How Danish Work Design Creates Productivity and Life Quality

Copenhagen Balance
By Camilla Kring, Vivi Bach Pedersen, and Andres Raastrup Kristensen

The future can be found in Denmark. In this report we show how some of the most successful companies in Denmark developed their business through an innovative, results-oriented focus on balancing employees’ work and private lives.

Denmark has a unique position in the world when it comes to balancing work and private life.

• Denmark has one of the highest participation rates for women in the workforce. (75% of women are in the workforce).

• Among all EU countries, Danish employees have the highest degree of influence over their work. (85% of employees indicate that they have an influence on their work situation).

• Danish employees have some of the world’s most flexible work conditions. (43% of employees can regulate their work hours to meet their private needs).

• Danish employees have some of the best maternity/paternity leaves in the world (combined one year leave per child).

The Danish model is known as ‘flexicurity’. In this model, it is easy for organizations to hire and lay off employees, while government subsidies assure a safety net if people cannot find jobs. Denmark is also known for a variety of public initiatives that make it easier to have children. For example, the state subsidizes parental leave for a year after childbirth. After the leave, parents can go back to work, while the children are cared for in subsidized nurseries and preschools. 92% of Danish children in the age group 3-5 years are in preschool. Thus, having a family can be combined with holding down a job.

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Introduction

In this report we discuss how six leading Danish companies innovate with work-life balance as an integrated part of their strategy. We provide you with a variety of concrete ideas and inspiration that work with Balance. These case examples demonstrate unique versions of the concept, and show how to implement such initiatives in order to simultaneously improve employee well-being and productivity. The report describes not only the current and new innovative best practices in the field, but also points to the new directions in which work-life balance is most likely to progress.

Balance is about Business

All the companies described in this report have worked with balance between work and private life for many years. In this process they have left the traditional understanding of Balance behind. This was an understanding built on the sharp dichotomy of the industrial era, during which work and private life were seen as conflicting entities in two distinct spheres that were to be balanced as if on a scale.

The entire work-life balance report is here.

Morality and ethics - the 'next big thing' for IT suppliers

By Brian Glick
Computer Weekly Editor's Blog
Originally published on June 10, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

But with that greater influence, comes greater responsibility. It is inevitable there would be a backlash, and that backlash is well and truly underway.

IT was at the heart of the global boom in financial services. Today it stands accused of enabling the behaviours of bankers that crippled Western economies.

Facebook and social media have transformed personal communications, enabled new communities and improved information sharing for all. But at what cost for privacy of our personal information.

Google and Amazon have made it easy to find information, to buy quickly and cheaply, opening up new knowledge and commercial opportunities. And they are pilloried as arrogant tax avoiders.

But the biggest example of the dark side of technology so far is dominating front pages and web pages alike around the world - the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring of electronic communications, and the allegations of complicity on the part of the global internet giants that provide that data.

Look at all the great things the web allows us to do - and look at how easy that makes it to create a surveillance society. As someone said recently, if you could give George Orwell one Tweet from beyond the grave, he would write: "I told you so #Prism".

This backlash is an inevitable stage in the progress of technology and the digital revolution, but of course it presents challenges on a scale that the world has never before had to comprehend.

The entire blog post is here.

How Not to Be Alone

By Jonathan Safran Foer
The New York Times - Opinion
Originally published June 8, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up.

The entire story is here.

Suspect in Colorado Killings Enters Insanity Plea

By Jack Healy
The New York Times
Originally posted on June 4, 2013

James E. Holmes, the former neuroscience student charged with killing 12 people inside a Colorado movie theater last July, changed his plea on Tuesday to not guilty by reason of insanity.

It was an expected shift in Mr. Holmes’s defense, formalized during a court hearing in this Denver suburb. As the judge read a lengthy document describing the legal consequences and psychiatric examinations that would follow the plea, Mr. Holmes, shackled and dressed in a red jail uniform, appeared to follow along on a copy, gazing down as one of his lawyers flipped the pages.

The entire story is here.

An Ethical Prohibition that Isn’t — And Never Really Was

By Robert E. Erard, Ph.D.
The National Psychologist
March 11, 2013

A decade after the 2002 APA Ethics Code and the HIPAA Privacy Rule should have settled the matter many psychologists continue to believe fervently that they have some special ethical duty to resist all formal requests for their raw test data, even when these requests are accompanied by releases from the test taker and even by subpoenas or court orders.

When asked for their test data, some psychologists claim paternalistically that nobody could ever understand what these mysterious numbers mean without being a licensed psychologist. They seem to ignore the fact that we ourselves have an ethical duty (Ethical Standard 9.10; APA, 2002) to provide test feedback (i.e., explaining those numbers), not to mention that most test publishers routinely sell test forms and computerized test interpretations to psychiatrists, social workers, counselors and others.

