Ever feel like you're so busy and stressed that you forget to breathe? Right now life has never seemed more overwhelming. The COVID pandemic, working from home and lockdowns have turned our working lives upside down, further blurring the line between work and home. We are taking less annual leave, working longer hours than ever and worried about redundancies. There are so many physical and emotional demands on us at the moment it makes it hard not to feel like we are all edging closer and closer to burnout. Dr Bill Mitchell is here to help - a psychologist with decades of experience specialising in helping the overwhelmed, overstressed and overscheduled rebalance their personal and professional lives. In Time to Breathe, Dr Bill brings you invaluable tried and tested, practical solutions from his clinical practice that will help you prioritise what is most important and ensure you stay in a happy, energised space - no matter what is going on around you. Find out how to build resilience in yourself and your family, and how to prevent the drift towards burnout and poor mental health that so many of us suffer from in our busy modern lives. Your family - and your boss - will thank you.

Flexible Work: Designing Our Healthier Future Lives examines flexible working through the lens of social science, in particular using psychological perspective to address not only what forms of flexible working there are and how they are evolving but also their prospect in the future of work. Bringing together views from thought-leaders and underpinned by research evidence, this book addresses two of the most fundamental business challenges for large and medium organisations - mental health and productivity - calling for the bridging of science and policy to design flexible working for our future healthier lives. Growing from these foundations, this book explains the latest landscape in flexible working, looking at employee psychological health and productivity, including showing up for work sick. Perspectives are provided from around the world on leadership, line management, 'over attachment' with technology, commuting, skill-based inequality and control over working time. Readers are offered insights into the relevance of flexible working for a diverse workforce - invisible disabilities, disabilities, older workers and blended families. Throughout, the book offers suggestions for shaping future policy, practice and research. Each chapter concludes with recommendations, making this essential reading for students, academics, human resource practitioners, policy-influencers, policymakers and professionals interested in flexible work.

This is a short guide on sit-stand working in the office. It reviews the research on sitting and standing at work from the 1950s to present and provides guidance for specialists, therapists, practitioners, and managers. The book is illustrated with many photos and figures, provides guidance for active working at the end of every chapter, and is understandable to the layman as well as the specialist. With the increased emphasis on healthy lifestyles, coupled with the obesity and overweight epidemic, many are claiming that we should spend more time standing at work. Some have even claimed that sitting is the new smoking. Readers of the book will learn and understand what is behind these claims, what stacks-up, what doesn't, and be able to make informed decisions about whether to invest in new facilities, and what to invest. This book is of value to human factors specialists, physical therapists, chiropractors and occupational health practitioners, architects, and facilities managers. Features Explains the origins of sedentary office work Summarizes the health risks of sitting and standing and how to avoid them Reviews new research on active working and practical ways of developing active working habits in the office Discusses the obesogenic workplace, and how to avoid it Includes over 60 key points to help you decide how to be more active at work

Every customer-facing corporation has at least one call center. In the United States, call centers handle a billion calls per year. Call Center Operation gives you complete coverage of the critical issues involved in the design, implementation, organization, and management of a customer call center. Sharp provides information on advanced technology tools for workforce management, workshop examples for training call center staff, and an analysis of the significance of the call center to overall corporate customer relationship strategies.
A special feature of the book is its focus on call center case studies, describing a number of successful call center strategies and best practices, selected from various business sectors - financial, retail, healthcare, travel, technology, and others. These case studies provide useful guidelines based on successful corporate call centers that will guide you in establishing and maintaining the most effective call center operation for your enterprise.
-Presents key concepts and techniques, including a formal development process, in a real-world context
-Provides extensive management guidelines
-Stresses the importance of staff selection and training

Strategy is becoming more 'open' - more transparent and more inclusive. Opening Strategy tells the story of how corporate strategists and strategy consultants have worked since the middle of the last century to open up the strategy process. First strategic planning, then strategic management, and now 'open strategy' have all brought more people into the strategy process and provided more strategic information, for the benefit of both business and society at large. Informed by interviews with corporate strategists and consultants at leading firms such as General Electric and McKinsey & Co, and drawing on the historical archives of strategy's pioneers, this book provides vivid insights into the trials and tribulations of practice change in the strategy profession. Above all, it stresses the hard work of the little recognized and sometimes eccentric individuals who have been leaders in practice change. By building on a wide range of illustrations, covering both successes and failures, the book draws out general lessons for practice innovation in strategy. Those studying the topic will be able to set standard strategy techniques in historical and social context and develop new areas for investigation, while practising executives and consultants should gain a sense of how to innovate in strategy - and how not to.

