Designing for Employee Voice

Employee voice and workplace democracy have a positive impact on employee wellbeing and the performance of organizations. In this paper, we conducted interviews with employees to identify facilitators and inhibitors for voice within the workplace and a corresponding set of appropriate qualities: Civility, Validity, Safety and Egalitarianism. We then operationalised these qualities as a set of design goals – Assured Anonymity, Constructive Moderation, Adequate Slowness and Controlled Access – in the design and development of a secure anonymous employee voice system. Our novel take on the Enterprise Social Network aims to foster good citizenship whilst also promoting frank yet constructive discussion. We reflect on a two-week deployment of our system, the diverse range of candid discussions that emerged around important workplace issues and the potential for change within the host organization. We conclude by reflecting on the ways in which our approach shaped discourse and supported the creation of a trusted environment for employee voice

Designing for the Embedding of Employee Voice

Previous research on employee voice has sought to design technological solutions that address the challenges of speaking up in the workplace. However, effectively embedding employee voice systems in organisations requires designers to engage with the social processes, power relations and contextual factors of individual workplaces. We explore this process within a university workplace through a research project responding to a crisis in educational service delivery arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Within a successful three-month staff-led engagement, we examined the intricacies of embedding employee voice, exploring how the interactions between existing actors impacted the effectiveness of the process. We sought to identify specific actions to promote employee voice and overcome barriers to its successful establishment in organisational decision-making. We highlight design considerations for an effective employee voice system that facilitates embedding employee voice, including assurance, bounded accountability and bias reflexivity

How could equality and data protection law shape AI fairness for people with disabilities?

This article examines the concept of ‘AI fairness’ for people with disabilities from the perspective of data protection and equality law. This examination demonstrates that there is a need for a distinctive approach to AI fairness that is fundamentally different to that used for other protected characteristics, due to the different ways in which discrimination and data protection law applies in respect of Disability. We articulate this new agenda for AI fairness for people with disabilities, explaining how combining data protection and equality law creates new opportunities for disabled people's organisations and assistive technology researchers alike to shape the use of AI, as well as to challenge potential harmful uses

Foray's into Disability Discrimination Legislation and Wearable Computing

Abstract A significant amount wearable computing research is directed towards the development of systems which may help people with disabilities. These systems are increasingly likely to be developed by end users, and at the same time be inherently disruptive. Whether (or not) a system which is developed under such a regime counts as a reasonable adjustment is an unexplored question, yet very significant if disabled people are to fully benefit from wearable assistive technologies. At the same time, there is also the theme of whether a wearable computing system could also be used to enforce accessibility, by offering a convenient measure of whether this concern is being appropriately met. This project is therefore aimed at bringing together the domains of wearable computing and disability discrimination law, to the mutual benefit of both fields

Using Computer Simulations to Investigate the Potential Performance of ‘A to B’ Routing Systems for People with Mobility Impairments

Navigating from ‘A to B’ remains a serious problem for many people with mobility impairments, due to the need to avoid accessibility barriers. Yet there is currently no effective routing tool that is regularly used by people with disabilities in order to effectively avoid accessibility barriers in the built environment. To explore what is required to produce an effective routing tool, we have conducted Monte-Carlo simulations, simulating over 460 million journeys. This work illustrates the need to focus on barrier minimization, instead of barrier avoidance, due to the limitations of what can be achieved by any accessibility documentation tool. We also make a substantial contribution to the concern of meaningful performance metrics for activity recognition, illustrating how simulations can operate as useful real-world performance metrics for information sources utilized by navigation systems.11

Wilds of the Wasatch

Painting depicting a scene from the wasatch mountains