Employment and Labor
Labor
The workforce of an economy.
The workforce in a digital society overlays traditional employment opportunities with new and evolving opportunities for entrepreneurship and work.
Working practices
Office design
- Office design incorporates all of the functional and decorative components of the working environment.
- Many modern offices include open floor plans, flexible furniture and glass walls that allow employees to transform spaces to meet their needs in any given situation.
Twitter's office in San Francisco includes a rooftop garden, an arcade room and a musical 'jamming' space to give employees a space to unwind in if they need breaks during their work day.
Remote working
- Remote working allows employees to conduct business and complete tasks from anywhere that they are able to connect to the essential networks.
- The advantages of remote working include better work-life balances, employee satisfaction, and digitalization.
- The disadvantages of remote working include less business centralization and potential poor work performance due to a lack of observation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many industries found that employees could work from home effectively using video-conferencing platforms and other digital tools.
Digital nomadism
- Digital nomads work remotely and do not tie themselves down permanently to any particular location.
- However, non-traditional employment opportunities have developed based on digital technologies that bypass some of the rights and progress that has been made.
A website developer could travel the world while logging in daily to complete tasks anywhere that they can get online.
Crowd work, microwork and gig economies
Crowd work
- Crowdsourcing allows companies to save time and money by collecting information, ideas or work from a group of people, usually over the internet.
- Instead of hiring a single person to complete a task, the task may be open to the public or a group.
Artist Aaron Koblin paid 10,000 people \$0.02 to draw sheep. He curated a gallery of sheep where visitors could watch the sheep being drawn, or zoom out to see the entire herd.
Microwork
Short-term projects that can be completed quickly for payment.
- How have digital technologies changed working practices?
- What are the benefits and challenges of remote working and digital nomadism?
- What are the ethical implications of automation in the workplace?
