OPINION: Aarhus University should investigate how IndFak, MitHR, RejsUd, and all the other IT systems affect the work environment
IT systems pose a genuine challenge to the work environment. Despite this, they are absent from the workplace assessment (WPA) conducted by the university every three years. AU should investigate how the systems affect staff well-being and the work environment, argues Olav W. Bertelsen, associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and joint union representative for academics at Natural Sciences.
This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed in the article reflect the author's perspective.
We have just completed the form for the workplace assessment (WPA) that Aarhus University conducts every three years. The well-known Rambøll form addresses everything from unwanted sexual attention to desk heights. But oddly enough, one critical part of the work environment is missing from the survey: the countless IT systems that dominate so much of our working time.
Colleagues across AU report that IT systems often create obstacles – or even stressors – in their daily work.
IT systems pose a genuine challenge to the work environment. Unpredictable updates make it hard to plan our work, and many systems are unnecessarily complicated because they weren’t designed with our needs in mind. Colleagues across AU report that IT systems often create obstacles – or even stressors – in their daily work. Regardless of the scale of these challenges, excluding them from the WPA is simply wrong.
Some systems are imposed on us by the state (e.g., the Ministry of Finance’s IndFak), others are massive commercial platforms that AU has no influence over (e.g., Microsoft systems), and then there are systems like MitHR, whose origins are hard to trace. You can easily get the impression that IT decisions are made in a vacuum, which can make it seem pointless to address them in the WPA.
The fact that the Ministry of Finance or a procurement process has determined which IT systems we must use does not justify AU, or other public employers, systematically ignoring the impact these systems have on the work environment.
The link between IT systems and the quality of working life is neither mysterious nor new. In fact, it has been thoroughly researched since the 1970s, including at AU. This is clearly an area that can be addressed systematically as part of the WPA process
If AU starts investigating how IT systems affect well-being and the work environment, we can take action to address the highlighted issues.
If AU starts investigating how IT systems affect well-being and the work environment, we can take action to address the highlighted issues. This would also give us a foundation to set requirements for the systems imposed on us from external sources.
AU cannot continue to ignore that IT is a crucial part of the work environment.
Olav W. Bertelsen is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and joint union representative for academics (VIP and AC-TAP) at the Faculty of Natural Sciences.
This text is machine translated and post-edited by Maria Nielsen Pedersen.