At present, COVID-19 has caused a possible paradigm shift in education, especially in education delivery for higher educational and learning institutions. To align with the national government and relevant national/international authorities’ policies and to avoid the spread of the virus, educational institutions in many nations have decided to temporarily suspend the traditional classroom-based education and replace it with online-based education. This studyaims at exploring the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and obligatory remote working on work-life balance, mental health and productivity of faculty members working in higher education institutions (HEI). The study is exploratory and uses a qualitative approach using an online survey strategy to include voices of faculty members from different countries. While the results of this study indicate both positive and negative effects of obligatory remote working on faculty members’ work-life balance, well-being and productivity at the same time our findings indicate that university administration must pay heed to address concerns presented in the results.
MULTIFILE
In tourism management, traditional input-output models are often applied to calculate economic impacts, including employment impacts. These models imply that increases in output are translated into proportional increases in labour, indicating constant labour productivity. In non-linear input- output (NLIO) models, final demand changes lead to substitution. This causes changes in labour productivity, even though one unit of labour ceteris paribus still produces the same output. Final demand changes can, however, also lead to employees working longer, harder and/or more efficiently. The goal of this article is to include this type of 'real' labour productivity change into an NLIO model. To do this, the authors introduce factor augmenting technical change (FATC) and a differentiation between core and peripheral labour. An NLIO model with and without FATC is used to calculate the regional economic impacts of a 10% final demand increase in tourism in the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. Accounting for real productivity changes leads to smaller increase in the use of labour, as productivity increases allow output to be produced using fewer inputs.
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From the conference paper : "The authors examined how to improve the total (onsite and offsite) labour productivity of production and assembling of fast retrofitting concepts in the Netherlands. The authors analysed the collected data of two NetZero energy renovations in which the initial process were quite traditional. In the first case the labour productivity can increase spectacularly by prefabricating the roof. In the second case the providers modernized the process by working in multi-disciplinary teams. No evidence have been found that working in a multi-disciplinary team can increase the labour productivity but the time for realization did decrease."
Designing cities that are socially sustainable has been a significant challenge until today. Lately, European Commission’s research agenda of Industy 5.0 has prioritised a sustainable, human-centric and resilient development over merely pursuing efficiency and productivity in societal transitions. The focus has been on searching for sustainable solutions to societal challenges, engaging part of the design industry. In architecture and urban design, whose common goal is to create a condition for human life, much effort was put into elevating the engineering process of physical space, making it more efficient. However, the natural process of social evolution has not been given priority in urban and architectural research on sustainable design. STEPS stems from the common interest of the project partners in accessible, diverse, and progressive public spaces, which is vital to socially sustainable urban development. The primary challenge lies in how to synthesise the standardised sustainable design techniques with unique social values of public space, propelling a transition from technical sustainability to social sustainability. Although a large number of social-oriented studies in urban design have been published in the academic domain, principles and guidelines that can be applied to practice are large missing. How can we generate operative principles guiding public space analysis and design to explore and achieve the social condition of sustainability, developing transferable ways of utilising research knowledge in design? STEPS will develop a design catalogue with operative principles guiding public space analysis and design. This will help designers apply cross-domain knowledge of social sustainability in practice.
Flying insects like dragonflies, flies, bumblebees are able to couple hovering ability with the ability for a quick transition to forward flight. Therefore, they inspire us to investigate the application of swarms of flapping-wing mini-drones in horticulture. The production and trading of agricultural/horticultural goods account for the 9% of the Dutch gross domestic product. A significant part of the horticultural products are grown in greenhouses whose extension is becoming larger year by year. Swarms of bio-inspired mini-drones can be used in applications such as monitoring and control: the analysis of the data collected enables the greenhouse growers to achieve the optimal conditions for the plants health and thus a high productivity. Moreover, the bio-inspired mini-drones can detect eventual pest onset at plant level that leads to a strong reduction of chemicals utilization and an improvement of the food quality. The realization of these mini-drones is a multidisciplinary challenge as it requires a cross-domain collaboration between biologists, entomologists and engineers with expertise in robotics, mechanics, aerodynamics, electronics, etc. Moreover a co-creation based collaboration will be established with all the stakeholders involved. With this approach we can integrate technical and social-economic aspects and facilitate the adoption of this new technology that will make the Dutch horticulture industry more resilient and sustainable.
Many companies struggle with their workplace strategy and corporate real-estate strategy, especially when they have a high percentage of knowledge workers. How to balance employee satisfaction and productivity with the cost of offices.This project focused on developing methods and tools to design customer journeys and predict the impact of investments and changes on user satisfaction with the work environment. The tools, including a game and simulation tool, allowed to focus on the needs of particular subgroups of employees while at the same time keeping an overview on the satisfaction and perceived productivity of all employees and guests. We applied Quality Function Deployment techniques to understand how needs of different types of users of (activity-based) office environments can catered for in smart customer-centric office design.
