European Journal of Workplace Innovation

Editorial

2026-06-29T15:48:28+00:00

Two Ways to Rome

2026-06-29T15:47:46+00:00

This paper examines the implementation of workplace innovation (WPI) in a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in the textile sector by comparing a participatory approach conducted in analogue and digital formats. It addresses the question of whether, in SMEs with limited innovation resources, digital par-ticipation can enable outcomes comparable to those of analogue formats. The textile industry provides a relevant empirical context, as it faces both innova-tion- and sustainability-related challenges, such as the need to reduce waste and improve production efficiency while adopting new technologies.

In the study, employees participated in digital or analogue focus groups and contributed their perspectives to the design of paper-based dashboard proto-types for the cutting machines they operated. The evaluation focused on the acceptance of the focus groups, perceived WPI, and the usability ratings of the resulting paper-based dashboard prototypes. The descriptive findings did not indicate substantial differences between digital and analogue focus groups with regard to acceptance and perceived WPI. Likewise, the usability ratings of the paper-based dashboard prototypes showed only limited descriptive differences.

Overall, the study suggests that, under certain organisational conditions, digital participatory formats may represent a viable option for implementing WPI in SMEs. The findings indicate that the key issue lies less in the format itself than in how participation is designed and enabled within the organisational setting.

Given the single-case design and descriptive analysis, the generalisability of the results remains limited. Further research is needed to compare digital and ana-logue WPI processes systematically under standardised conditions.

Reframing Success in Embodied Work

2026-06-29T15:48:11+00:00

Technology adoption is often framed in binary terms of acceptance or resistance, oversimplifying the complex dynamics of workplace integration. This study introduces the Normalisation-Situated Practice Matrix (NSPM), an analytical heuristic that maps the degree of organisational embedding (normalisation) against the degree of experiential user engagement (situated practice), providing a new way to understand how different stakeholders negotiate the deployment of new technologies. Focusing on occupational exoskeletons in a warehouse setting and drawing on observational fieldwork and 34 semi-structured interviews with frontline employees, managers, and technical and academic experts, this study explores the competing goals, approaches, and lived experiences of these diverse groups.

Our thematic analysis identifies three key dynamics: (1) a disconnect between managerial decisions and employee work realities, pointing to the challenges of top-down implementation; (2) the active role of employees in adapting technology through informal, practice-based strategies that operate alongside official guidelines; and (3) the existence of competing narratives around exoskeleton use that reflect broader organisational tensions, where decision-making authority is concentrated at the executive level while frontline workers bear the embodied consequences. Rather than defining success solely through implementation efficiency or binary adoption metrics, our study demonstrates that technology adoption is a dynamic and contested process shaped by power relations, situated practices, and multiple stakeholder perspectives. The NSPM structures examination of these complexities and reframes success in human-centric terms, offering a diagnostic tool applicable across diverse technology integration contexts.

Leader Change Engagement as a Boost for Workplace Development

2026-06-29T15:48:02+00:00

In 2023, Finland implemented a major structural reform that created Wellbeing Services Counties (WSCs), which became responsible for organising public healthcare, social welfare, and rescue services. This reform transferred these responsibilities from individual municipalities to newly established regional authorities, with the aim of improving service coordination, accessibility, and equality across the country. This research focused on one mid-sized WSC. The research examined how change engagement and its dimensions were reflected in WSC leaders’ and supervisors’ descriptions of their leadership work. The data for this study comprised leaders’ and supervisors’ (N=92) answers to open-ended questions in an online survey. The data were analysed with a theory-driven qualitative content analysis. The research contributes new insights into leaders’ change engagement and conceptualises it as a means of supporting both leadership engagement and well-being at work. In times when leaders report decreasing motivation and intentions of resignation it is more important than ever to find new ways of supporting enthusiasm and ensuring that public leadership work remains attractive. Job demands and resources theory (JD-R) provided us with a basis for analysing the leaders’ work from the perspective of change engagement. The research showed that leader change engagement could be an important concept for understanding change as a resource in the leaders’ work and well-being. Furthermore, it provides a new way of perceiving the connection between leaders’ work and their well-being.

Conditions for Workplace Innovation in a Public Organisation

2026-06-29T15:48:20+00:00

Previous studies have shown that innovation processes in public sector organisations are difficult due to various innovation barriers inherent to the public sector, but few studies have empirically explored the barriers in a way that is close to organisational practices and conditions for successful innovation remain unclear. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to explore and discuss conditions for workplace innovation in public sector organisations, with particular focus on the conditions that enable and constrain an innovation process in such organisations. The paper builds on a qualitative case study of an innovation process in a Swedish municipality. The process was studied from development and testing of a new approach to the provision of health and care (H&C) until the early stages of adoption of the new approach throughout municipal H&C operations. The findings show that the conditions that enabled the innovation process primarily related to the initial stages of the process, when developing and testing the new approach to H&C, while barriers that emerged as particularly strong in the implementation phase slowed down and hampered the innovation process. There were two types of barriers that constrained learning, those stable over time and those that emerged during the innovation process, and the barriers were formed in a complex pattern of domino-effects raising through overhead municipal departments and administration systems.

The Challenge of Socio-Technical Work Design

2026-06-29T15:47:54+00:00

This essay examines the challenges of socio-technical work design in the current phase of economic and industrial transformation. It demonstrates how these challenges are approached differently within the Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 concepts. Despite these divergences, it is argued that both visions draw on the socio-technical systems approach to designing human-centred work. The start-ing point is the principle of joint optimisation of the socio-technical approach, whereby the interfaces between the technology, human and organisational sub-systems can be considered the central design options. However, from a socio-logical point of view, the socio-technical systems approach is criticised for being overly voluntaristic. This is because it focuses solely on the micro-level of work process. It overlooks structural conditions of work that extend beyond this and have a lasting influence on the socio-technical design of work. It is particularly evident in the context of the current phase of crisis and industrial transfor-mation.

Finally, prospects for the debate on socio-technical work design and human-centred work, as well as the broader concepts of Industry 4.0 and 5.0, are con-sidered in the context of industrial transformation. It is presumed that the fu-ture of this discussion, particularly regarding human-centred work design, as well as the concepts of Industry 4.0 and 5.0 in general, is characterised by signif-icant uncertainty. Given the crisis-level challenges of the industrial transfor-mation, it is assumed that the debate on human-centred work and the concepts of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 will lose their current political relevance.