There are 60 million health care workers globally and most of this workforce consists of nurses, as they are key providers of primary health care. Historically, the global nurse occupation has been predominately female and segregated along gendered, racialised and classed hierarchies. In the last decade, new actors have emerged in the management of health care human resources, specifically from the corporate sector, which has created new interactions, networks, and organisational practices. This book urgently calls for the reconceptualisation in the theoretical framing of the globalised nurse occupation from International Human Resource Management (IHRM) to Transnational Human Resource Management (THRM). Specifically, the book draws on critical human resource management literature and transnational feminist theories to frame the strategies and practices used to manage nurses across geographical sites of knowledge production and power, which centralise on how and by whom nurses are managed. In its current managerial form, the author argues that the nurses are constructed and produced as resources to be packaged for clients in public and private organisations.

After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments.Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. ON THE CLOCK takes us behind the scenes of the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce to understand the future of work in America - and its present. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity.ON THE CLOCK explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.

Homework; work that is categorised as informal employment, performed in the home, mainly for subcontractors and mostly undertaken by women. The inequities and injustices inherent in homework conditions maintain women's weak bargaining position, preventing them from making any improvements to their lives via their work. The best way to tackle these issues is not to abolish, but to bring equality and justice to homework. This book contributes a gender justice framework to analyse and confront the issues and problems of homework. The authors propose four justice dimensions - recognition, representation, rights and redistribution - to examine and analyse homework. This framework also takes into account the structures and processes of capitalism and the patriarchy, and the relations of domination that are widely held to be the major factors that determine homework injustice. The authors discuss strategies and approaches that have worked for homeworkers, highlighting why they worked and the features that were beneficial for them. Homeworking Women will be of interest to individuals and organisations working with or for the collective benefit of homeworkers, academics and students interested in feminism, labour regulation, informal work, supply chains and social and political justice.

Is your organization strategically prepared for the digital and distributed workplace? Technology, data analytics and artificial intelligence already impact how people work and engage with organizations. A dispersed workforce, greater transparency, social change, generational shift and value chain disruptions are driving new behaviors and expectations from the workplace. Together, these trends are shaping a new era of distributed and digitally enabled network of workers where the work comes to workers instead of the workers going to work. In Humans at Work, employee and workplace experience experts Anna Tavis and Stela Lupushor advocate for the adoption of human-centric practices as a critical and necessary part of adapting work and workplaces to the future of work. Outlining the four factors (digitization of work, distributed workplaces, organizational redesign and changing workforce) driving the dramatic changes in the workplace, each chapter provides examples of how innovative companies are building workplace infrastructure and reshaping norms, serving new markets and adopting new technologies. Filled with examples from both start-ups and established companies, Humans at Work is the workplace leader's guide to building a workplace that creates market value by making work more human.

This title was first published in 2002. Call centres are a type of service work that stand at the interface between corporations and consumers. They exemplify more general tendencies present within service work. They also have a particular public image - being associated in the public mind with low skilled and regimented work. This volume presents contributions from British and German management academics and industrial sociologists based on primary research on call centres in both countries. The contributions cover the genesis and development of call centres as a new form of organization, or indeed a new industry; the rationalization and control strategies of organizations that establish call centres; and the nature of service work and service interactions. The findings of this volume challenge the common public image of call centres and finds that call centre employment is in fact very diverse. So, for example, skilled advising and consulting services are often performed over the phone. Along with the sometimes skilled nature of call centre work, work organization and working conditions vary as well. The text also seeks to contrast the British and German experience of call centre work and employment. In Germany clerical work has traditionally been embedded in the specific traditions of co-operative industrial relations that define the German model. Call centres present a strategic challenge to this model, and the expansion of call centres has been at the forefront of changes aimed at making employment more flexible in Germany. This work offers a choice of country cases, which permit a comparison of service employment within both a liberal capitalist and a socially embedded economy.

