Decent Work in America: The 2005 Work Environment Index

What are the factors that make for a decent work environment and how do the conditions of work vary in different parts of the United States? To address these and similarly important questions in a clear and accessible way, we have developed a new approach for measuring the work environment on a state-bystate basis throughout the United States (including the District of Columbia) – the Work Environment Index (WEI). This is the first installment of the WEI, and we intend to update it every year. The WEI is a unique social indicator that brings together in one measure a range of factors that, in combination, define the quality of our working lives in the U.S. today. The WEI examines three basic dimensions of the U.S. work environment: job opportunities, job quality and workplace fairness. We rank the 50 states and the District of Columbia according to these three categories. Based on our measures of job opportunities, job quality, and workplace fairness, we find that, overall, Delaware offers the best relative work environment in the United States. Other states with high WEI rankings include New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont and Iowa. The states with the lowest WEI rankings are Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Utah, South Carolina and Mississippi. Our state-by-state WEI ranking enables us to consider a crucial and widely-discussed issue: Do the states that provide a relatively decent work environment end up paying a penalty in terms of their overall economic climate? For example, do states that rank high according to the WEI score poorly in terms of their overall growth rate, the pace at which new businesses are being formed in the state, or their rate of new job creation? In fact, we find that overall economic conditions in states with a high WEI rank are at least as favorable, if not somewhat more favorable, than those with low WEI rankings. Along with this, we also find that poverty rates in states with high WEI rankings are consistently lower than states with low WEI rankings.labor, work environment, business climate, decent work, poverty, job growth, economic growth, business start-up

Organizational Probes:Exploring Playful Interactions in Work Environment

Playfulness, with non-intrusive elements, can be considered a useful resource for enhancing social awareness and community building within work organizations. Taking inspirations from the cultural probes approach, we developed organizational probes as a set of investigation tools that could provide useful information about employees’ everyday playful experiences within their work organizations. In an academic work environment, we applied our organizational probes over a period of three weeks. Based on the collected data we developed two design concepts for playful technologies in work environments

Demographics and Perceptions of Work Environment for Registered Nurses

Registered nurses (RNs) are the lifeblood of hospitals. Therefore, retaining skilled nurses is necessary to insure the viability of these institutions. A two-year longitudinal, non-experimental research study utilized a descriptive design to compare the perceptions of RNs who remained on their units to those who left or changed units over a two-year time period. The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether there was a statistically significant difference between these two groups. Results in several areas indicate that further evaluation is necessary by nurse managers and administration. This information could help retain RNs as well as attract qualified nurses to a center of excellence

Impact of online professional development in the work environment

Online distance education programs are populated by adult learners who try to continue or complete their education without having to leave their jobs or places of residence. Their work environment becomes not just their working place, but also the labs where they apply new knowledge. The general expectation is that after graduation they will make an impact in their work environment through their job and through interacting with peers and supervisors. This study explored the influence that K-12 teachers had in their work environment as they pursued and graduated from an online Masters program in Education. The study showed the impact that the participants have and how they become agents of change in their immediate workplace.publishedpeer reviewe

Demographic, Work Environment and Resilience Characteristics among Registered Nurses

In a caring profession like nursing, the risk of sending newly-graduated nurses with low resilience into the workplace provided impetus for the study to explore the association between demographic, work environment and resilience characteristics among registered nurses employed in acute care setting. Select subscales from the PES-NWI were used to assess Nurse Manager Ability, Leadership and Support of Nurses; Staffing and Resource Adequacy; and Collegial Nurse-Physician Relations (Lake, 2002) and the Resilience Scale was used to measure resilience (Wagnild & Young, 1993). Intent to stay was measured by McCain’s Behavioral Commitment Scale (McCloskey, 1990). One-hundred and thirteen (113) registered nurses completed and returned the survey, giving a response rate of 50.2%. Using SPSS 24 (IBM Corp., 2013) software, descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. The p-value for all comparisons was set at p≤0.05. Five (5) out of the twenty-one (21) correlations were statistically significant and were greater than or equal to .33. Resilience scores and Behavioral Commitment scores, or intent-to-stay, had a correlation of only .069. Adequate Staffing was also correlated to positive Nurse-physician relationships and to strong Nurse Management. These factors are clearly related to creating a stable workforce among nurses. The results showed that no factor had strong correlation with the highest level of nursing education received, suggesting that, at this hospital, registered nurses prepared by a four-year degree had no higher or lower resilience and were no more or less likely to stay at their place of work than those who were prepared at the associate degree level. Findings from this study have the potential to mitigate practice work environment stressors and decrease turnover among registered nurses employed in acute care settings

What Factors Will Transform the Contemporary Work Environment and Characterize the Future of Work?

There is an overwhelming consensus among researchers that the contemporary work environment is transforming at a rapid pace. Advanced technology, increasing globalization, and the influx of a new generation of workers are all factors that will change the structures that govern the contemporary workplace. To prepare for the future of work, an organization must comprehend the manner in which each of these factors will engender changes in the evaluation of skillsets, the employer value proposition, and the available labor force

The Work Environment Index: Technical Background Paper

The vast majority of Americans work for a living. The track record of different states varies widely when it comes to providing decent opportunities for working people. The Work Environment Index (WEI) captures these differences and provides a basis for evaluating how well each state does in creating an economy that supports its working population. The purpose of this article is to detail the construction of the WEI and to explain the design of the Index. This paper serves as a technical companion to the report Decent Work In America: The 2005 Work Environment Index. Many factors contribute to a good environment for working people: quality jobs, adequate opportunities for employment, basic social protections, and being treated fairly. The WEI is a composite measure of these different dimensions and provides a basis for comparing the quality of the work environment in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The WEI has multiple objectives: 1) to capture and quantify the various dimensions of the work environment on a state-by-state basis. 2) to provide a direct, relatively transparent, and easy-to-understand measurement that is firmly rooted in publicly available data sources. 3) to provide a basis for making comparisons between the states that are fair and objective. 4) to create a tool for analyzing other socio-economic issues at the state level: e.g. poverty rate differentials, job quality and quantity trade-offs, and patterns of economic growth.labor, work environment, business climate, decent work, poverty, job growth, economic growth, business start-ups

Dynamics of collaborative work in global software development environment.

This study aims to explore the dynamics of collaborative work in global software development projects. The study explored the nature of collaboration, the patterns of collaborative behaviors in different tasks in computer science, and the impact of the tasks to the collaboration among students. Four different collaborative software development tasks were assigned to the globally distributes teams. The study used data from 230 students from five universities, namely Atilim University (Turkey), Middle East Technical University (Turkey), Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá (Panama), University of North Texas (US), and Middlesex University (UK). The findings involve the recommendations for building effective collaborative working environments and guidelines for building collaborative virtual communities