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This research compares consultants' and contractors' professional practices and perspectives on the use of specifications in the engineering of built environment projects.

The study initiates with a review of literature, toward realizing (1) the need for inclusion of specifications, throughout the projects' stages (design, tender, construction and handing over), as well as the (2) causes and effects of defective specifications in design and execution of engineered projects. Additionally (3) the study investigates the challenges and causes of specification variations to projects' design and execution. The systematic methodology adopted in this research utilizes frequency indicators, to rank and correlate the perspectives of 60 professionals, who are experienced in consulting and contracting of mega public and private projects.

The research considers the uncertainties and differences that could be present in engineering developments and use of design specifications for projects' execution and handing over. The two groups of experts' (consultants and contractors) perspectives are usually observed as conflicting, in practice. Practices comparison of their experiences with engineering projects' specifications usability provides unique empirical findings. The analysis and assessment of the experts' knowledge, this research addresses gaps identified in the literature, providing valuable insights.

The study provides in-depth recommendations and discusses possible trends and methods for enhancing specifications' usability in design engineering and execution of built environment projects. The analysis and recommendations present and assess experts' knowledge while bridge gaps identified from the literature.

This paper aims to provide an exemplary application of an indicative post-occupancy evaluation (POE) on an organizational multistorey residential apartment building.

This research comprises of mixed qualitative and quantitative approaches. The methodology commences with a review of the recent literature, identification of performance elements, conduct of walk-through, distribution and collection of users' surveys and the development of short and long-term recommendations, where an adequate sample of users were approached for conducting a focus group interview session.

The research identifies 74 performance elements that were clustered into technical, namely (thermal, acoustic and visual comforts, indoor air quality and safety and security), functional, namely (design adequacy, finishing, furnishing, fittings and equipment and building surroundings) dimensions and behavioral, namely (apartment building attributes and managerial and logistical support). The questionnaire survey aimed to solicit users' opinions upon the occupied case study residential facility.

The research identifies areas of occupants' satisfaction and dissatisfaction in a typical multistorey residential building, as a part of a community housings for a mega organization, located in Saudi Arabia. The identification of these areas serves as a lesson learned for future developments, design considerations and implications. Hence, improving the well-being and comfort of its employees.

Meetings with colleagues are an essential activity in workplace collaboration. The iterative nature of collaborative work demands spaces that team members can access quickly and easily. Creating suitable meeting spaces will become more critical if the hybrid work model continues and the workplace environment becomes the hub for face-to-face collaborative time, learning and training. Workspace and fit-out is expensive so it is crucial that the investment in meeting spaces supports employees’ collaboration activities.

This paper presents a case study of a corporate organisation undertaken in New Zealand to investigate how employees from two business units use their workspace to collaborate within their own team and across other teams in their organisation. The study uses ethnographic techniques, including participant observation and in-depth face-to-face interviews.

The findings show that the frequency and nature of small group work in collaboration was underestimated in the initial planning of the new workspace. Although participants found the design and fit-out of the formal meeting rooms supportive of collaborative work, the meeting rooms were in high demand, and it was difficult to find a room at short notice. The breakout spaces were confusing because they lacked key design attributes identified by the participants as conducive to small group work. Design shortfalls together with fit-out features perceived as supportive of collaborative work are identified.

The research reports on employees’ perceptions and experiences across two functionally diverse business units, reflecting their different needs and concerns.

Extant expatriate literature largely adopts a global north/western focus and expatriate-centric approach in investigating spousal/partners’ motives for supporting expatriation. Contrastingly, this study focuses on the lived experiences of dual-career female partners from an emerging global south economy and a patriarchal society as it relates to motives for supporting a partner’s international assignment (IA) to a developed country.

This investigation adopts a hermeneutic interpretive phenomenology research design. Twelve career-oriented female partners from an emerging global south economy (Brazil) who supported a partner’s IA to a developed country (USA) participated in this study. The data included semi-structured interviews and field notes.

The study indicates that societal constraints, gendered career experiences and career and life stage reasons influenced women’s decision to engage in career opt out and/or interruption in support of their partners' IA. Further, patriarchal long-lasting structures and ideologies shaped women’s career experiences; women perceived IAs as a means of acquiring embodied and institutionalized cosmopolitan capital for themselves and their families in order to gain a better position in a transnational/globalized world.

Although the sample size of this study is appropriate for the methodological choice adopted, future studies should include more participants and address different socioeconomic, political and cultural contexts.

This study highlights dual-career female partners' lived experiences in an emerging global south economy and a patriarchal society as it relates to motives for supporting IAs.

This study aims to explore the career transition process of women professionals when they return to the workplace after a break and re-integrate with their career aspirations.

This research used a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews for data collection. All 20 women participants have returned to their careers after a break.

The data analysis reveals women’s career transition and re-integration process into the workplace after a career break. Supervisory support, work–life balance practices, role models, coworker support and career success emerged as factors enabling successful transition. The employing organisations’ diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring strategy emerged as an important mechanism for re-entry.

Although previous research has studied women professionals returning after a break, the “transition process” that enables re-entry is missing.

