disseminating and sharing the tools and toolkits we um develop in our center and that yourworkpath.com on website that i shared earlier much of this is available so i'm very interested in making sure that we do develop and tailor our tools and toolkits to make them accessible for employers and i'm interested in understanding how employers are are um more interested in buying into certain types of toolkits and tools over others this is consistent with niosh's um research to practice initiative so one example of what we've been doing lately is um working with say safe corporation safe corporation is a total worker health affiliate there's a they're the workers comp insurance company in oregon the primary workers comp insurance company in oregon and we have been developing a version of ship that is general and adapted for safe so that they can use it as part of what they're calling a new leadership project and it's to make trainings available um to their policyholders and advocated and shared by um by their um their their team at safe with the policyholders so ship will soon be moving into um the hands of the policyholders and availability um be available to policyholders through safe corporation which there are many and we'd love to do this with other other organizations so dissemination and translation through we're working with human resource associations uh assp and other organizations to make sure that organizations workplaces know about the availability of these trainings which are primarily again free and available to use um finally i wanted to mention that um also we try to make sure that we're not just publishing academic papers but we're publishing lay papers so an example is the conversation article that my colleague lindsay ali and i um wrote probably back in about april so it was at the start of covid because we realized that the work that we're doing around supervisor training is absolutely critical in light of covid supervisors need to understand that workers are going through extreme levels of stress whether they are essential workers required to come on um be on site or if they are working at home trying to manage work with school-aged children whether they have a spouse that's lost a job and so training supervisors to be more empathetic and supportive of workers during covid is critical um we wrote about this in the conversation we actually developed a very quick it's a micro training a five-minute micro training on pandemic response um training for supervisors around this support um kovid we is is it's been it's been impactful for all of us and what we are currently doing is we're also evaluating the effectiveness of these trainings um at with through follow-up evaluations during covid of workers because i believe that training supervisors to be more supportive will actually help to mitigate some of these negative psychological experiences um and effects that people are having as a result of covid as i close i just want to mention the oregon healthy workforce center has right now four tool kits that are available through yourworkpath.com

