All Change and Programme Management Office courses

The ways in which we work have changed considerably during the past 18 months, both in terms of our minds and our bodies. In this seminar, Dr. Michelle Robertson (Director for the Office Ergonomics Research Committee, Research Scientist at Harvard School of Public Health) will discuss some of the ways that we work and live with our everyday technology, and share thoughts and best practices on how to think about our health and wellbeing.

About the Trainer

Dr. Michelle Robertson is the Executive Director of the Office Ergonomics Research Committee, a lecturer at Northeastern University and the University of California, Berkeley Center of Occupational and Environmental Health, and a research faculty at the University of Connecticut, Psychological Sciences. She has dedicated more than 20 years of her career in systematically designing and evaluating organizational and training interventions that include participatory and macroergonomics approaches, work organisation factors, training system design, computer work environments, office ergonomics, and designing integrated wellness and ergonomics programs. She is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the International and Ergonomics Association.

These events are sponsored by HR, ourcambridge and UIS as part of the Digital Workplace and Cambridge Works Programmes.

Learn about how the Environmental Sustainability Team is working towards the University’s climate targets, and how sustainability can play a part in your professional life.

The proliferation of communication technologies, such as email and other online messaging tools, has enabled easier and faster information sharing. Coupled with the difficulty of measuring actual performance in today’s knowledge economy, this increased connectivity has caused workplaces to use response speed as a proxy for hard work, signaling to employees that the only way to succeed is to be “always on”. Although prior work has examined the negative well-being and productivity implications of this constant connection to work, relatively little research has investigated the drivers of work connectivity or tested solutions to address it.

In this talk, Laura M. Giurge - assistant professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, will introduce a novel driver of work connectivity – the email urgency bias – and present a solution to mitigate it. On a broader level this research can help mitigate the spread of unhealthy work cultures that make employees feel pressured to stay connected to their work even when they are not expected to do so.

About the Trainer

Laura M. Giurge is an assistant professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics. She is also a research associate of organizational behaviour at London Business School, the Barnes Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, at the University of Oxford, and a DSI Fellow at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on the intersection of management and behavioural science and includes topics such as time, well-being, gender inequality, leadership, and the future of work.