This study aims to examine the effect of perceived supervisor support (PSS) and workplace dignity (WPD) on employees' affective commitment to change (ACC). It also investigates PSS as an antecedent of WPD and WPD as a mediator between PSS and ACC.

To examine the proposed relationships, data was collected from employees of an Indian public sector company undergoing many change initiatives at the time of the study. The hypotheses were tested using the structural equation model.

The findings indicate the direct effect of PSS and WPD on employees' ACC, and WPD does mediate between PSS and ACC. The results also suggest PSS works as an antecedent of WPD.

The findings suggest how organizations can enhance employees’ ACC by creating a positive context involving supervisor support and experience of WPD.

The findings contribute to ACC literature by highlighting the role of WPD and PSS. This is one of the few quantitative studies which examines the antecedent and consequences of WPD.

The present study aims to gauge the experience of gender non-binary (NB) employees in the context of employee value propositions (EVP) in Indian enterprises and make suggestions for organizations to align their gender-aligned interventions with the EVP framework.

Qualitative methodology was used for collecting data through semi-structured interviews and subsequent analysis of the transcripts. The data was gathered from 10 NB participants working in Indian enterprises with the use of non-probabilistic purposive snowball sampling.

The analysis revealed eight themes representing the good, bad and ugly experiences of NB individuals within the context of EVP. These findings underscore the potential of enriching value propositions for employees to promote gender inclusion in corporate settings, contributing to long-term organizational success.

The study offers both theoretical and practical implications for fostering inclusivity at the workplace. It suggests that policymakers and organizations should align EVP with diversity and inclusion initiatives, re-evaluate hiring processes and promotion policies to ensure equal opportunities for NB individuals, provide regular staff training to address biases and implement inclusive insurance policies and representation in employee resource groups (ERGs).

This study provides unique insights into the experiences of NB employees within the framework of EVPs in Indian organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to study the experiences of middle-class working mothers from the ITES (Information Technology Enabled Service) sector in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their experiences of work from home are studied in the backdrop of the ideal worker model at work and the adult worker model at home. Further, the study aims to identify the need for sustainable, inclusive practices for working mothers in Indian organizations to break the male breadwinner model in middle-class households.

A qualitative approach to collect data from 39 middle-class mothers working in MNCs in four metro cities in India. The semi-structured, in-depth interviews focused on their experiences of motherhood, care and work before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic made it evident that the ideal worker model in organizations and the adult worker model at home were illusions for working mothers. The results indicate a continued obligation of the “ideal worker culture” at organizations, even during the health crisis. It made the working mothers realize that they were chasing both the (ideal worker and adult worker) norms but could never achieve them. Subsequently, the male breadwinner model was reinforced at home due to the matrix of motherhood, care and work during the pandemic. The study concludes by arguing the reconstruction of the ideal worker image to make workplaces more inclusive for working mothers.

The study is placed in the context of Indian middle-class motherhood during the pandemic, a demography less explored in the literature. The paper puts forth various myths constituting the gendered realities of Indian middle-class motherhood. It also discusses sustainable, inclusive workplace practices for mothers from their future workplaces' standpoint, especially in post-pandemic times.

Companies target globally mobile workers and face the war for talent, while individuals are more reluctant to engage in global mobility. This scenario led us to propose a model to understand the individuals' decision process to engage in global mobility.

Building on the self-determination theory, the theory of planned behavior and the literature on decisions for global mobility, the authors propose mechanisms through which psychological variables and assignments' factual and perceived contextual aspects (directly or indirectly) explain the decision to engage or not in global mobility.

This study offers a conceptual model with the authors' novel propositions to explain individuals' decision to engage in global mobility.

The model provides a more comprehensive explanation of the individuals' decision-making process to engage in global mobility than previous models and potentially yields more effective organizational practices to attract both well-established and emerging phenomena of globally mobile workers.

This study explores how social partners contribute to the successful return to work (RTW) of individuals affected by chronic diseases, employing the framework of actor-centred institutionalism.

This paper adopts a comparative case study methodology to assess the role of social partners in the workplace (re-)integration of people with chronic disease in Belgium and Italy, both of which represent well-developed industrial relations systems yet having different institutional and policy frameworks on RTW.

Institutional factors are found to affect the type and degree of social partners' commitment and contribution to RTW. Differences in their commitment can be explained by their varied degrees of integration in public policy formation, which explain their different preferred stages of interactions in this field: national tripartite social dialogue for Belgium; and sectoral collective bargaining for Italy. Unsatisfactory outcomes of social partners’ contribution in facilitating RTW processes are attributed to the fragmentation of the legal framework and uneven development of collective bargaining in Italy. In Belgium, the authors find the presence of cumbersome RTW procedures downplaying the role of the worker representative.

This paper adds empirical evidence to the limited literature on the role of social partners in facilitating RTW and sheds light on how to improve the current policy context. It suggests involving the social partners in the development of a comprehensive public policy framework, which should allow for an early, flexible and multi-stakeholder (re-)integration procedure following chronic disease.