and the safety and health improvement program be super promoting you through safety and the compass program and we have two more that will be uh coming out soon again feel free visit yourworkpath.com to access our tools and toolkits they're available they're downloadable and we're also available to to support any questions and consultation and that is all for me i would invite you to follow on the oregon healthy workforce center through social media and i wanted to mention i also have some of the citations here um they were in the presentation and i'm happy to share the presentation with anybody so i'm going to stop sharing my screen now great thank you very much leslie for that presentation i'm going to reshare and so we have arrived at our q a portion we looks like we have about uh 13 to 14 minutes for any questions for those of you who have them if you haven't posed a question you would like to certainly now is the time again don't forget to use that box that you have you should have a little q a box where you can just type it in and we can try to get that answered for you today so one question uh that came in uh this seems uh like it's it would be for jessica and it is can you please share industry-specific guidelines on organizational design roadmap and strategies yeah that's a great question so so as i mentioned in the presentation as i was going through the niosh strategic plan and held the healthy work design strategic goal nash's research portfolio is organized by 10 industry driven sectors and then seven cross-cutting health and safety outcome driven cross sectors which of which healthy work design is one of the latter but construction is one of those former industry-based sectors and that program has an entire very rich web page devoted to construction specific resources and they have information on things like work arrangements small business green jobs and a variety of other topics so that might be a good place to look for that type of industry specific information in addition niosh has the national construction center at cpwr the center for construction research and training and they're also a great resource for that industry-specific information right thank you jessica next we have and and this could be for either one of you certainly with your backgrounds what does the research say about worker stress when working in the blended environment um go ahead leslie i'm gonna well i'm gonna interpret blended environment i think it's the it's the blend of work from home and work at the central facility as i referenced it in the presentation yes yeah do you want to go ahead that's what i was do or well i was going to say i think for the most part a lot of the research that exists on the benefits of telecommuting really has been done with samples that represent blended worker populations because 100 remote work is still really atypical especially in the united states um and so there are studies that suggest that working from home even part-time or working from a preferred location even part-time can have benefits for things like increased job satisfaction quality of life and decreased stress and even potential decreases in depression but typically these are studies with small samples and so as the blended work environment becomes more popular um potentially you know now that we've lived through and have some at least anecdotal evidence that work from home can be effective during the coveted pandemic there'll be more opportunities to really build that evidence base for a variety of worker populations and on a variety of different blended schedules great thank you here's one uh i'm going to read this uh it's a great question but bear with me i'm concerned that there will be all these subcontractor deploy from your home types models that emerge like construction or uber in those cases you don't really have leadership in the same way that we are used to so a lot of safety issues will be lost because you have hundreds or thousands of unique work sites and work locations so it's hard to have a robust hazard assessment and policies that cover all of the hazards so how do you lead safety and health issues when you can't even use the tools that we have always used to keep people safe it seems that niosh needs to start developing the tools and resources needed to support the new model of work arrangements that jessica presented on that's a yeah that's i think i mean i don't think it's a question i think it's a statement and i think it's a really really important um statement and i think it looks like emily emily haas is is absolutely correct um this is this is something that that is still needed we don't quite understand how we're going to be able to um necessarily provide risk models and risk assessment risk um reduction models when people are so dispersed when there are not not direct leaders and they're going to have to be responsibilities at certain levels of organizations for individuals because and and for implementing um you know safety trainings and the way that we approach these issues um i think that you know i mean niosh definitely is that's part of what this program is all about is to really spur and put attention to um these types of alternative types of jobs that are really coming up um this is what this is what's happening in the future great thank you leslie um next let's go to how has moving across state lines impacted these studies well i think it's one of those you know factors that we see not only moving across state lines but if we think from a more global perspective about multinational companies anytime you have the employer situated in a context that's different from the environment or the context in which the worker is situated so be that different states or different countries that can impact um worker need and cause a potential mismatch between employer what employers provide in terms of benefits and then what workers are requesting or feel like would really support their their life and their quality of life and um and so i think that this concept will continue to become more complex as not only do we see companies where because of remote working employees can if it's a us-based organization for example employees can be in in any state but we also then will have multinational companies where the parent company is in a completely different country you know we have those models now but all of the the future oriented literature suggests that that's only going to continue to grow as we have a more global economy and so it's really sort of a cutting edge issue that requires more attention [Music] okay we have another question here do you have any research do you know of any research on onboarding new employees and acclimatizing employees to new work teams areas or roles i can take that one um there is there is research on onboarding there's actually um i i would suggest uh taking a look at talia bowers research b-a-u-r um v-a-u-e-e-r she has um focused on onboarding and socialization and then ryan olsen is currently working on my colleague is currently working on a study of um onboarding practices for new bus operators but onboarding is is definitely a um an important area and that we need to definitely orient new employees to the safety requirements of jobs to the culture and to really the the overall the overall team um team experience in order to alleviate some of the stress that they're experiencing as they enter new jobs and also help orient them more so that they have the skills both the psychological background and the um and the safety skills that will prepare them for um for the new jobs but i would definitely look into um talia bauer's work okay great uh next we have are there any comparable trainings for supervisors available in the marketplace how would you assess the marketplace in terms of which kinds of training products are most popular and how they are assessed by those who use them there are so in terms of the trainings that um that i presented on are training supervisors around how to support workers and it's really theoretically based in social support theory and conservation of resources theory which is the idea that when supervisors understand their kind of people power and how they how they do have a lot of power over workers and employees and that they can actually use that power to a positive degree by supporting workers um and how that is a very important mechanism for leading to improvements in health and safety and well-being i i am not familiar with any other trainings that focus on really developing super supervisors support in this way but the trainings that i have um are is are available um in the marketplace i guess or they're well they're not being sold we're they're available through us so i think that's that that is what is available okay is it the employee or employer who is financially responsible for the ergonomic equipment while teleworking i.e workstations desks and chairs this is something that has come up yeah i would say common practice right now is that the employee bears the responsibility for any costs incurred for the home work environment there aren't any regulations about whether it's an employer or employee responsibility when you have that remote work situation for the most part is managed i think at the organizational the organizational level um will there be any type of formal policy or regulation about it in the future i think it stands to be determined but for now there isn't any anything that i'm aware of so yeah so some employers are are taking they do see it as their responsibility but right they regulate it's not it's not regulated but i do know that some employers do take on that responsibility because they they are progressive employers and they understand that if they if they help out in terms of um you know ergonomic issues and make sure that their employees have the appropriate work workspaces at home that that will eventually also lead to uh reduction in health care costs for the employer um another problem though with all of this work work at home is that so many so i mean not just do people not have the appropriate um death settings or or chairs but i mean space as i think you know we've talked about i mean the space i mean i know that people are working out of out of closets i mean people are people do not have appropriate space at home so working at home is great for some people and it's not great for others yes that's we could have a very lengthy conversation about that um and here i believe uh this will be the last question that we can address uh thank you for sharing your professional expertise on the future work the importance of supervisor training rings true have your efforts investigated strategies or research for return to work strategies as telework may minimize ahead and any research that you can point to regarding shared workplace in a blended environment given covid shared space concepts may raise health and safety concerns given social distancing i i actually i have i've thought about the training around return to work strategies i think that's really important um i have not gone there yet um but anticipate anticipate heading in that direction um in terms of research to support regarding the um shared work space and the blended environment i mean i i'll leave that to jessica if you want to answer that particular one well i think there's general sort of hot desking research out there about sharing workspaces and how even pre-covered there were challenges around you know the design of a shared space especially from an ergonomics perspective what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another and so there were already noted limitations to those hot desking type models i haven't seen any any systematic research really that's talked about that environment postcovid or even during the pandemic while employers are planning to bring people back to work you know the the research that i've seen suggests that most employers plan to have at least some portion or the majority of their workforce back in a centralized facility in the summer that seems to be a common goal so the june july 2021 time frame but i haven't seen anything come out in terms of specific guidelines for sharing those workspaces from a communicable disease perspective yeah we could talk about this endlessly well i'm afraid that we're all out of time i'm sorry that we didn't get a couple of the questions please feel free to contact us separately another warm thanks of course to jessica and leslie for their thoughtful presentations today to sarah mitchell and keanna harper for their technical assistance and of course to all of you our attendees who joined us for our first nice feature of work initiative webinar on the role of organizational design in the future of work again we have a series of webinars planned and lots to learn about the initiative if you'd like to do so you have the address to visit certainly we hope to see you again and until then please stay safe healthy and well bye-bye everyone

2021-02-20 08:51

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