FOREWORD
Digital world is constantly changing
and it seems to affect our lives and work in a dramatic and somehow
unpredictable way. New skills and competencies are required and more than ever
our learning efforts must be equally distributed between old, traditional and new
knowledge, more abundant and diverse, far from what we’ve learned before and
beyond any imagination a decade ago.
Performance at work is redefined in such a way that
has no connection at all with what was expected from us at the beginning of our
working life. We have been trained to use our knowledge to solve problems, now
we need to be trained to use machine learning systems to deal with complex
problems and to rely on artificial intelligence when it comes to understanding
our digital world and its diverse connection with our real life.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about how digital
technologies have changed our lives, our society and of course our experiences
at work. These changes are visible in many countries and impact every company
and are linked with a new workforce who is culturally diverse, narrow specialized
in new IT technologies and more demanding in terms of mobility. Companies
should have something really interesting to offer in
the long term to retain this workforce enough to benefit from their outstanding
productivity. For example, in Predictions
for 2017: Everything is Becoming Digital, Bersin
by Deloitte observes that the need to “be digital” is forcing organizations to
completely rethink ways to manage, engage, lead and develop people.
The new digital world of work is transforming people,
companies and the society through new tools that make us more efficient,
constantly connected to others and strongly focused on results and deeply
immersed into the virtual reality. The profile of the digital worker is
constantly changing, for most of them learning is taking place in virtual
spaces, mediated by computers, in parallel with solving current tasks;
specialization becomes narrow and oriented to the future rather than to solving
current tasks. In this work environment, performance is as important as
“happiness at work”. Working life is understood differently, money is not
enough motivator and people are responsive to a lot of other motivational
drivers: prestige, recognition, self-esteem, work status. Sometimes good
communication is vital, team cohesion and performance depend on the ability of
workers to think, work and perform as a complex and efficient body.
Happiness at work becomes an increasingly appealing research
topic among human resources specialists, firm managers or academics looking for
new methods to support and foster performance at work. Over the years, scholars
and executives alike have been obsessed with increasing their employees’
productivity. In particular, happiness as a way to boost productivity seems to have gained increased
attraction lately.
Recent studies reveal that in order
to be happy at work, we need three things: (1) to feel that we are
making a difference; (2) to see the link between our work and our vision for
the future; and (3) great relationships.[1]
Closing in a positive manner, we believe that JEDEP
authors make a difference through valuable content and interesting ideas shared
with all our readers, we really think there is a tight link between our work to
promote Open Access to knowledge and our vision about the future of knowledge
sharing, and definitely believe that we are
contributing to establishing great relationships and we are looking for
solutions to create and maintain a JEDEP network of authors and readers.
Enjoy our content and we hope to bring you, dear
reader, inspiration and willingness to contribute to our next issues.
Editor-in-chief,
Prof. Manuela Epure, PhD
[1] Annie McKee – Take this Quiz in order to figure out how to be happier at work, Harvard Business Review, 13 Oct.2017, retrieved at https://hbr.org/2017/10/take-this-quiz-to-figure-out-how-to-be-happier-at-work