SLIDE 1 “ ‘Productive Subjects:
Workplace wellness programmes, big data and affective control’
Chris Till Exploring Big Data to Examine Employee Health and Wellbeing ESRC Seminar Series – 21st June 2016, SUMS
c.till@leedsbeckett.ac.uk @chrishtill
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Self-tracking and Corporate Wellness
SLIDE 4
Step Jockey
SLIDE 5 Corporate wellness – why are employers interested in health?
“…a healthy workplace environment can potentially induce many positive changes, such as a healthier workforce, increased job satisfaction and reduced absenteeism, which in turn improve productivity and the quality
- f working life” (Chu et al, 1997: 378).
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Internalizing Controls
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Making productive bodies
SLIDE 8 The New Spirit of Capitalism
New corporate ethos emerged 1990s
job security + status autonomy + self-development
Companies need “self-organized, creative beings”
Employees encouraged to seek “liberation” through “projects”
Control exercised by “transferring constraints from external organizational mechanisms to people’s internal dispositions” (Boltanski and Chiapello).
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Controlling liberated workers
Control exercised by “transferring constraints from external organizational mechanisms to people’s internal dispositions” (Boltanski and Chiapello).
Tests Quantification of Performance
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Nudging and gamifying
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Controlling liberated workers
“Life is conceived as a succession of projects […] What matters is to develop activity […] never to be short of a project […] The prospect of an inevitable, desirable endpoint thus accompanies engagement without affecting enthusiasm. This is why engagement is conceived as voluntary” (Boltanski and Chiappelo).
Projects Enabling self-development
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Engaging workers
SLIDE 13 Engaging who?
“I’d like to think we target events and activities to different [ groups but] the participation from ancillary roles was very poor […] so it would be more your sort of mid to higher grade positions […] [They] probably just want to come into work, do their job, get paid and go home”. “ [M]aybe from a fitness point of view, they’re less important because they’re less sedentary, so perhaps we don’t need to worry so much that we don’t engage them […] I’m not sure there’s much of an appetite but I don’t want them to think this doesn’t include them, whether they come or not. [This] isn’t [about] people taking part in stuff, it’s people knowing that it’s going on and feeling good about an employer that does these things”
“emotional engagement” – “a desire to do more for the
“transactional engagement” – “driven to meet expectations in
- rder to earn a living and progress”
“ [M]aybe from a fitness point of view, they’re less important because they’re less sedentary, so perhaps we don’t need to worry so much that we don’t engage them […] I’m not sure there’s much of an appetite but I don’t want them to think this doesn’t include them, whether they come or not. [This] isn’t [about] people taking part in stuff, it’s people knowing that it’s going on and feeling good about an employer that does these things”
SLIDE 14 Engagement
“being positively present during the performance of work by willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions and meaningful connections to others” (CIPD). “an employee’s positive emotional attachment to their job and/or colleagues and/or
- rganization which profoundly
influences their willingness to learn and perform at work” (Horsman).
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“…we call it ‘employer brand’. So in terms of return on investment, for us, it’s about improving our employer brand so that we attract people who want to work for the [the company]. So there is a hard- nosed element to this, it’s not entirely altruistic”
Managing affective relationships
People are seeking something more meaningful and sustainable than engaging with a corporate strategy(Sparrow). “there was a huge potential reserve of energy and commitment in organisations which could be released by making ‘meaning for people’ and highlighted the fact that people desperately need meaning in their lives and will sacrifice a great deal to institutions that will provide this meaning for them” (Horsman).
“Employees will also need to be persuaded that engagement has something in it for them – so we need to show more clearly that engagement also improves individual health, stress and well-being (Sparrow).
SLIDE 16 Engaging each other
“being positively present during the performance of work by willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions and meaningful connections to others” (CIPD). “an employee’s positive emotional attachment to their job and/or colleagues and/or
- rganization which profoundly
influences their willingness to learn and perform at work” (Horsman).
“Ideal-typical” figure of new spirit “connexionist” (Boltanksi and Chiapello) “network extender” […] the nodal point of various networks” (Du Gay and Morgan). “It’s the camaraderie, because actually most of the teams are in the same departments and they see them every day. They start bouncing off each other”. “It was a healthy workforce but it was engagement, the whole staff engagement thing as well. The feedback we got from the people who did was, aside from some of the competitiveness, it was more of a real team spirit and there was a buzz in the air around departments with people doing things as a team that you would talk to people a little bit more that maybe you wouldn’t normally talk to”.
SLIDE 17 Measuring wellbeing
Trying to quantify the benefits of wellness programs is a big
- challenge. […] how you quantify it really is on feedback. There’s
a couple of feedback systems for our own service (occupational health) and one is automated […] and we do another one…But the feedback for that was overwhelmingly positive for the GCC’s program so you know we would be looking to replicate that.
- ne really good indicator at the moment is, if you look at our staff survey
results from last year, the question that says “The [organisation] is interested in my wellbeing”. We are 72% on that. So 72% of our staff say that they think we’re interested in their wellbeing. Now the [national sector] workplace survey that came out a couple of weeks ago asks almost word-for-word the same question and across the institutions that replied to that it was 52.6
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Thanks for Listening!
