New sfs research project examines prerequisites and opportunities for promoting social connectedness in flexible working environments as a resource for resilience
In relation to the phenomenon of increasing flexibility and hybridization in working environments and the erosion of the workplace as a social space, social relationships between employees are increasingly becoming apparent as a critical factor in good work and a key starting point for ensuring and promoting resilience. Interpersonal processes of exchange between different perspectives in a suitable organizational climate form the basis for functional perception, communication, and action. These, in turn, are necessary prerequisites for resilience understood as the ability of companies, teams, and individuals to adapt to the dynamic challenges they face, which need to be recognized in good time, successfully overcome, processed with rapid recovery, and used for further development.
Work design and team-building measures aimed at promoting social connectedness among employees therefore play an important role, but this is disproportionate to their often low popularity among the workforce, which means that social connectedness as a key factor in building, securing, and promoting resilience has not yet been made productive in line with its actual potential.
In a collaboration of interdisciplinary scientific partners from the fields of occupational science and sociology, media studies, occupational psychology, and game studies, as well as practical partners from the IT sector, the necessary conditions for the systematic development of social connectedness as a resource for resilience at the individual, team, and organizational levels are being researched, and the findings are being used to develop a tool for companies that can be used to analyze the respective operational situation and identify appropriate measures. In addition to the Social Research Center Dortmund, the partners involved are the University Medical Center Rostock, Institute for Medical Psychology and Medical Sociology, the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences, Serious Games & Digital Knowledge department, the Perspektive Arbeit & Gesundheit association, and the two software companies rku.it GmbH and Clausohm-Software GmbH.
The project responds to observations made by the practice partners, according to which existing recommendations for increasing social cohesion among the workforce have so far posed problems in implementation and have had insufficient effect. For example, team-building events and (cooperative) team games have the potential to promote solidarity, cooperation, and creativity, but often meet with resistance from employees. Work design measures such as smart working and team presence days, on the other hand, tend to promote the expansion of existing relationships, but not its development between groups that are still distant from each other. With regard to counteracting differences and distances in increasingly diverse and distributed workforces, improving social relationships, and thus increasing the resilience of employees, teams, and organizations, there is a lack of tools for differentiated and tailored recommendations of existing measures that contribute not only to the development and maintenance of work-related connectedness, but also to its creation.
According to the project's initial thesis, in order to achieve the desired effects and be accepted by the workforce, both cooperative games and work design measures must be selected or designed more specifically according to the already existing degree of connectedness between employees and the forms in which they work together. However, both the consulting landscape and research in the fields of occupational science and media education lack approaches that address the challenges of flexible and diverse workforces and differentiate between existing levels of connectedness. The partners involved in the KoSpiRIT project want to close this gap by pooling their expertise, field access, networks, and different disciplinary and workplace perspectives.
The central planned results are: Firstly, the scientific foundation of a) connectedness-promoting work design as a building block of resilience, and b) the potential of cooperative games as measures that strengthen social connectedness and thereby foster resilience.
On the practical level, secondly, a toolset will be developed that supports companies and inter-company actors in conducting a differentiated analysis of social relationships in various work constellations, identifies suitable development perspectives with regard to resilience-promoting elements, and enables the selection and implementation of the most suitable work design measures and cooperative games to strengthen solidarity in order to make resilience-related measures more tailored, more acceptable, more efficient, and more sustainable. The toolset incorporates the results of scientific research, project surveys, practical testing, validation by accompanying experts, and evaluation, which are carried out in a participatory manner in the science-practice network over the course of the project. The toolset will be implemented as a web application and made available to operational and inter-company actors.