This working paper presents the first findings of a survey on the impact of COVID-19 on workplace practices among employers in EU Member States. The survey was developed, organised and fielded at end-2020 by Eurofound and Cedefop. It explores the impact of the health crisis on companies in the...

The main function of hierarchies is to coordinate activities within an organisation, but a hierarchical structure also provides work incentives, by offering the prospect of hierarchical mobility. An alternative way for organisations to motivate workers is through job design. In organisations...

I consider the concept of employment insecurity and provide new evidence for 1997 and 2005 for many countries with widely differing institutional contexts and at varying stages of development. There are no grounds for accepting that workplaces were going through a sea-change in employment...

This paper shows that employability strongly moderates the effects of unemployment and of job insecurity on well-being. I develop a simple framework for employment insecurity and employability with two key features. First, it allows for the risks surrounding unemployment and employment...

Many commentators have argued that "key skills" are becoming more important in modern workplaces. This paper draws on a survey that uses a methodology based on job analysis to measure skills at work, and estimates their implicit prices using a hedonic wage equation. The main new findings are...

I investigate evidence concerning two indicators of the pressure of work, namely work hours and the intensity of effort during work hours ("work effort"). Interest in both is motivated by efficiency and welfare considerations, but analysis is typically attenuated by poor measurement. I first...

I investigate possible explanations for work intensification, using four British data sets. I conjecture that an important source of work intensification is effort-biased technical change (EBTC), which enhances the productivity of high effort workers relative to that of low effort workers. EBTC...