Jenn Walkers Organizational Behavior Blog

  Stress in the Workplace and the 4 day work week The article titled “A four-day workweek Reduces Stress Without Hurting Productivity” written by Jan Donges and Sophie Bushwick for the publication Scientific American explored a recent study done in the UK regarding shortened workweeks, their impacts on employees’ mental health and on businesses' profitability. According to a study that was conducted by a group of independent researchers in collaboration with the advocacy groups 4 Day Week Global and 4 Day week Campaign, a four day workweek led to significantly improved well-being among employees and the change didn’t affect productivity levels at the businesses. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many workers experienced increased stress and burnout which made it difficult for businesses to meet their goals let alone succeed. The six-month test period ran from June to December 2022 and involved 61 different U.K. companies with approximately 2900 employees. According to the partici...

In the article titled "Almost a Year After Toxic Workplace Allegations, Ubisoft Employees Reportedly Say 'Nothing Has Changed' written by Rebekah Valentine for IGN on May 4th, 2021, she describes how the French publication “Le Télégramme” has reported that Ubisoft has made little progress in addressing the harassment and toxic workplace allegations across its studios and departments, despite public-facing actions taken by the company. The report highlights that many of those accused of harassment and abusive behaviour still held positions at Ubisoft, including Nadeo studio lead Florent Castelnérac and former Singapore studio lead Hugues Ricour. The report also notes that "nothing has changed" in Ubisoft's Canadian studio, despite the appointment of the new studio head Christophe Derennes to replace Yannis Mallat, who left the company following allegations of creating a toxic and abusive workplace. Ubisoft has taken action in an attempt to address the allega...

The article for the Wall Street Journal titled “Rise of AI puts the spotlight on Bias in algorithms” written by Isabelle Bousquette explores the recent hype around generative AI such as chat GPT which has emphasized the ongoing challenges that businesses all around the world are facing in order to keep bias out of the algorithms their AI uses. Bias has been a persistent issue, often in part because the AI has been trained on skewed information by using non-representative data sets since these AI algorithms are built by people who have their own biases that are reflected in their work. While many companies are investing large sums of money to reduce bias in their algorithms, they are often only backing systems, processes and tools that do so proactively. The costs of retroactively limiting bias for established systems are quite high and the situation is less than ideal as it’s significantly more difficult to remove bias later on from an AI algorithm than it is to address the bias fro...

     The article “ The pandemic changed how we work. Now, mothers want it to stay that way” written by Kiernan Green for the CBC describes the challenges families with young children are facing as they try to juggle childcare and working full time. Before the Covid 19 pandemic, Brianna Shereck was struggling with getting ahead at work as a marketing coordinator in Victoria’s tourism industry and being able to care for her two preschool-aged kids so much so that in 2019 she missed 5 weeks of work because they both kept getting sick at daycare, 5 weeks that she could have spent working had her former employer allowed her to work remotely from home. Following the pandemic, she was let go from her former job working in Victoria’s tourism industry and is now working completely remotely for a Saskatoon-based retirement firm, when asked if she would consider going back to a traditional office environment, she replied that neither she nor her husband who also works remotely cou...

  Blog Post #1- The Gig economy The article “Flexibility and earning potential, two lures of the gig economy” written by Nigel Wilson for Forbes describes how the gig economy in the United States had over 70 million gig workers at the end of 2022, noted as the most gig workers in an economy in the world. The author notes that there are both positive and negative aspects of working as a gig employee with the majority of the negatives coming in the form of a lack of financial security and safety nets for those that have chosen to work in the gig economy. (Wilson, 2023) A study referenced by Forbes and conducted by Legal and General found that 82% of gig economy workers chose to work in the gig economy vs. the 13% of gig workers having to work in the gig economy because for whatever reason they cannot find a traditional job. The main reasons why people are choosing to work as a gig worker vs a traditional job include reasons such as not wanting to work in a corporate environment o...