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Work In Progress

Work In Progress

Psychwashing: When Employers Use "Well-Being" To Hide Workplace Business As Usual

Corporations are racing to adopt the language of the mental health movement. But is this anything more than a veil to cover up the deeper problems within the modern workplace?

WARSAW — Raises? Shorter working hours? Jobs that carry real meaning? Does anyone really need these things anymore? Nope, if you ask corporations, they would rather have their employees learn deep breathing or sign up for courses on how to effectively manage stress. Therapy and wellness culture has entered companies, but in a caricatured form.

Not so long ago, topics such as productivity and efficiency were all the rage in workplaces. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and it forced a reorganization of corporate priorities. All of a sudden, companies began to claim that they care about the mental health, well-being, and stress levels of their employees. But considering that what businesses still treasure most is their own bottom line, has this shift in language really changed anything?

“Mental health is now a corporate topic”, said professor Tomasz Ochinowski, a psychologist and organizational historian from the Department of Social Management at the University of Warsaw. “The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have definitely played a major role here”, he added, “but in a lot of ways, this is also a generational change”.

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"Bossware" Boundaries? How Employers Monitor You At Home Depends On Where You Live

Eye-tracking webcams, keystroke recorders, screen captures of visited sites. With the rise in remote work, employee monitoring software has become the norm in the U.S.. But in Europe, things are more complicated.

PARIS — Is there a spy in your computer? If you work in the U.S., chances are the answer is 'yes.' According to several studies conducted by Gartner and Digital.com, around six out of 10 employers use software to monitor their remote workers. The Americans have even come up with a name for this kind of tool: "bossware".

As the Covid pandemic forced millions of people to work from home almost overnight in 2020, many employers were "buying panic" monitoring equipment, Bloomberg reported at the time. The lockdowns have passed, but remote working has not. Nor has surveillance software.

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Hot Summer Jobs: How Global Warming Weighs On The Workplace

As workers around the globe are faced with the mercury rising, jobs both inside and outside are becoming less and less bearable in the summer months.

PARIS — It’s August again, temperatures are topping 30 ℃ (86 ℉), and I work in an office in the center of France’s capital that dates back to the 19th century. Needless to say, it has not been equipped with air-conditioning nor built to shield against heat waves. We work with fans, and hide the sunlight with make-shift curtains.

Of course, I am among the lucky ones. On my way to and from the office, I can’t help but notice those who are obliged to work outside, under the scorching sun, often with heavy gear and extra clothing to protect themselves. How could they ever stay cool? Who’s looking out for their health and safety?

Over the past few years, our planet has been faced with steadily more severe heat waves. We have had to learn how to live with rising temperatures and adapt our daily lives to the on-the-ground reality of global warming. And for 40 or so hours a week, it is a decidedly work-related question.

The unbearable heat that has taken over some countries since the start of July has been fatal for some. According to French daily Les Echos, France registered 80 more workplace-related deaths than usual during the heatwave in July. Now, nations are taking new measures and re-evaluating working conditions to face this environmental phenomenon.

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Work → In Progress: The Glass Ceiling Is Dead, Long Live The "Glass Wall"

Hit the pause button and rewind to a world grappling with the COVID-19, not that long ago. The world of work, like virtually all aspects of our daily lives, is bearing the brunt of the pandemic, with a particular emphasis on female-dominated sectors of the economy. Millions of women across the globe are forced to put their activity on hold and handle child care duties for instance — at least considerable more than their male counterparts.

Fast forward a bit, to 2021: The economy is starting back up, but more than a million women are still unemployed. Some economists feared the pandemic might even wipe out a generation of progress for working women.

Back to the present day, women are coming back to the workforce in record numbers. According to Insider, 77.8% of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are in the labor force, surpassing the previous peak in 2000.

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Work In Progress
Yannick Osselin-Champion and Bertrand Hauger

Work → In Progress: AI, The Pros And Cons Of Your New Sort-Of Colleague

Will it help you, control you ... or replace you?

It seems like Artificial Intelligence is all we read about these days, with some newspapers even suggesting its rapid expansion poses “existential threats to humanity.” But even if we do have a lot of questions about AI, it also opens up opportunities to help human activity for the better – in particular in the world of work.

We’re hearing more about “future-proof careers,” which will survive the advent of AI. A recent report from consulting firm Challenger, Grey and Christmas found that AI was behind nearly 4,000 layoffs in the U.S. last month. That’s almost four times the impact of outsourcing – although cost-cutting still accounted for double the job losses.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 brings positive news about jobs created by AI and technological advances in the next five years. There’s some nuance around this new tool – which, like any revolutionary invention, will have a lasting impact on many industries.

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Work In Progress
Ginevra Falciani, Bertrand Hauger and Emma Albright

Work → In Progress: Gen Z And The Workplace, It’s Complicated

Gen Z, those 26 and younger, are entering the workforce. Their lives and values differ drastically from older generations, forcing employers to rethink how they work.

There are a lot of ideas around Gen Z in the workplace. There's a wide range of opinions: they're sometimes described as lazy and other times as promising. Born between 1997 and 2012, this generation is the most diverse in history, and its values have been shaped by growing up alongside various crises, including the climate crisis.

