The Changing Nature of Work is an established video series that creates a multimedia learning environment to help students understand work and its changing nature. By watching the videos, students will gain valuable insights about work and develop an understanding of how technology, global competition, and new demographic patterns are changing work as we know it today. There are three learning products:
1. Classroom Videos
This series captures workers in their job setting talking about the work that they do. Each video ranges from 10-15 minutes and is designed to supplement the traditional classroom format. The videos provide vivid visual and audio information that enhances the concepts and applications derived from text, lecture, and discussion.
The current series includes videos about job attitudes, work motivation and performance, job design, decision making, and organizational change. Videos about group performance, managing in cross-cultural settings (Mexico and China), continuous quality improvement as a change process, and a plant closing, also are available.
The target audiences are students taking organizational behavior and management courses at the undergraduate or graduate levels. Some of the videos can also be used in executive education.
This video series has been used in a variety of university settings at different levels (e.g., undergraduate, masters, executive programs). The feedback has been very positive students report that the videos truly make learning more exciting. Our experience indicates that the videos can be used in many ways to supplement a lecture, to initiate a group discussion, to simulate a job analysis, and so on. Each video comes with teaching instructions.
2. Management Development Series
Videos by experts on critical management issues. These could be used in a classroom or as a "take away" for an executive program. That is, the videos can be a way to review, outside of the university setting, basic issues critical to managers. The videos in this series are by Professors Denise Rousseau and Paul Goodman on the subject of organizational change.
3. Work Documentaries
This series will feature a full-length documentary (60 minutes) about a unique aspect of work. The first video is about an amazing phenomenon of work in India. Each day, 100,000 lunches are moved from people's homes to their work place by 4,000 workers. This very complicated distribution system exists and operates very reliably without any modern business practices or technology. The video and the subsequent discussion explore why this complicated form of organizing works. Click here to learn more about this antiquated system.