Focus Programme: Occupational Safety & Health in the Digital World of Work

Artificial intelligence, big data, mobile working, industry 4.0 - digital technology is transforming the world of work. With this interdisciplinary focus programme, BAuA is helping to ensure these changes are managed humanely.

Female employee in a server room is reflected in a plexiglass pane
© iStock/mediaphotos

Digitalisation has been shaping our ever more closely interconnected world for several decades. In recent years, however, technological change has disrupted the world of work so profoundly that a dramatic transformation in the nature of work itself has tangibly been taking place. On the one hand, this has been driven by specific technologies such as robots that collaborate with humans, artificial intelligence (AI), and the processing of massive volumes of complex data (big data). On the other hand, new technologies have encouraged developments such as flexibilisation, mobility, and permanent availability - with consequences for employees’ physical and mental health.

Under its cross-disciplinary research programme Occupational Safety & Health in the Digital World of Work, the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin, BAuA) is contributing actively to the debate on key questions about what our worlds of work should look like in future. Human-centred approaches to work design are systematically integrated into the focus programme’s conceptual framework, with consideration being given to the risks posed to employees just as much as the new opportunities that are opening up. The pressures digitalisation has placed on occupational safety and health (OSH) provision, both within organisations and across the economy as a whole, are also being analysed.

In this context, the assessment of human-centred work design during this period of digital transformation is founded on criteria that have been well-established for many years in ergonomics. Some of these criteria have remained consistently relevant as digitalisation has spread: the diversity of requirements workers have to satisfy and time elasticity, for example. Some are becoming more important as a result of digitalisation and will therefore have to be adjusted or expanded, including the extent to which tasks promote interaction and whether they facilitate learning. In addition, digitalisation has made a number of new criteria relevant for the first time. These include technological reliability and new forms of flexibility. What is more, an important role is played by multidimensional, values-based criteria like the amount of attention paid to individuality and diversity, the human-centred deployment of technological innovations, and the demand for clear lines of responsibility in the OSH field.

The focus programme consists of three components:

  1. Systematic monitoring of technological change and its impacts on working conditions (Monitoring the digital world of work): All sorts of wishful ideas and anxieties tend to be expressed in public discussions of digitalisation’s consequences for safety and health at work. Our research supplies facts that make it possible to conduct such discussions more objectively.
  2. Task-specific analysis of the effects of digital change and the development of human-centred guiding principles for working in a digitalised world (Tasks in times of digital change): We seek to analyse how workers’ tasks are evolving in the era of digitalisation. To do this, we apply a methodology that distinguishes between object-related, information-related, person-related, and leadership and management tasks.
  3. Systematisation of (new) requirements for technical and organisational occupational safety and health (OSH systems in the digital world of work): Work processes are increasingly being dominated by digital technologies, thus making the OSH situation more dynamic and complex. Our research is focussed on understanding the kinds of effective OSH structures currently in place and the ways they could ideally be improved in a digital world.

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Monitoring the digital world of work

Topic

The public debate on the consequences of digitalisation for safety and health at work reveals various aspirations and fears. Our research has the objective of providing facts to make the discourse on the topic more objective.

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Tasks in times of digital change

Topic

Is digitalisation rendering human beings dispensable at work? This seems unlikely; but the tasks performed by people will change.

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OSH systems in the digital world of work

Topic

Digitalisation poses a challenge for occupational safety and health (OSH): location- and time-flexible working is making working processes more opaque. Work processes are increasingly determined by digital technologies, making occupational safety and health more dynamic and complex.

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Publications

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Stress from Digital Work: Toward a Unified View of Digital Hindrance Stressors

Article 2024

The complete article "Stress from Digital Work: Toward a Unified View of Digital Hindrance Stressors" can be downloaded at the …

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Comparing weighting agorithms for anthropometric datasets to enable the generation of representative digital human models

Article 2023

The article "Comparing weighting agorithms for anthropometric datasets to enable the generation of representative digital human …

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Potential influences of AI-assisted decision-making on the actualization of ethical principles in care: results of a qualitative study

Article 2023

The complete article "Potential influences of AI-assisted decision-making on the actualization of ethical principles in care: …

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Small Enterprises and Microenterprises - Supported, Trained, Digitalised?

baua: Report brief 2023

Analyses of the German sample for the 2019 ESENER-3 survey reveal that trained company managers make more frequent use of …

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Supporting work place risk assessments by means of natural language processing

Article 2023

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BAuA-Working Time Survey 2019: Digital information and communication technologies and their association with work intensity, temporal boundary­lessness and working time flexibility

baua: Report 2022

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, work with digital information and communication technologies (ICT) was widespread in Germany. …

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Chances or risks? - Impacts of new technologies and digitalisation on OSH

Article 2022

The complete article "Chances or risks? - Impacts of new technologies and digitalisation on OSH" is a chapter of the "Book of …

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Comparing univariate and multivariate analysis of anthropometric measurements from 3D body scans for ergonomic work system designs

Article 2022

The complete article "Comparing univariate and multivariate analysis of anthropometric measurements from 3D body scans for …

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Criteria and Guidelines for Human-Centered Work Design in a Digitally Transformed World of Work: Findings from a Formal Consensus Process

Article 2022

With the increasing digital transformation, work tasks are changing - in some cases, significantly. Our study addresses the …

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Digital transformation: The role of computer use in employee health

Article 2022

The complete article "Digital transformation: The role of computer use in employee health" can be downloaded at the website of …

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