Fu­ture-Ready Man­age­ment and Work: Work-life bal­ance, AI and Di­versity

Course content

This exciting interdisciplinary course introduces you to various aspects of the future work contextualized with societal developments, from a management and worker perspective, with gender as a cross-cutting theme. Transformative changes of work include the evolution of the workplace, with less centrality of the specific physical place, and a shift towards tele-work and the hybrid workplace, entailing a more fluid approach to work and working time. This has advantages, as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also challenges, especially when men and women also engage in care tasks while working from home. Parallel to these developments, workers increasingly demand limits on their working time, wishing to make space and time for care and leisure activities. This, in turn, leads to demands for and experiments with the 4-day working week. Other aspects of relevance include how AI affects the workplace, from both the management and the worker perspective. AI on the modern work-place can be seen as a double-edged sword, which on the one hand could increase productivity and provide tools for monitoring effectiveness, but on the other hand, it could put constraint on workers, possible entailing negative repercussions for their well-being at work, and undermine their basic labour rights.

 There are several sub-themes in this course, including:  

(1) Trends and policies pertaining to the labour market, in particular the prevalence of the service economy and a highly educated work-force – with women having qualifications equivalent to men; the role of AI and automation for jobs displacements; societal structures to accommodate working parents (especially early childhood education and care and parental leave); ethical considerations of firms in a globalized context.

(2) Managing the changing workplace, including remote work, 4-day working week; diversity and inclusion, including women on boards and in management positions; accommodation of work-life balance policy for men and women, use of AI at the workplace.

Course overview: 

1. Introduction to course and European labour markets: institutional features and main longitudinal trends
2. Work-life balance policy: cross-national policy,practice and outcomes
3. Work-life balance policy and work engagement
4. The role of the firm in gender equality and diversity: tackling unconscious bias through specific policies and leading by example
5. Evolving Workplace Dynamics: Women in Leadership, Board Representation, and the Role of Quotas
6. Gender diversity at the workplace: the case of duolingo
7. AI and the workplace
8. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Diversity and Inclusion: Opportunities and Ethical Considerations (Natalie)
9. Executive Personality and Gender Dynamics: Shaping Leadership Diversity
10. Diversity and Inclusion Benefits and Considerations –  Simulation
11. Course Overview and studying for the exam