A recent article was published in Forbes France looked at how companies must now adapt to the new generation coming into the workforce. More than half of the young people from Gen Z currently at work say they are not satisfied with their job and their work/life balance. As a result, the turnover has never been so high and costly for companies.

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Work In Progress
Bertrand Hauger, Anne-Sophie Goninet, Laure Gautherin and Emma Albright

Work → In Progress: Time To Change Everything Or Back To Business As Usual?

The world of work is at a crossroads. A new French study published last week shows that in the span of four years, jobs offering remote work have increased tenfold since 2017, as the world grapples with the long-term impact of COVID-19. The profound questioning of the necessity to “go to the office” that the pandemic posed led to teleworking becoming a “new normal” of sorts, with the majority of businesses implementing hybrid models that allow employees to work remotely while still having access to the necessary resources they need to do their jobs ...

… that is, until it was "back to business as usual." But returning to office-based work, as most parts of the world consider the coronavirus crisis more or less a thing of the past, it is becoming apparent to some that things would, and should, never be the same.

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Work In Progress

Work → In Progress: The Ripples Of Ukraine War On The World Of Work

Jobs for Ukrainian refugees, too busy to quit in Hong Kong, the rise of 'asynchronous' work....and more

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the working world — still recovering from the global pandemic, no less — was dealt a sizeable blow, from ripple effects of unemployment to supply chain disruptions to office campaigns to support the victims of the war.

Of course, the most immediate impact of the war is inside Ukraine itself, which UN News estimates has lost 4.8 million jobs. The immediate impact has also been felt across the global economy, as energy embargoes and grain blockades have undermined the most basic elements of life. Meanwhile, the influx of refugees has put newfound pressure on labor markets in certain countries.

But as the war unfolds before us on our screens, business in Western countries have also felt compelled to get involved, often with spontaneous initiatives to offer help. In the UK, for example, several companies have put pressure on the government to make it easier on refugees, and have offered jobs themselves to Ukrainian refugees. Some are going even further by offering relocation and other assistance.

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Work In Progress
Rozena Crossman

Work → In Progress: Why 'Financial Wellness' Is Not Just About A Raise

The workplace wellness trend now includes the very practical questions about how, when and how much we get paid, and is shaping up to be the next step in blurring the lines between personal and professional that were once so neatly divided.

We’re approaching the end of Q1 of 2022 and the “wellness” trend that’s usually reserved for millennials’ yoga mats has officially made its way into the professional world. After two years of realizing that job setups don’t always favor employees’ health, the call for sweeping workplace changes — ranging from more medical access to an HR focus on mental well-being — is in full swing.

But wouldn't you know: the latest professional self-care trend carries a notably practical air: financial wellness.

Bank of America’s 2021 Workplace Benefits Report mentioned “financial wellness” 43 times, which it defined as “the type of support employers are offering to address financial needs.” But is making money not the point of work? It seems this new rebranding of how work relates to cash is indicative of how differently we now view employment.

The financial wellness movement doesn’t want companies to just fairly compensate employees but instead to teach them how to manage their salaries, be it saving for retirement, navigating debt or budgeting.

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Economy
Laura Villahermosa

The Pandemic Changed How Latin Americans Work — And Where

Once dismissed as being for millennials and hard-up freelancers, coworking firms now occupy Latin America's prestigious corporate towers that have more and more spaces to fill.

LIMA — When workers left their offices in March 2020, with a global pandemic in full swing, nobody knew when they would be back. As firms and workers began warming to working from home weeks into lockdowns and confinement regimes, the real estate sector trembled at the prospect of a massive downturn in demand for office space.

In Latin America, use of corporate office space had already been changing before the pandemic, with the demand for shared offices taking off in 2015-2018. The U.S.-based firm WeWork was one of the beneficiaries. "We had 70% occupation levels before the pandemic," says Claudio Hidalgo, head of WeWork in Latin America.

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Future
Carl-Johan Karlsson

​Will There Be A Legal Right To Telework?

Silicon Valley firms are leading the way in corporate policy, while European countries like Germany are beginning to draw up laws to create a bonafide legal right to work from home.

Employers and governments around the world have been oscillating between full remote requirements to everyone-back-to-the-office to forever-flex schedules. Now, two years into the pandemic, working from home appears bound to be a feature of our current existence that will be with us — in some form — once COVID-19 is gone.

But even as companies experiment with different policies, others are pushing to see it translated into law — in other words, to make working from home a right.

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Work In Progress
Rozena Crossman

Work → In Progress: The Working World In 2022

Will the Great Resignation of the past year lead to a Great Reskilling the next...?

Like the year before, 2021 was filled with Zoom meetings, travel bans, shaky economics and supply chain disruptions. At the same time, it was a singular year, defined by strikes, international labor shortages and vaccine mandates in many workplaces. As Q4 comes to an end, things are ramping up, and the work challenges of 2022 are becoming very clear.

All over the world, unemployment is high — and so is the lack of available labor. What will see a bigger increase, inflation or salary bumps? Will the Great Resignation lead to a Great Reskilling? What we do know is that white-collar workers are shifting from overtime to flexible schedules, from cogs in the wheel to drivers in the front seat, from struggling independent contractors to employees with full benefits.

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