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The need for office efficiency is now of paramount importance. Great strides have been made in factory production methods and procedures during the first half of the twentieth century. But to the present, application of scientific management solution of office problems has been much slower.

Due to a variety of reasons, one of the most common types of training found at companies is safety and health training. As part of a comprehensive health and safety training program there is usually an ergonomics training course. These courses are used to empower the employees to identify hazards and set up their workstations with the goal of injury prevention and increasing employee efficiency. Even with their usage, little data exist on the effectiveness of ergonomics training. In addition, no published research is available on the effectiveness of office ergonomics delivered via the web. This research project investigated the effectiveness of office ergonomics training delivered by both an instructor and a web-based program. Using a methodology popularized by Kirkpatrick, this investigation focused on the effects of both training delivery methods for knowledge, behavior, and reaction to training. As a method for comparing results, data was collected for both the knowledge and the behavior prior to and post-training delivery. Data for reaction to training was collected post training. This investigation used multiple methods of comparisons between base pre and post-training data and between the two training delivery methods. These methods include intra-group, inter-group, gain-score, and normalized-scores comparisons. The result form these comparisons showed that for both delivery methods there was a significant increase for knowledge and behavioral changes. Additionally, the group that received web-based training had a significantly greater increase for both behaviors and knowledge. However, there was no difference between the two training methods for reaction to training. For the study population assessed, this investigation shows evidence that both instructor and web-based office ergonomics training is effective at generating behavior change and knowledge gain. However, this study shows that web-based training was more effective at generating a greater change than the instructor delivered course. Additionally, this study provides evidence that the common method of assessing participate reaction to training is not effective at determining the true effectiveness of the training.

New ways of working with a flexibilization in time and space are characteristics of today’s office world, but at the same time stress-related health problems are on the rise. Nature contacts is shown to be a resource for health, and outdoor offices were invented to combine both flexible working and health resources at the workplace. As outdoor office work (OOW) is quite new and little is known about its usage, the aim of the study was to deepen our understanding about what circumstances lead to the consequence, that employees do not conduct office-related work tasks outdoors, even if they have access to outdoor spaces and green areas. Following research question was about to be answered by a grounded theory study: What factors hinder office workers to conduct office-related tasks outdoors? The data collection was conducted in 9 semi-structured online interviews and 3 phones calls with participants from Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. The theoretical model was constructed through a process of coding and memo writing. The results show a theoretical model that entails one core category, Norms, and three main categories, Personal Factors, Organizational Factors and Practical Issues. The categories act interdependent, whereas existing norms have the most powerful impact. Work is perceived as something that should be conducted indoors at a desk, and as something that is stressful and can be inconvenient. The existing norms of how to conduct office work are influencing personal, organizational, and practical factors that lead to the consequence that employees do not conduct office work outdoors. The findings of the study provide useful knowledge for further research in the field of OOW, as well as for organizations that want to implement an outdoor office.

Tyrimo objektas 1260 raštvedybos vienažodžių ir sudėtinių terminai. Tiriama iš teisės aktų ir mokomųjų raštvedybos leidinių išrinktų terminų sandara ir kilmė. / The subject of reseach is 1260 terms of office-work field of modern Lithuanina. One-word and composite terms were picked out from standing legislations and reguliations and instructional editions of office-work. In this reseach work terms are discussed by their origin and structure.

The introduction of computers in working life has changed the very nature of many jobs and the entire work situation for a great number of people. How has this affected the individual´s health and well being? With the large increase in the use of computers we have witnessed an increase in reports on negative effects on users´health. The puropose of this thesis is to describe a number of studies on health effects of office computerisation conducted over a period of 20 years. The emphasis of the early studies was on psychosocial factors and stress effects while the focus in the more recent studies was to take into account occupational health in software development. The following conclusions have been drawn: We still face severe problems concerning the computer users´health and work environment. Much of the negative health effects are associated with stress. The introduction of new computer systems can result in an increase in various work-related health risks. These risks are related to several interacting factors, with two of the more important factors being work organisation and contents and design ot the computer system. Current methods, models and tools for system development are insufficient to prevent work environment and health problems encountered in administrative case handling work. To counteract these problems more attention needs to be given to social and organisational factors during system development.

Womit und wann fängt die neue Arbeitswelt an? Indem wir das Büro verlassen? Wie und wo wollen wir künftig arbeiten und welche Werkzeuge benötigen wir dafür? Microsoft Deutschland lebt die neue Arbeitswelt mit seinen flexiblen Arbeitsmodellen und der offenen Unternehmenskultur bereits seit vielen Jahren und hat mit dem Manifest für neues Arbeiten vor einem Jahr die Diskussion um die Wissensarbeit der Zukunft angestoßen. Mit dem Buch „Out of Office – Warum wir die Arbeit neu erfinden müssen“ findet diese Debatte nun ihre Fortsetzung. "Wir haben dieses Buch mit der Absicht verfasst, die Büroarbeit der Zukunft neu zu definieren,", so die Autoren Dr. Elke Frank, Personalchefin bei Microsoft Deutschland und Dr. Thorsten Hübschen, verantwortlich für das Office Geschäft. "Out of Office" erscheint im Redline-Verlag und ist ab sofort im Handel erhältlich.

