Nordic Life Science 1
78 Ulrika Lindstrand also worries that working fo
rm home will lead to physical problems and ergonomic injuries, as only 30% were completely content with the shape of their home offices. She would like to see a concrete legal framework to clearly identify the employers responsibility to make sure that we have an optimal workplace at home if we must work from home, not least if if the remote work will continue even after the pandemic. “Right now [March 16th 2021] we are facing some sort of regulatory vacuum. The Swedish Work Environment Authority has removed clear regulations when it comes to workplaces that the employer is not in control of, like the remote workplace at home,” she says. In addition, the Swedish Work Environment Authority has made a proposal for changes in the legislation. The proposal runs the risk of affecting the employer’s responsibility in preventative work environment efforts, says Lindstrand. “We believe that the timing for these regulations changes is badly chosen. Clearer regulations are needed in issues concerning the employer’s responsibility for the workplace at home. There should be no uncertainties in the fact that it is the employer that is responsible for the home office. In its new work environment strategy, the Swedish government has made clear that in the future, working life regulations are needed for workplaces that the employer has no control over. This is welcomed, but it is urgent.” The physiological stresses must also be taken into consideration when looking at the change in peoples working life during the pandemic. In the Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers’ survey, a large proportion of respondents said that they felt down and had decreased motivation levels, especially among engineers under 30 years of age (57%). In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Jennifer Moss, a workplace expert, journalist and author, describes the physiological effects of our working conditions during the pandemic in more detail. Together with colleagues she created a survey that analyzed the state of burnout and well-being during COVID-19. The authors gathered feedback from more than 1500 respondents in 46 countries, in various sectors, roles, and seniority levels, in the fall of 2020. As many as 89% of respondents said their work life was getting worse and 85% said their well-being had declined. As many as 57% of employees felt that the pandemic had a “large effect on” or “completely dominated” their work. Only 21% rated their well-being as “good,” and a mere 2% rated it as “excellent”. Moss summarizes in the article that what they learned from the survey was that burnout is a global problem, and we are in the middle of a burnout epidemic. In 2019 the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been 78 NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG “WE ENVISAGE THAT MANY COMPANIES WILL ADOPT A HYBRID MODEL. IT WILL BE KEY TO FIND THE BALANCE BETWEEN THE UPSIDES OF REMOTE WORK WHILST MITIGATING AGAINST RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH A LOSS OF ORGANIZATION CULTURE BY OFFERING OPPORTUNITIES FOR RELATIONSHIPBUILDING AT THE OFFICE.” – FREDRIK ANJOU successfully managed”. This acknowledges that burnout is more than just an employee problem. According to Moss, burnout is an organizational problem that requires an organizational solution. Burnout is usually described as having six main causes (Maslach et al., Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2012); unsustainable workload, perceived lack of control, insufficient rewards for effort, lack of a supportive community, lack of fairness and mismatched values and skills. Melissa Ross notes in her article that during the pandemic we didn’t adjust workloads, we didn’t give people control and flexibility, we allowed more meetings and unhealthy levels of screen time, and we didn’t recognize the extent of people’s struggles. Just as the Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers showed, Ross’ survey showed that millennials are experiencing the worst decline in well-being. Much of this is due to having less autonomy at work, lower seniority, and greater financial stressors and feelings of loneliness. Lets not forget that the workplaces and the way we work had begun to change before the pandemic hit us. For example, repetitive tasks have decreased and tasks that require creativity and the ability to think out of the box have increased. More advanced digital tools, such as AI-supported decisions, chatbots and cloud based collective knowledge have accelerated this development. What we do and produce at the office has started to change. We also see a growth in management models