Other psychologists contend that either test copyrights or licensing agreements with test publishers prevent them from complying with these requests. They overlook the fact that the Fair Use Doctrine under the Copyright Act of 1976 (2011), the legal rights of test takers to their health care information and discovery rules governing the bases for experts’ opinions in forensic matters have consistently trumped these arguments when they have been put to the test (e.g., see Carpenter v. Yamaha, 2006).

The entire story is here.

A Simple Way to Reduce Suicides

By Ezekiel J. Emanuel
The New York Times - Opinionator
Originally published June 2, 2013

EVERY year about a million Americans attempt suicide. More than 38,000 succeed. In addition, each year there are around 33,000 unintentional deaths by poisonings. Taken together, that’s more than twice the number of people who die annually in car accidents.

The tragedy is that while motor vehicle deaths have been dropping, suicides and poisonings from medications have been steadily rising since 1999. About half of suicides are committed with firearms, and nearly 20 percent by poisoning. A good way to kill yourself is by overdosing on Tylenol or other pills. About 90 percent of the deaths from unintentional poisonings occur because of drugs, and not because of things like household cleaners or bleach.

There is a simple way to make medication less accessible for those who would deliberately or accidentally overdose — and that is packaging.

We need to make it harder to buy pills in bottles of 50 or 100 that can be easily dumped out and swallowed. We should not be selling big bottles of Tylenol and other drugs that are typically implicated in overdoses, like prescription painkillers and Valium-type drugs, called benzodiazepines. Pills should be packaged in blister packs of 16 or 25.

The entire opinion piece is here.

Pediatricians warned children of military personnel face mental health risks

By Ryan Jaslow
CBS News
Originally posted May 27, 2012

Children of military personnel may be at an increased risk for social, emotional and behavioral problems, according to a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Published May 27, Memorial Day, in the academy's journal Pediatrics, the new clinical report aims to raise awareness among pediatricians for the mental health needs for military children.

Authored by Dr. Ben S. Siegel and Dr. Beth Ellen Davis, who serve as members on the Committee On Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health and Section on Uniformed Services, the report points out about 60 percent of U.S. service members have families while about 2.3 million military members have been deployed since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq about a decade ago.

The entire article is here.

Prominent Hilton Head psychologist’s license revoked; Sex with patient alleged

By Alice Stice
The State (South Carolina News Site)
Originally published May 31, 2013

A prominent Hilton Head Island psychologist has had his license permanently revoked for having a sexual relationship with a patient that included intimate encounters in his office, according to an order from the S.C. Board of Examiners in Psychology.

Dr. Howard Rankin, a psychologist, neuropsychologist and author who has been featured in the national media, admitted the relationship to an investigator from the S.C. Department of Labor, Licensing & Regulation and is barred from practice after an April disciplinary hearing before the board, records show.

Rankin has been featured as an expert on addiction, weight loss and other fields in The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, and has appeared as a guest on CNN and ABC’s “The View” and “20/20.”

He declined to comment for this article.

According to the board’s order, a female patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder began seeing Rankin for therapy in 2005. The patient, referred to only by her initials in the order, had attempted suicide on several occasions and had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment more than once, the order says.

The entire story is here.

Human Subjects Research Landscape Project – Analysis Dataset

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethics

In order to respond to President Obama’s November 24, 2010 charge “to determine if Federal regulations and international standards adequately guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies supported by the Federal Government,” the Commission recognized that a critical first step would be to define and understand the landscape of “scientific studies supported by the Federal Government.” Finding no comprehensive publicly available source for this information, the Commission asked the 18 federal departments and agencies that have adopted the Common Rule—and therefore were likely to support scientific studies with human subjects—to provide basic project-level data for department/agency-supported human subjects research in Fiscal Year 2006 to Fiscal Year 2010.

These data, which include study title, number and location of sites, number of subjects, and funding information, were compiled into the Commission’s Research Project Database, and analyzed as part of its Human Subjects Research Landscape Project.

Posted here is the Commission’s analysis dataset, which incorporates minimal data cleaning as detailed in “Appendix II: Human Subjects Research Landscape Project Methods.”  Also posted is a data dictionary that defines the dataset’s fields. The data are available in two formats: Microsoft Access and .CSV.  The Access file contains the same information as the three .CSV files.

As detailed in the Methods, department/agency-reported information in the dataset was not independently audited or verified.  Moreover, the dataset is static; no additional data will be added to it.

For further information, and to read the Human Subjects Research Landscape Project Methods, please see “Appendix I: Human Subjects Research Landscape Project: Scope and Volume of Federally Supported Human Subjects Research” and “Appendix II: Human Subjects Research Landscape Project Methods.”

The entire study is here.