Balancing workload to improve employee well-being in digital operations – BALANCE
Balancing workload to improve employee well-being in digital operations
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Challenges and objectives
The recent spread of Covid-19 and the increase in burnouts have put the importance of workload balance back on the agenda of researchers and practitioners. The BALANCE project responds to the effort to study how to achieve workload balance through work design. The project team is approaching work design in a new, more intelligent way, taking into account work flexibility, digitalization and real-time adaptable decisions. An analytical and empirical approach will be used, based on real-time data from Infrabel's control rooms, which have already been collected for BALANCE. In addition, interviews and a (two-wave) questionnaire will be organized to see the impact on well-being. Control rooms (see illustration) are an ideal testing ground for studying the impact of work flexibility, work configuration and automation on workload balance, and consequently on employee working conditions and organizational performance. In addition, following on from Industrie 4.0 and 5.0 and the growing interest in digital transformation in operations management, the role of Human-Machine Interaction will also be examined in detail.
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The BALANCE project has already produced several results (as shown by the scientific results and research pipeline), relevant to both academics and professionals. While current results have mainly focused on operational performance, workload and the changing human-worker relationship, this approach is now being extended to employee absence and general well-being. The project team hopes and firmly believes that BALANCE is just the beginning of a long-term research trend in this field. Supported by the ANR, project members have had the opportunity to expand their network in this field considerably, and to devote their time to working with PhD students, project partners, the company and external researchers on this topic.
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Men, C.; Verschelde, M.; Van den Broeke, M.; Roets, B. Employees' Interaction with Automation as Antihero? Impact on Workload and Train Delays in Digital Control Rooms (soon to be submitted to Production and Operations Management in April 2024).
Men, C.; Van den Broeke, M.; Verschelde, M. Local knowledge and operational performance: Evidence from a digitized setting. (planned to be submitted to Journal of Operations Management before summer 2024).
Men, C.; Van den Broeke, M.; Verschelde, M. Employee-centric operations: A review and a conceptual framework towards Industry 5.0. (soon to be submitted to Omega in May 2024).
The recent covid-19 propagation and increasing number of burnouts has put the relevance of workload balancing back on the researchers’ and practitioners’ agenda. The project BALANCE responds to the required effort to study how to obtain workload balancing via work design – which we aim to operationalize in a new smarter way, by jointly considering labour flexibility, digitization and real-time adaptability decisions. We will use an analytical and empirical approach, starting the analysis from the rich, real time data on digital control rooms from the railway company Infrabel, already collected for this project. In addition we will perform interviews and a two-wave survey to collect well-being information. Control rooms are an ideal testing ground to study how labour flexibility, work configuration, and automation impact workload balance - and consequently the social well-being of employees and the performance of organizations - in a real-time data context.
Project coordination
Maud Van Den Broeke (INSTITUT ECONOMIE SCIENTIFIQUE GESTION)
The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.
Partnership
IESEG INSTITUT ECONOMIE SCIENTIFIQUE GESTION
Help of the ANR 227,415 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project:
September 2022
- 48 Months
