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The purpose of this paper is to examine employee satisfaction with an employer-imposed compressed workweek (CWW) schedule within a US municipality (City).

The study utilizes an employee survey (n=779) to test factors related to employee satisfaction with the CWW, a four-day, ten-hours/day workweek (4/10 schedule).

Employee satisfaction with the schedule is influenced by previous 4/10 pilot experience, work schedule preference, and happiness with the 4/10 schedule’s implementation. Additionally, sick leave figures and survey results regarding informal substitute work schedules suggest that worker fatigue may limit the overall organizational value of the 4/10 schedule.

The study is opportunistic in nature and therefore constrained by the City’s HR Department concerns for survey length and respondent anonymity. This meant an inability to collect demographic data or to utilize validated scales.

Analysis suggests that the potential work-life benefits of flexible work schedules may not apply equally to employer-imposed vs employee-chosen compressed work schedules. Further, CWWs engender greater fatigue despite employee satisfaction, an issue managers should consider when weighing schedule costs and benefits.

The study highlights the importance of employee choice in conceptualizing flexibility and for capturing CWW benefits, namely: an initiative’s voluntary or involuntary nature should be considered when determining whether it is likely to be beneficial for employees.

This paper aims to explore the need for organizations to adopt organizational development (OD) programs on a continuous basis as a way of coping with a changing business environment. Emphasis is to be laid on organizational learning due to its significance in enhancing organizational change and development.

The paper is based on an extensive literature review.

A wide range of organizational development (OD) intervention strategies exists. There is a need to adopt a coordinated approach in applying OD efforts for organizations to reap maximum benefits.

This paper is theoretical and is not based on empirical findings.

Several recommendations are included in the paper. It is envisaged that adoption of the recommendations can assist an organization to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

The paper identifies several OD frameworks that can be tested in future research projects.

Based on the results of a questionnaire survey among facility management professionals, the paper reviews current and future applications for alternative workplace strategies (AWS) in Hong Kong. The survey indicates that the impact of workplace redesign and on‐site/on‐premises strategies is more favoured when compared with off‐site/off‐premises strategies. The survey also indicates that the current and future impact of AWS in Hong Kong may be less significant when compared with the USA. The work also examines the role of telecommunciations technology and its likely impact on future office accommodation requirements. Finally, the paper concludes by reviewing a number of factors that specifically influence the application of AWS in Hong Kong.

The purpose of this paper is cost optimization of project schedules under constrained resources and alternative production processes (APPs).

The model contains a cost objective function, generalized precedence relationship constraints, activity duration and start time constraints, lag/lead time constraints, execution mode (EM) constraints, project duration constraints, working time unit assignment constraints and resource constraints. The mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) superstructure of discrete solutions covers time–cost–resource options related to various EMs for project activities as well as variants for production process implementation.

The proposed model provides the exact optimal output data for project management, such as network diagrams, Gantt charts, histograms and S-curves. In contrast to classic scheduling approaches, here the optimal project structure is obtained as a model-endogenous decision. The project planner is thus enabled to achieve optimization of the production process simultaneously with resource-constrained scheduling of activities in discrete time units and at a minimum total cost.

A set of application examples are addressed on an actual construction project to display the advantages of proposed model.

The unique value this paper contributes to the body of knowledge reflects through the proposed MINLP model, which is capable of performing the exact cost optimization of production process (where presence and number of activities including their mutual relations are dealt as feasible alternatives, meaning not as fixed parameters) simultaneously with the associated resource-constrained project scheduling, whereby that is achieved within a uniform procedure.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the determinants of public employee turnover intent and the use of workplace flexibilities, with particular attention on the role that gender plays on the relationship between these two constructs.

Using a cross-sectional quantitative research design, the data collection specifically targeted employees of US municipalities that had a significant portion of their workforce using some type of alternative work schedule. Nine cities from six different states were included in the data collection.

In support of prior research and conventional wisdom, the authors find that the use of alternative work schedules is associated with lower expressions of turnover intent, but this relationship is only significant for female municipal employees.

One limitation of the study is that it is mono-source data. A second limitation relates to the lack of controls for contextual and occupational characteristics. Further research is needed on the relationship between alternative work schedule choice and turnover, particularly exploring how other characteristics might impact the relationship between employment flexibilities and turnover.

Overall, the results of the analysis align with broader observations of the need for increasing workplace flexibilities and scholarship exploring these flexibilities, especially for female employees who are attempting to integrate their work and family responsibilities.