Collective bargaining between employers and trade unions has profoundly changed working conditions in companies around the globe. But why do we start work at the age of 10, 16, 18 or 24? Why do we work 6, 8, 10 or more hours a day? These questions are becoming increasingly pertinent as working norms are fractured and fragmented by country. This book brings an entirely new perspective to our understanding of changes in working time. In both the UK and the US, effective legal or collectively-bargained regulation of working time has been limited over the last 20 years, to the extent that its disappearance is seen as almost unproblematic. Here author Jens Thoemmes sheds light on this transition and its economic implications with a fully evidenced sociological account, based particularly on original research into cases of working time standards in France and Germany. This book addresses the whole process of working time regulation over the last twenty years, evaluating the activities of trade unions, employers, and the State. While theories of industrial relations have already addressed the issue of markets in the context of collective bargaining, this book draws connections between time and markets, places these transitions in their historical contexts, and illustrates the importance of this movement crossing borders and cultures.

The increasing globalization, the battle for talents, and global trends are changing the work patterns in organisations around the globe. Enterprises are working across country and cultural borders alongside complex supply and demand networks. Global incidents such as the financial crisis in 2008 and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have forced global organizations to find innovative ways to continue to connect globally and maintain a competitive advantage. Therefore, innovative enterprises have established global and virtual organisations including members of the value chain on supply and demand side. This book outlines these new work and leadership styles, and agile organisations, which are necessary to work virtually and globally. It provides case studies and experiences from different global organizations in different industries and sectors with a focus on value-adding processes and services.

Organizations are implementing virtual teams using web technologies as a cost-effective measure for training and project development. In Working at a Distance, Cassandra Smith provides a detailed, comprehensible virtual team business model for managers, professionals, teachers or students involved globally with such initiatives. The author argues that guidance for members of such teams is generally lacking. They are left to figure out their places on the team and face a host of other issues, the impact of which can be ameliorated with a virtual team business model that anyone working at a distance can follow. Cassandra Smith has taught courses online and facilitated virtual teams. The model she has created based on that experience maximizes the benefit to be gained from individual members' skills, personality styles, and the strengths of each active participant. It will enable teams to set up viable working plans and work cohesively at a distance. The model also provides for conflict management in virtual environments. Built on research and practical experience, the empirical data and subject experts' views captured by the author and the model offered here will help all stakeholders of businesses or educational institutions where managers, employees and clients; or teachers and students are working at a distance to achieve desired outcomes.

This book provides insight into the potential for the market to protect and improve labour standards and working conditions in global apparel supply chains. It examines the possibilities and limitations of market approaches to securing social compliance in global manufacturing industries. It does so by tracing the historic origins of social labelling both in trade union and consumer constituencies, considering industry and consumer perspectives on the benefits and drawbacks of social labelling, comparing efforts to develop and implement labelling initiatives in various countries, and locating social labelling within contemporary debates and controversies about the implications of globalization for workers worldwide. Scholars and students of globalisation, development, corporate social responsibility, human geography, labour and industrial relations, business ethics, consumer behaviour and fashion will find its contents of relevance. CSR practitioners in the clothing and other industries will also find this useful in developing policy with respect to supply chain assurance.

