Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to understand the employees lived experiences of workspace. Employees experiences refer to any perception, sense, understanding and interpreting of the workspace (physical, cultural and technological). Understanding the employees lived experiences plays a main role in aligning organizational efforts with employees values. We took up this study in order to expose the importance of employees experiences at workspace and shed light on previous studies that have been done on understanding humane lived experiences as well. The research focuses on two questions: what are the employees’ lived experiences? and how they interpret those experiences? We used the Dickelman’s phenomenological approach in this study. We interviewed 16 employees and middle managers who hold BA and BS degrees and worked at a telecom organization. Findings show that: employees experiences and interpretation at their workspace can be expressed in 6 main themes: “precaution”, “strait”, “inefficiency”, “belonging”, “discouragement” and “lagging behind of personal life”. These main themes included 22 subthemes which clarify and interpret the employees experiences in details.
Machine summary:
The problem of this research is the lack of attention by human resource managers to the lived experience of employees regarding the work environment (physical, cultural, and technological) in the planning and implementation of organizational actions.
Achieving this goal requires answering the question: "What are the lived experiences of employees regarding the organizational work environment, and how are they made meaningful?" To achieve the research goal, the phenomenological method has been used due to the authenticity it attributes to humans and human cognition.
Venugopal, Roberts, Cook, Christopoulos and Sah 29 (2020), in a study titled "Employee Experience of Underground Work Environments: A Qualitative Study"; investigated the concerns expressed by employees working in underground facilities in North America using the thematic analysis method, and three main themes were identified: "environmental effects," "design factors," and "organizational and social dynamics.
In the continuation of the work, first 23 sub-themes were induced, then with a back-and-forth process involving the codes, interview texts, and contact with the interviewees in the next stage, 14 themes and finally 6 main themes and 22 sub-themes were extracted as follows: Table 1- Extracted main and sub-themes Main Theme Sub-theme Caution Ambiguity, challenge with manager, conflict of interest, fear, unpredictability Constraint Physical space limitation, mandatory limitation, interactive limitation, gender limitation Inefficiency Slowness, aimlessness, complexity, confusion Belonging Financial support, brand popularity, loyalty, importance of job, peace of mind Disillusionment Despair regarding promotion, being seen by chance Left behind from life Work pressure, work-life conflict A stability criterion between two transition codes was calculated with an agreement value of more than 76 percent between coders; to ensure the validity of the results, a questionnaire with 11 questions was designed and provided to the interview participants along with a table including open codes and the sub-themes and main themes induced from them.
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