The purpose of this study is threefold: (1) to find out the qualities employers expect in beginning workers, (2) to investigate the importance attached to personality by some writers in the literature of the business education field, and (3) to compile information that will be of aid to students of Dallas Technical High School in developing the needed personal qualities and skills.

The concept of "visual fatigue" has been studied for 70 years or more. In that time, no single metric of measuring visual fatigue nor one agreed-upon set of tasks to induce visual fatigue has been settled upon. Not even a robust definition of visual fatigue has been established. This research worked to solve some of those problems. This research first set out to develop an index of visual fatigue that could be used effectively in quantifying the subjective experience of visual fatigue. Then it sought to create a set of measurable tasks, representative of office work, that would induce visual fatigue. Taking these two developments, an experiment using human participants was conducted to validate these developments and work toward solving two issues in the visual fatigue field: how visual display technology and ambient illumination affect the onset of visual fatigue. A 4x4 within-subjects design was developed and executed to study how these two independent variables affected ratings of visual fatigue, performance on the task battery, subjective image quality judgments, and contrast sensitivity shifts. Two cathode ray tube (CRT) and two active-matrix LCD (AMLCD) monitors were used in this study. While many instances of the monitors as a whole caused significant differences in reports of visual fatigue, performance, subjective image quality, and contrast sensitivity loss, only a slight effect of display technology was found. Four of eleven visual fatigue and two of eight subjective image quality dimensions showed that the LCD monitors induced more visual fatigue and were rated poorer than the CRT monitors. Ambient illumination levels of 0, 300, 600, and 1200 lux affected all four groups of dependent variables. On the whole, lighting caused visual fatigue, with "watery eyes" and "glare from lights" being adversely affected by brighter lighting. The 0 and 1200 lux were associated with the worst performance, while 300 lux was associated with the best performance. Subjective image quality was affected by lighting, with increasing lighting causing bothersome screen reflections and more temporal (e.g., flicker and jitter) distortions; 600 lux induced more reports of image sizing anomalies. Finally, it caused significantly worse shifts at the 6.0 c/deg spatial frequency on the contrast sensitivity test. The data show that lighting of 300 lux is the best of these four illumination levels. The results of this study not only contribute to the body of research in the areas of display technology and ambient illumination, but several developments of this research are offered to the research community: a complete survey metric of visual fatigue, a standardized battery of tasks for studying visual fatigue and image quality, and a comprehensive subjective image quality survey. / Ph. D.

La thèse donne à voir et à comprendre en quoi consistent les organisations et l’expérience du travail dans les organisations à partir de l’analyse d’interactions verbales, corporelles et matérielles filmées dans des bureaux. Développant une approche praxéologique originale du côté de la recherche sur les organisations, nous contribuons en outre aux travaux sur les interactions en interrogeant la présence de l’institution dans des formats interactionnels, dans une démarche comparative que permet le corpus. L’exposition de notre ancrage théorique au croisement de ces courants nous conduit à une question épistémologique : est-il possible d’extraire des interactions en coprésence le Quoi du travail d’organisation, tel que l’ethnométhodologie a pu le formuler pour le travail professionnel ? Les résultats empiriques de l’enquête sont ensuite présentés dans cinq chapitres, chacun consacré à un phénomène ou moment de la vie dans les bureaux : les ouvertures des visites, les clôtures des visites, les appels téléphoniques pendant une interaction en coprésence, la mobilisation dans l’interaction du dispositif vidéo, et enfin les réajustements du cadre de participation. La comparaison des différents environnements de travail, des régularités au sein de chacun et entre eux, permet certaines découvertes. / The thesis endeavours to show and understand the very stuff of organisations and the experience of work in organisations, starting from the analysis of verbal, embodied and material interactions filmed in offices. Developing a praxeological, original approach within theories of organisation, we also aim to contribute to research on interactions by putting to question the relevance of institution within interactional patterns, through the comparative approach enabled by our corpus. A theoretical anchorage at the crossroads of these currents being set, we are lead to an epistemological question: is it possible to extract out of copresent interactions the What of organizing work, the way ethnomethodology did with studies of work? We present in the next five chapters our empirical results, each concerning one phenomenon or sequence of work in offices: opening a visit, closing a visit, answering an incoming phonecall during a copresent interaction, formulating the video cameras in interaction, and finally reajusting participation frame. Comparison of various work settings, of regularities between and within them, leads to some discoveries.