A "riveting and powerful" (Gretchen Carlson, cofounder of Lift Our Voices) insider's account on Wall Street-an updated Liar's Poker-where greed coupled with misogyny and discrimination enforces a culture of exclusion in the upper echelons of Goldman Sachs. Jamie Fiore Higgins became one of the few women at the highest ranks of Goldman Sachs. Spurred on by the obligation she felt to her working-class immigrant family, she rose through the ranks and saw it all: out-of-control, lavish parties flowing with never-ending drinks; affairs flouted in the office; rampant drug use; and most pervasively, a discriminatory culture that seemed designed to hold back the few women and people of color employed at the company. Despite Goldman Sachs having the right talking points and statistics, Fiore Higgins soon realized that these provided a veneer to cover up what she found to be an abusive culture. Her "engrossing" (Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro, authors of Power, for All) account is one filled with shocking stories of harassment and jaw-dropping tales of exclusionary behavior: when she was told she only got promoted because she is a woman; when her coworkers mooed at her after she pumped for her fourth child, defying the superior who had advised her not to breastfeed; or when a male boss used a racial epithet in front of her, other colleagues, and clients without any repercussions. Bully Market "exposes the #MeToo movement's unfinished work on Wall Street" (Meighan Stone, author of Awakening: #MeToo and the Global Fight for Women's Rights) sounds the alarm on the culture of finance and corporate America, while offering clear, actionable ideas for creating a fairer workplace. Both a revealing, extraordinary look at the industry and a top Wall Streeter's explosive personal story, Bully Market is an essential account of one woman's experience in a flawed system that speaks to the challenge and urgency for change.

This book looks at how large organizations have managed and adapted to changing conditions of employment shaped by the recent economic and political environment. Additional data are presented based on evidence from other significant actors such as agency employment firms and trade unions. The book also engages with important North American debates on the changing nature of work, careers, and employment.

Organizations are implementing virtual teams using web technologies as a cost-effective measure for training and project development. In Working at a Distance, Cassandra Smith provides a detailed, comprehensible virtual team business model for managers, professionals, teachers or students involved globally with such initiatives. The author argues that guidance for members of such teams is generally lacking. They are left to figure out their places on the team and face a host of other issues, the impact of which can be ameliorated with a virtual team business model that anyone working at a distance can follow. Cassandra Smith has taught courses online and facilitated virtual teams. The model she has created based on that experience maximizes the benefit to be gained from individual members' skills, personality styles, and the strengths of each active participant. It will enable teams to set up viable working plans and work cohesively at a distance. The model also provides for conflict management in virtual environments. Built on research and practical experience, the empirical data and subject experts' views captured by the author and the model offered here will help all stakeholders of businesses or educational institutions where managers, employees and clients; or teachers and students are working at a distance to achieve desired outcomes.

Over the past two decades the use of flexible employment relations has increased in most developed countries. The growth of temporary agency work constitutes a significant component of this development. Organizations are now facing the challenges of managing a blended workforce, i.e. a workforce consisting of both direct hires and contractors. At a time when Europe, as well as the rest of the world, is facing enhanced global competition and a severe labor market crisis, an understanding of temporary employment practices becomes all the more acute. With the evolution of the use of agency work in the Western world over the past decade, the chapters in this volume show how a focus on the management and organization of temporary agency work can be helpful to see possibilities and pitfalls for the use of temporary employment in the wake of changed employment practices and challenges to labor market stability and welfare structures.

Together, the new case studies presented in this volume provide a wide scope of analysis of the organization and management of temporary agency work, offering a much-needed contribution to the discussion of issues and priorities that guide and shape organizational practices today. Its particular uniqueness lies in the empirical richness and variety of local case studies and the way in which these are related to wider policy aims, ideological shifts, and the dynamics of organizational practice, with a particular focus on the organization and management of blended workforces .

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This book provides insight into the potential for the market to protect and improve labour standards and working conditions in global apparel supply chains. It examines the possibilities and limitations of market approaches to securing social compliance in global manufacturing industries. It does so by tracing the historic origins of social labelling both in trade union and consumer constituencies, considering industry and consumer perspectives on the benefits and drawbacks of social labelling, comparing efforts to develop and implement labelling initiatives in various countries, and locating social labelling within contemporary debates and controversies about the implications of globalization for workers worldwide. Scholars and students of globalisation, development, corporate social responsibility, human geography, labour and industrial relations, business ethics, consumer behaviour and fashion will find its contents of relevance. CSR practitioners in the clothing and other industries will also find this useful in developing policy with respect to supply chain assurance.

