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Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

Using a unique longitudinal survey of employers in the United States during the 1990s, this chapter examines the trends and factors associated with how businesses have invested in high performance workplace practices. The specific workplace practices examined include shared rewards, job rotation, workforce training, employee involvement in problem solving, and self-managed employee teams. The incidence and diffusion of innovative workplace practices such as these varies over time but not in a unidirectional way. Employers with a more external focus and broader networks to learn about best practices are more likely to have extensively invested in these types of workplace practices. The educational quality of the workforce and investments in physical capital, especially information technology, appear to be complementary with a range of workplace practices. However, the association between unionization and workplace practices is mixed. Unionized establishments are more likely to train their employees but nonunionized establishments are more likely to have engaged a higher fraction of their nonmanagerial workers in problem solving. Finally, for employers in the manufacturing sector, past profits tend to be positively associated with more extensive investments in high performance workplace practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that influence effective workplace designs for knowledge workers.

During spring 2016, the employees in a large institution for research and higher education, a large consultancy company and a medium-sized consultancy company (in total 4367 employees) in Norway received invitations to participate in an anonymous online survey about workplaces and facilities. In all, 1,670 employees answered the survey (38.2 per cent response rate). The data have been analyzed with IBM SPSS version 23, among others through use of exploratory factor analysis and two-way ANOVA.

Most respondents at the institution for research and higher education have cell offices. Most respondents in the two consultancy companies have open and flexible offices. This paper indicate the respondents’ preferences or perception of their workstation and the workplace’s fit for their tasks is affected both by the respondents’ type of office and how much time they spend at their workstation during the week. There are also possible age or generation effects.

One methodical weakness in the present paper is that two-way ANOVA has been applied on survey data. Experiments are usually arranged to provide almost equal numbers of observations in each category. This is usually not possible with survey data. However, despite this weakness, the present paper provides several findings that challenge some of the workplace research’s taken for givens.

The present paper indicates that facility managers and others responsible for office and workplace design are advised to take the employees’ tasks and work patterns into consideration when designing workplaces and providing offices and workstations to their end-users. The present paper also indicates that employees require different kinds of support facilities and services depending on what kind of offices and workplaces they have.

This is a large N empirical study among knowledge workers in three organizations, one public administration and two private enterprises. The present paper indicate that provision of offices and workstations with supporting facilities should be differentiated according to the end-users’ work tasks and work patterns.

This study aims to explore the association between employees' sense of belonging and their perception of workplace physical attributes at a corporate campus, and the workplace planning and management strategies to support employee sense of belonging for the long‐term competitiveness and performance of organizations.

The research site for this study is the corporate campus of a large information technology firm, Wipro Technologies, located in India. A workplace questionnaire designed by the International Workplace Studies Program (IWSP) at Cornell University was used. A total of 267 employees working at Wipro participated in this study.

Factor analysis of the survey items identified five underlying factors that are related to workplace physical environment. Statistically significant correlations were identified among employees' sense of belonging and these factors about work environment. A statistically significant model comprising four of the factors was developed to predict employees' sense of belonging.

The paper presents a new model to link sense of belonging to perception of workplace physical environment. Workplace planning and management implications were discussed for organizations to incorporate physical and spatial measures in their workplace to effectively enhance employees' sense of belonging.

Using data from the 2013 European Company Survey, this chapter operationalizes the representation gap as the desire for greater employee involvement in decision-making expressed by the representative of the leading employee representative body at the workplace. According to this measure, there is evidence of a substantial shortfall in employee involvement in the European Union, not dissimilar to that reported for the United States. The chapter proceeds to investigate how the size of this representation gap varies by type of representative structure, information provided by management, the resource base available to the representatives, and the status of trust between the parties. Perceived deficits are found to be smaller where workplace representation is via works councils rather than union bodies. Furthermore, the desire for greater involvement is reduced where information provided the employee representative on a range of establishment issues is judged satisfactory. A higher frequency of meetings with management also appears to mitigate the expressed desire for greater involvement. Each of these results is robust to estimation over different country clusters. However, unlike the other arguments, the conclusion that shortfalls in employee involvement representation are smaller under works councils than union bodies is nullified where trust in management is lacking.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how healthcare first-line managers think about and act regarding workplace survey processes.

This interview study was performed at a hospital in south Sweden. First-line healthcare managers (n=24) volunteered. The analysis was inspired by phenomenography, which aims to describe the ways in which different people experience a phenomenon. The phenomenon was a workplace health promotion (WHP) survey processes.

Four main WHP survey process approaches were identified among the managers: as a possibility, as a competition, as a work task among others and as an imposition. For each, three common subcategories emerged; how managers: stated challenges and support from hospital management; described their own work group and collaboration with other managers; and expressed themselves and their situation in their roles as first-line managers.

Insights into how hospital management can understand their first-line managers’ motivation for survey processes and practical suggestions and how managers can work proactively at organizational, group and individual level are presented.

Usually these studies focus on those who should respond to a survey; not those who should run the survey process. Focusing on managers and not co-workers can lead to more committed and empowered managers and thereby success in survey processes.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze employer responses to vacancies and skill shortages by adopting certain workplace practices.

Making use of the longitudinal nature of the Workplace and Employee Survey, a nationally representative sample of Canadian organizations, the paper applies both linear and probit models to examine incidence of positive vacancies and vacancy rates and subsequent adoptions of various workplace practices in response to such vacancies and skill shortages.

Employers respond to labour and skill shortages in a number of ways, focusing more on short‐term and less costly solutions, such as adoption of flexible working hours and increases in overtime hours, greater reliance on flexible job design and part‐time workers, and implementation of self‐directed work groups and problem‐solving teams. There is no evidence that workplaces would raise employee wages or fringe benefits to alleviate shortages.

In the absence of a well‐developed internal market, firms are likely to continue using short‐term and less costly solutions. Governments should work with firms, workers and their representatives and act strategically to resolve issues of timely identification of skill shortages in order to make informed decisions and put mechanisms in place to address such shortages.

The results are based on a national longitudinal survey and a number of important practical and policy implications are discussed in the paper

This paper uses a matched workplace‐employee data set to examine the extent to which individuals’ experiences of work and experiences of practices at work, as measured by selected indicators of worker wellbeing, are explained by the nation state of the head office of the workplace. Seven dimensions of worker wellbeing are identified and examined. The paper establishes that employees have different experiences if employed in a workplace in which the head office is located in France, Germany, Japan or the USA relative to the reference category of being employed in a workplace which is UK‐owned.