Ensuring productive, healthy & resilient work environments

The world has changed significantly and rapidly, altering how, when and where we work and learn.

This presents new challenges for employers, employees, educators, students, service providers and other stakeholders such as workplace regulators.

As a result, there is increasing demand for new approaches to how we design, build, use and manage physical and virtual work and learning environments.

We also need the people who work in these environments to acquire new skills.

Delivering effective solutions that address these complex needs requires collaboration by different stakeholders and experts from many disciplines.

The Next Generation Workspaces Initiative enables industry, government and research partners to collectively identify critical workforce needs and collaborate on new solutions and capabilities that will support well-being, engagement, productivity and resilience.

Coordinated by UQ, the initiative assembles and coordinates the required stakeholders and disciplines to:

1. Understand the impacts of workplace changes
2. Develop, test and apply new evidence-based solutions to the complex and evolving challenges arising.

The Next Generation Workspaces Initiative is currently focused on developing solutions to the challenges outlined below.

Dedicated Solution Work Groups (consisting of businesses, government bodies and UQ researchers) are currently being formed.

Organisations can express interest to participate in any of these work groups by contacting Alex Blauensteiner at UQ’s Global Change Institute or Associate Professor Remi Ayoko in the Faculty of Business Economics & Law (BEL).

1. Enabling collaboration, knowledge transfer and innovation in changing physical and virtual work environments.

2. Enabling learning and mentoring in changing physical and virtual work environments.

3. Enabling social, emotional, and phyisical  well being and safety in changing physical and virtual work environments.

4. Adapting leadership and managment skills to suit changing physical and virtual work environments.

5. Delivering workspace experiences that attract and enable workers.