Aumentando a produtividade e o bem-estar do trabalhador do conhecimento: mudanças no processo de trabalho e a utilização de um protótipo de sistema de informação

Abstract

People are the most valuable asset of a company is perhaps the oldest cliche in the business world. Peter Drucker, in one of his most famous books, reinforces that idea by stating that the most important resource of a 20-century company was its production equipment, and the most valuable asset of a 21-century institution (whether business or not) will be its knowledge workers and their productivity. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that organizations worldwide are scrambling to meet growing demands of production and services with a predominantly dissatisfied, unmotivated and unengaged workforce. In that context, this work is aimed to propose interventions that, incorporated in a workflow and a prototype of an information system, can increase productivity and well-being on a knowledge workers team. The prototype and the accompanying process was operationalized following the research design methodology. At the end, have been proposed and analyzed four suggestions: (1) Periodic work-rest schedule; (2) Policy of clear separation between work and rest periods; (3) Reduction of unnecessary interruptions through staff awareness and (4) Prototype as an interruptions mediator. Literature grounds concentration level of an individual as an indicator of his productivity and well-being. Based on that assumption, and for the purpose of an evaluation, we conducted a case study which measured in real time the level of concentration reported by a team of knowledge workers before and after the introduction of the interventions proposed by the study. In the first scenario - control, the team had an average of 6.16 ± 0.26 for subjective concentration in a scale of 1 to 10. In the second scenario, inserting the interventions proposed by the study, an increase of 21,27% on reported concentration average was observed, reaching 7.47 ± 0.24. The results have significance at a 99% confidence level, and thus provide evidence that the adoption of the prototype and the proposed strategies significantly increased the concentration level reported by study participants.