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1 – 10 of over 6000Emmanuel Flores, Xun Xu and Yuqian Lu
The purpose of this paper is twofold: to raise and address an important change for the human capital in the future of Industry 4.0, and to propose a human-focused perspective for…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold: to raise and address an important change for the human capital in the future of Industry 4.0, and to propose a human-focused perspective for companies underneath the new Industrial Revolution.
Design/methodology/approach
The research study follows a state-of-the-art literature review process. The nature of the selected approach enables to cover the extensive aim of the paper with sufficient scientific solidity that should support the understanding of every topic.
Findings
This work has presented three relevant aspects for Industry 4.0 and its human labour force: a workforce architecture with new interactions, a term to embrace the human capital of the future and a typology for referencing the required competences for Industry 4.0.
Research limitations/implications
The paper sheds light on an important aspect for the emerging Industrial Revolution, the human force. The result and conclusion sections suggest future implications for academia and the private sector, due to changes at the conceptual and practical levels of human operation in the industry – for example, new structural interactions among employees, additional qualities to human capital and different ways to identify the competences for the workforce.
Originality/value
This is an interdisciplinary study that tries to bring together a modern industrial term, a social focus and a company scenario. From this, it was possible to obtain a new social term, a novel typology of competences and a new company-scenario interaction.
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Proposes the adoption of six strategic objectives around which to build a workforce policy architecture for the future.
Abstract
Purpose
Proposes the adoption of six strategic objectives around which to build a workforce policy architecture for the future.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing from a review of the literature, this paper investigates a workforce policy response to emerging social and demographic trends, forecast workforce shortages, ongoing and rapid change, the growth in complexity and the changing nature of work.
Findings
A workforce model that supports organizational growth and development, characterised by attributes that are associated with knowledge society work is proposed. These include: trends that alter the balance of the social structure; social and human capital growth; lifelong learning; a policy emphasis on the self; workplace flexibility; and the development of an organizational identity as a preferred corporate employer.
Practical implications
The outcomes of this paper are significant for large Australian public sector organizations.
Originality/value
This paper provides an integrated workforce management framework for dealing with emergent trends. The findings in this paper are of value to Australian public sector human resource executives.
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Mohammad Gharipour and Amber L. Trout
Our lived experiences are complex, dynamic and increasingly connected locally and globally through virtual realities that call for an evolution and responsiveness from the field…
Abstract
Purpose
Our lived experiences are complex, dynamic and increasingly connected locally and globally through virtual realities that call for an evolution and responsiveness from the field of architecture education. To ensure future built environments are designed to nurture healing and health, this paper aims to address a critical need in architecture education to integrate knowledge of health and social-behavioral disciplines in students' course work. The authors will outline the process of preparing a new multidisciplinary course on health and the built environment (HBE) at the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore, USA, as an effort to challenge the barriers of discipline-specific pathways to learning in the field of architecture.
Design/methodology/approach
The central question is how to develop an active learning pedagogy to foster a multidisciplinary learning environment focused on the “practice” (how to) of human-design-oriented approaches to improve the capability of built and natural environments to promote health and healing. The course intentionally centered on the real-life experiences of students to ground their new understanding of health and well-being fields. The course proposal went through an extensive peer-review process of reviewers from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and other departments at Morgan State University to ensure a balance between health- and architecture-specific curricula with a transdisciplinary approach to understanding complex health issues.
Findings
This paper shows the effectiveness of tools and techniques applied in the course to challenge architectural students to integrate various health and behavior perspectives in their designs and to apply health and healing principals to their current and future design projects.
Originality/value
While there are courses in American universities that offer a traditional introduction to health concerns related to the built environment, there is limited focus on the perspective of the design field approach to improve health and healing outcomes.
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Recognizing that very less number of research has been conducted on workforce agility, the current research aimed to examine the impact of organizational practices in the form of…
Abstract
Purpose
Recognizing that very less number of research has been conducted on workforce agility, the current research aimed to examine the impact of organizational practices in the form of organizational learning and training, compensation, involvement, team work and information system (IS) on workforce agility. Influenced by the “Black Box” approach, the study also examined the role of psychological empowerment as a mechanism mediating the relationship between organizational practices and workforce agility.
Design/methodology/approach
The study has been conducted in selective Indian industries, representing manufacturing and service sector across public and private sectors. Quantitative and qualitative data have been collected from both executives and non-executives through reliable instruments validated in Indian context. Data have been analyzed using descriptive analysis, canonical correlation analysis and multiple regression.