There has been relatively little research exploring the relationship between the determinants of turnover intent and the use of workplace flexibilities at the municipal level of government. This is particularly important given that employment in local government is larger than both federal and state government employment combined in the USA (US Census Bureau, 2017).

This paper aims to analyze the relevance of private meta-governance for multi-stakeholder partnerships. The authors assume that meta-governance, defined as higher level rules that shall guide partnerships’ governance activities, could build on and institutionalize lessons learned about partnerships’ success conditions and, in doing so, may render partnerships’ work more effective in the future.

The research paper investigates a case of non-state meta-governance in the standard-setting arena. It explores how actors assess the interaction of the meta-governance efforts of the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance (mainly in the form of their three Codes of Good Practice) and the Alliance for Water Stewardship’s efforts when setting and implementing their International Water Stewardship Standard. For this, a combination of research methods is applied: a literature review for deriving propositions on success conditions; document analysis, participatory observation and semi-structured interviews for gathering empirical evidence on the interaction between meta-governance and the partnership’s work.

Respondents praise the benefits of ISEAL’s enabling meta-governance measures to strengthen their standard, structures and processes, as well as from ensuring activities, as these also improve their internal governance system while simultaneously providing credibility. In this context, they confirm the relevance of three success factors mentioned in the literature on voluntary standards: an inclusive process, a locally adapted design of the standard and institutionalized compliance management.

Instead of reinventing the wheel with every new multi-stakeholder partnership, meta-governance frameworks should be used to enable partnership staff and members, policymakers and stakeholders to learn from experience.

The authors’ analysis generates unique insights into perceptions of partnerships’ staff and stakeholders regarding lessons learned and private meta-governance. The present study on these actors’ perspectives provides a starting-point for further research on how meta-governance could help institutionalize success factors to scale-up and improve the impact of standard-setting partnerships.

Given the demanding and stressful nature of project work, with a view to explore established concepts of burnout within the project management context, the purpose of this paper is to examine two instruments: the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS). Since there is a paucity of literature in project management anchored within the MBI and the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS), this paper proposes a high-level model on burnout in project management, drawing on the literature underlying these two instruments.

Using a conceptual approach, the paper reviews the social psychology literature on burnout and then the narrow stream of literature on burnout in project management. The paper develops and proposes a conceptual model as a foundation to explore the links between the determinants of project manager burnout/engagement and turnover/retention.

This paper contributes to an improved understanding of the determinants of project manager burnout, engagement, turnover, and retention.

The driver for this research is to contribute to the emerging literature on burnout in project management and strategies to help improve engagement and retention of project managers in the discipline – specifically, their tenure in organizations and/or the profession.

This paper contributes to the topic of burnout in the project management context. An improved understanding of the stressors in project management contexts, and the mechanisms to mitigate the stress, can add to our understanding of project manager well-being, engagement and retention, improved project success, and healthier work environments.

Over the last ten years interest in and implementation of different forms of alternative officing (AO) have increased dramatically. AO has, in fact, become simply another tool in the real estate and FM space planning and design toolkit. This paper briefly describes different types of AO, and then suggests that AO, which has primarily responded to corporate drives to reduce costs, should broaden its focus to explore alternative ways of constructing and procuring space in response to a different organisational change: namely, to be able to occupy space on‐demand. The article describes the concept of a lean portfolio that helps organisations manage uncertainty better through infrastructure on‐demand; and proposes a research agenda for systematically examining different alternative workplace strategies (AWS).

Introduction Operations research, i.e. the application of scientific methodology to operational problems in the search for improved understanding and control, can be said to have started with the application of mathematical tools to military problems of supply bombing and strategy, during the Second World War. Post‐war these tools were applied to business problems, particularly production scheduling, inventory control and physical distribution because of the acute shortages of goods and the numerical aspects of these problems.

Alternative workplace strategies (AWS) are more commonly associated with changes in the office environment, particularly those impacted by the adoption of technology. Using a case study, this paper attempts to interpret AWS by examining the redesign of a comprehensive paediatric rehabilitation centre at a general acute hospital. By adopting a non‐territorial work environment, the hospital facility management team was able to foster a shared and common vision: a “department without walls”. The paper describes how this resulted in an improvement in service quality for the handicapped children and enhanced communications between the professionals, patients and their families.