Workplace health promotion and labour market performance of employees

Managing employees’ health, safety and anxiety in a pandemic

Purpose

This paper identifies and discusses the strategies adopted by a manufacturing company to manage its national and international employees' anxiety, health and safety with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, to fill a current research gap.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses the qualitative method to identify the strategies employed by a manufacturing company to manage its employees' anxiety, health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thematic analysis of data from fourteen semi-structured interviews is presented.

Findings

Results from the data analysed show that five strategies that help manage employees' health, safety and anxiety are - enhanced communication, formulation and enforcement of policies, rules and regulation, education and training, and management commitment. The findings indicate that the implementation of these strategies does not lead to a negative effect and therefore can conclude that there was no cobra effect.

Research limitations/implications

Although exploratory and based on one organisation; the findings lay the foundation for future theoretically grounded research on management of employees' health, safety and anxiety.

Practical implications

Findings could be the basis for training for managers and also be used to modify the strategies applied in managing employees' anxiety, health and safety.

Originality/value

This paper investigates and offers insight into the best strategies to adopt to manage employees' anxiety, safety and health during the COVID-19 pandemic in the manufacturing sector.

Innovation in Company Labor Productivity Management: Data Science Methods Application

The article considers the challenge of labor productivity growth in a company using objective data about economic, demographic and social factors and subjective information about an employees’ health quality. We propose the technology for labor productivity management based on the phased data processing and modeling of quantitative and qualitative data relations, which intended to provide decision making when planning trajectories for labor productivity growth. The technology is supposed to use statistical analysis and machine learning, to support management decision on planning health-saving strategies directed to increase labor productivity. It is proved that to solve the problem of employees’ clustering and design their homogeneous groups, it is properly to use the k-means method, which is more relevant and reliable compared to the clustering method based on Kohonen neural networks. We also test different methods for employees’ classification and predicting of a new employee labor productivity profile and demonstrate that over problem with a lot of qualitative variables, such as gender, education, health self-estimation the support vector machines method has higher accuracy.

The impact of intergenerational financial transfers on health and wellbeing outcomes: A longitudinal study

This paper estimates the impacts of intergenerational financial transfers on the physical health, mental health and perceived financial security of Australian males and females. We distinguish between two key sources of intergenerational financial transfers - inheritances and inter vivos parental cash transfers. Taking nationally representative data from the 2001-2015 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, we develop a two-stage modelling strategy that controls for potential bias in reported health and wellbeing responses that arise due to unobserved heterogeneity. In the first stage, propensity score matching is applied to achieve matched treatment and control groups, where the former is comprised of intergenerational financial transfer beneficiaries while the latter is made up of non-beneficiaries with a matched set of characteristics to the beneficiaries. This is followed by the application of regression models that further control for unobservable heterogeneity, so that the coefficients on the intergenerational financial transfer predictors can be attributed to the effect of the transfers on health and wellbeing. We do not find systematic evidence of a causal link between receipt of intergenerational financial transfers and health and wellbeing outcomes. This applies to both inheritances and inter vivos parental cash transfers, and for both males and females.