Findings
Findings that organizational practices significantly related to workforce agility prove that organizational practices are capable of improving the agile attributes and behavior of the workforce. In detail, team work has the greatest influence on workforce agility, followed by Reward system, employee involvement, organizational learning and training and ISs. Further, the study result also proved the mediating role of psychological empowerment between organizational practices and workforce agility.
Practical implications
Organizations are to design practices related to organizational learning and training, compensation, involvement, team work and IS and implement them efficiently and effectively to enable agility within the workforce, as an agile workforce can only respond proactively to a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business environment. Further, the result also suggests that managers should design the organizational practices capable of enhancing psychological empowerment, as the combination can deliver better workforce agility.
Originality/value
The research is useful considering very less number of research on workforce agility.
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Manish Kumar and Javed Mostafa
Electronic health records (EHR) can enable collection and use of data for achieving better health both at the patient and population health levels. The World Health Organization's…
Abstract
Purpose
Electronic health records (EHR) can enable collection and use of data for achieving better health both at the patient and population health levels. The World Health Organization's (WHO) draft 2019 four-year global digital health strategy aims to “improve health for everyone, everywhere by accelerating the adoption of appropriate digital health” and EHRs are key to achieving better health goals. Despite the fact that EHRs can help to achieve better health, there is lack of evidence explaining national and sub-national EHR development in the limited resource settings.
Design/methodology/approach
We conducted a landscape study to describe the EHR development and use in the low- and middle-income countries for achieving better health. We reviewed literature from four scientific databases and analyzed gray literature identified in consultation with 17 international experts.
Findings
The findings of this literature review are presented in three subsections. The first two subsections describe key stakeholders for development of national and sub-national EHR and health information architecture which includes status of ehealth foundations, EHR, and sub-systems in the country. The third subsection presents and discusses key challenges related to sustainability of national and sub-national EHRs. The findings in these three subsections are further explored through examples of health information flow in Uganda, and electronic medical record/EHR implementation in Sierra Leone and Malawi. These examples briefly describe stakeholders, information architecture, and sustainability challenges.
Originality/value
This paper fills an important research gap and clearly explains the urgent research need to build context-specific EHR development models to enable use of data for better health.
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Arnaldo Camuffo and Federica De Stefano
In this paper, we argue that work should be recognized as “commons.” We call for a new approach to how managers define their role and responsibility regarding the problem of work…
Abstract
In this paper, we argue that work should be recognized as “commons.” We call for a new approach to how managers define their role and responsibility regarding the problem of work flexibility and of its societal implications. We argue that, in the global and digitized economy, it is in the best interest of all the company’s stakeholders that managers choose combinations of work arrangements and human resource policies considering the externalities of these decisions. Managers’ responsibility spans to the costs and risks that the broader social system of organizational stakeholders will bear because of their decisions. When labor market institutions are “thin,” it is management’s responsibility to contribute structuring and shaping them, so that the interests of workers, independent of the work arrangements, are considered.
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Yesim Deniz Ozkan-Ozen and Yigit Kazancoglu
The aim of this paper is to identify and analyse workforce development challenges in the digital age by first, presenting these challenges and relationship between them, and then…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to identify and analyse workforce development challenges in the digital age by first, presenting these challenges and relationship between them, and then proposing a structural model that categorizes these challenges and proposes suggestions for managers to improve human resources practices and firm performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Fuzzy total interpretive structural modelling (TISM) is used as the methodology, which gives an interpretive structural model by presenting direct and transitive relationship between workforce development challenges and categorizes them under autonomous, dependent, independent and linkage groups.
Findings
In total, 13 different workforce development challenges are presented in this study. Results showed that lack of IT/digital skills has a critical role in workforce development in terms of affecting other challenges. Dependent group includes requirements for longer learning time and specialized training, lack of analytical thinking and dealing with complexity, and lack of interdisciplinary thinking and acting. On the other hand, lack of ability in decentralized decision-making and shortage of workforce with adequate skillset within the labour market have more macro-impacts on others. Most of the challenges located in the linkage group, which means that most of the challenges are interrelated with each other.
Originality/value
Originality of this paper is presenting a systematic structure for workforce development in Industry 4.0 that considers challenges systematically.
