Adam Smith Business School

Dr Lila Skountridaki, University of Edinburgh

'The role of the physical working space in the quality of working life'
Thursday 26 May, 1.30pm - 3.00pm
Room 206, Gilbert Scott Building (Main Building)

Register at business-events@glasgow.ac.uk

Abstract

If there is one management myth that the enforced working from home during the pandemic has de-composed, it is the assumption that employee productivity suffers when working from home. As numerous managers came to realise (and admit), staff visibility may serve the purpose of managerial control (Sewell and Taskin 2015) but not necessarily management’s key functions, including organisational efficiency as well as the conversion of employees’ capacity for labour into actual labour (Littler 1990). This paper focuses on another workplace myth, one which is still to be busted in public discussions: that shared office spaces, with or without staff desk allocation (open plan or hot desking), are a major silenced dysfunction in our organisational lives. Similar to remote work, open plan offices may be justified by a direct control strategy or a cost containment imperative, but for a large part of the workforce, it comes with a cost in terms of productivity and/or wellbeing (Morrison and Smollan 2020). This paper brings together insights from the UKRI/ESRC funded working@home study and an extensive mixed methods study on home and hybrid work at a large higher education institution in the UK, to demonstrate that a major ‘push away’ from the office factor for staff is the experiences of their physical working environment. In particular, employees’ accounts of their hybrid work preferences reveals that regular arbitrary meetings with peers (the so-called watercooler moments), audio/visual distractions staff experience at the workplace as well as lack of control over temperature, lighting or hygiene levels has a significant negative impact on the quality their working lives.

Biography

Lila joined the University of Edinburgh's Business School in 2020 as Lecturer in Organisation Studies. Her teaching focuses on Business Ethics and Responsible Business at an undergraduate and postgraduate level, and her research interests include the sociology of work, the professions, and professional ethics. She has also done extensive research on the transnational healthcare market. Lila is a Fellow of the HEA. Previously she was at the University of Stirling, where she was a Lecturer in Management and Sustainable Practice. She was a member of the General University Ethics Panel and the faculty Lead on the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Management, Strathclyde University Business School in 2014. She studied Economics at the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece (BSc) and the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (MSc). Before starting her PhD, Lila worked for Quality Control and Accounting Departments in the private sector in Germany and Greece.

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First published: 7 March 2022