'Kind, realistic and genuinely helpful' Observer 'Bravo on the publication of this witty, wise guide to solo working' Alice Lascelles 'Filled to the brim with advice . . . Such a brilliant book' Emma Gannon Whether by choice or circumstance, as a freelancer or a company employee working from home, more of us are becoming solo workers than ever before. But once you've made the leap, how to do you actually work well in isolation? And how can you thrive while working alone? Picking up where the freelancer bibles stop, Solo addresses what we gain but also miss when we shift from the structure of an office environment to the solitary confines of our homes or studios. Blending the latest research in psychology, economics and social science with guided self-examination and more than ten years of freelance experience, Rebecca Seal shows you how to stay resilient, productive and focused in a company of one. Practical and inspiring, she also explores the idea of meaningful work and helps you define your own success.

Introducing the first macro-sociological perspective on the concept of creativity this book includes a review of ten domains which have studied creativity. It also explores the results of a six-year on-going research project comparing students' ideas on creativity with employers' and industry professionals' views.

Since the 1980s, the process of European economic integration, within a wider context of globalization, has accelerated employment change and placed a new premium on flexible' forms of work organization. The institutions of employment relations, specifically those concerning collective bargaining between employers and trade unions, have had to adapt accordingly. The Transformation of Employment Relations focuses not just on recent change, but charts the strategic choices that have influenced employment relations and examines these key developments in a comparative perspective. A historical and cross-national analysis of the most important and controversial issues' explores the motivation of the actors, the implementation of change, and its evolution in a diverse European context. The book highlights the policies and the role played by different institutional and social actors (employers, management, trade unions, professional associations and governments) and assesses the extent to which these policies and roles have had significant effects on outcomes. This comparative analysis of the transformation of work and employment regulation, within the context of a quarter-century timeframe, has not been undertaken in any other book. But this is no comparative handbook in which changes are largely described on a country-by-country basis, but instead, The Transformation of Employment Relations is rather focused thematically. As Europe copes with a serious economic crisis, understanding of the dynamics of work transformation has never been more important.

Collective bargaining between employers and trade unions has profoundly changed working conditions in companies around the globe. But why do we start work at the age of 10, 16, 18 or 24? Why do we work 6, 8, 10 or more hours a day? These questions are becoming increasingly pertinent as working norms are fractured and fragmented by country. This book brings an entirely new perspective to our understanding of changes in working time. In both the UK and the US, effective legal or collectively-bargained regulation of working time has been limited over the last 20 years, to the extent that its disappearance is seen as almost unproblematic. Here author Jens Thoemmes sheds light on this transition and its economic implications with a fully evidenced sociological account, based particularly on original research into cases of working time standards in France and Germany. This book addresses the whole process of working time regulation over the last twenty years, evaluating the activities of trade unions, employers, and the State. While theories of industrial relations have already addressed the issue of markets in the context of collective bargaining, this book draws connections between time and markets, places these transitions in their historical contexts, and illustrates the importance of this movement crossing borders and cultures.

The mental health pandemic manifests everywhere, not least in your workplace. As organizations around the world face health and social crises, as well as economic uncertainty, acknowledging and improving wellbeing in your workplace is more critical than ever. Increasingly, leaders and managers must support mental health and cultivate resilience in employees - not just increase engagement and performance. Based on more than 100 million Gallup global interviews, Wellbeing at Work shows you how to do just that. Coauthored by Gallup's CEO and its Chief Workplace Scientist, Wellbeing at Work explores the five key elements of wellbeing - career, social, financial, physical and community - and how organizations can help employees and teams thrive in those elements. The book also gives leaders ideas and action items to help employees use their innate talents and strengths to thrive in each of the wellbeing elements. And Wellbeing at Work introduces a metric to report a person's best possible life: Gallup Net Thriving, which will become the "other stock price" for organizations. In a world where work and life are more blended than ever, maximizing employee wellbeing takes on greater urgency. Wellbeing at Work shows leaders how to create a thriving and resilient culture. If you and your leaders don't change the world, who will? Wellbeing at Work includes a unique code to take the CliftonStrengths assessment, which reveals your top five strengths.