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Rubaya Rahat, Piyush Pradhananga and Mohamed ElZomor
Safe-to-fail (SF) is an emerging resilient design approach that has the potential to minimize the severity of flood damages. The purpose of this study is to explore the SF design…
Abstract
Purpose
Safe-to-fail (SF) is an emerging resilient design approach that has the potential to minimize the severity of flood damages. The purpose of this study is to explore the SF design strategies to reduce flood disaster damages in US coastal cities. Therefore, this study addresses two research questions: identifying the most suitable SF criteria and flood solution alternatives for coastal cities from industry professionals’ perspective; and investigating the controlling factors that influence the AEC students’ interest to learn about SF concepts through the curricula.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used the analytical hierarchy process to evaluate the SF criteria and flood solutions where data were collected through surveying 29 Department of Transportation professionals from different states. In addition, the study adopted a quantitative methodology by surveying 55 versed participants who reside in a coastal area and have coastal flood experiences. The data analysis included ordinal probit regression and descriptive analysis.
Findings
The results suggest that robustness is the highest weighted criterion for implementing SF design in coastal cities. The results demonstrated that ecosystem restoration is the highest-ranked SF flood solution followed by green infrastructure. Moreover, the results highlighted that age, duration spent in the program and prior knowledge of SF are significantly related to AEC students’ interest to learn this concept.
Originality/value
SF design anticipates failures while designing infrastructures thus minimizing failure consequences due to flood disasters. The findings can facilitate the implementation of the SF design concept during the construction of new infrastructures in coastal cities as well as educate the future workforces to contribute to developing resilient built environments.
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Carmel Joe, Pak Yoong and Kapila Patel
The purpose of this paper is to describe different concepts of valuable knowledge that are perceived to be lost when an older expert departs from a knowledge-intensive…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe different concepts of valuable knowledge that are perceived to be lost when an older expert departs from a knowledge-intensive organisation.
Design/methodology/approach
A multiple case research methodology and semi-structured interviews involving 17 participants from five small-to-medium enterprises (SME).
Findings
Five concepts of valuable knowledge have emerged from the interviews: subject matter expertise; knowledge about business relationships and social networks; organisational knowledge and institutional memory; knowledge of business systems, processes and value chains; and knowledge of governance.
Research limitations/implications
The scope of the research project is restricted to SMEs in New Zealand and this restriction limits the generalisation of the results to other contexts. This study may serve as a starting point for future investigations including larger organisations that may have a greater number of older experts.
Practical implications
By identifying the different types of older experts' knowledge, organisations are able to realise the potential of retaining that knowledge within the organisation.
Originality/value
This is one of the first investigations of the knowledge that older experts in the professional services industry possess within a small-to-medium enterprise context.
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Manisha Saxena and Dharmesh K. Mishra
Employee engagement (EE) can result in multiple positive impacts not only on the individual and his/her team but also on the organisational and financial outcome of the business…
Abstract
Purpose
Employee engagement (EE) can result in multiple positive impacts not only on the individual and his/her team but also on the organisational and financial outcome of the business. If artificial intelligence (AI) can be used as a tool to facilitate EE, organisations will be more than satisfied to adopt it. The paper aims to study the penetration of AI for EE in corporate India.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the information gathered through secondary research, a framework of questions was built and sent to some senior people in the area of AI and HR to check for its completeness. Respondents based on inclusion criteria were selected through random purposive sampling to be a part of the study. A total of 23 respondents participated in the study. Qualitative data analysis of the transcripts was conducted using MAXQDA 2022 (Verbi Software, Berlin, Germany), which is a qualitative data analysis software. Multiple readings were undertaken to identify the patterns and relationships in the data.
Findings
The participants described a variety of issues while using or planning to use AI for EE. Some of the issues mentioned were related to cost, challenges, mindsets and attitudes, demography of employees, comfort in the use of technology, size of the organisation, change management strategies, software vendors and vendor support. The most common responses were grouped into headings such as Organisation, Process, Employee and Software Choice Related aspects.
Originality/value
Lately, the overall work environment, work and personal life balance, and quality of life have become more desirable than earning a good salary. AI is becoming a part of various aspects of business but its role in HR is yet to be explored. AI’s capabilities to predict may result in more employee work satisfaction. The paper explores the possibility of using AI as a tool in every aspect of employee life cycle, thereby attempting to make HR processes more productive and enhance EE.
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