Monday morning SoSus musing

Rather than go ahead and define Social sustainability (which I like to abbreviate SoSus) head-on, I'm going to spend a portion of most Mondays (does this reek of New Year's resolution? ;) mulling over bits and pieces of what it means. It's a pretty big puzzle.

My body of research so far concerns Human Factors and Ergonomics, but as part of my Assistant Professor position I'm meant to expand the scope of my research to "Social Sustainability" - this makes it ever so much wider, and starts to concern policy, workforce, human resource management and a slew of other things that smack of... well, politics. Although this makes many researcher-type people that I talk to cringe, I personally feel that these are important issues to tackle even in the research community.

When asked what SoSus is, I usually rattle off the triple future challenges that are posed to (European) factories in the immediate and far future regarding staffing. Those challenges mainly regard how those future factories and production lines need to be designed in order to:

• Accommodate what will most likely be an aging population, given our demographic forecasts in Europe - this means challenges regarding technology acceptance, physical and cognitive limitations and general entitlement issues ("I've been here so long that I don't want to change how I've worked for so many years")...
• Entice and retain young people to work in production, in terms of offering viable career development, meaningful and accessible on-site learning, technology adaptation that suits their level of habitude regarding communication and sharing, and offering such a good working environment that some young staff will eventually choose to stay and become senior...
• Address the issue of an increasing population component of non-nationals in the workforce, i.e. people who may have migrated for working purposes and can be expected to have some obstacles with the national language and customs. How does one design the factories of the future so that these people are still enabled to work efficiently and productively?

So I rattled this off during a conversation with E yesterday, and she replied with some interesting observations from her research field (control room design and HF methodologies for nuclear power plants) that set a nice prelude for these questions.

E had done some interviews with some swedish nuclear power plant personnel and asked (as one of many questions) whether they had begun to notice any staffing differences in recent times. Interestingly, the answer was that the company had had to overstaff recently for a number of interesting reasons, which I suppose are at present an indicator of Swedish society, but may be a hint at European societal expectations of the future:

•  An increasing percentage of men in the workforce are taking out equal parental leave
•  There are more women in the workfore than before, and as a populational consequence of the first point, they are also taking out  equal parental leave
•  Current societal trends regarding career development make it very uncertain that staff will choose to stay in the same company (or even industry) for any longer period of time, as it is considered a good career move to diversify one's experiential portfolio by changing jobs ever so often (a rumour has it that in China, two years in a row begins to look suspiciously staid and comfortable...).
•  In total, this means that a greater number of the workforce go missing from work at some point (either by absence or leaving entirely), so the company has to accommodate this by having more people on staff.

 At the same time, long-time experienced staff is a high commodity in the nuclear industry,  because some operations cannot be performed at all without senior staff on-site. So the nuclear compaines are extra loath to dispense with people once they have been hired and trained for some time, as the staff who have several years of experience become a very valuable asset to the company's ability to operate safely (or at all) and according to regulations.

E also offered another angle - at a Human Factors Network course in control room design, she had listened to a lecture including a recount of nuclear power plant work in South Africa, where the nature of staffing problems has had a more sobering limitation. There, the AIDS epidemic has made it likely that many in the population won't survive past a certain adult age, which means that there is a demographic setback to reaching the same levels of "staff seniority" as in western countries. This bleak outlook has a consequence that the demands that can be placed on nuclear staff knowledge and seniority becomes limited, since there is always a risk that older workforce members will per definition be scarce. As a consequence,  the nuclear industry has tried to counteract personnel (= competence) losses by designing as much 'smart' behavior as possible into interfaces and methods. Although this makes any system (i.e. a company) less person-dependent, this also presents plenty of challenges that instead have to do with documentation, slow change processes regarding equipment and technology acceptance, and masses of administrative tasks which in themselves don't contribute to the core production, but are necessary to 'harvest' the know-how of potentially transient human contributors...

For me, this conversation was enlightening and confounding at the same time (as SoSus conversations always are) - how can people be encouraged to stay in one industry to accumulate enough knowledge to reach a level of expertise, craftsmanship and/or authority to retain some form of operational stability and basic level of knowledge transfer between members of the workforce? And what are the advantages and drawbacks of increasingly 'designing' this wisdom, knowledge and system of best practices into user interfaces, methods and procedures? And where does the free will of the individual workforce member come into the picture?

Mmm-mm. So many interesting things to untangle… :)

EDIT Jan 8:  E asked me to correct a couple of points that I didn't get quite right, so some text has been changed.