Publications

The UK’s new government has promised to take action to “promote a positive work-life balance for all workers”, and to prevent homes “turning into 24/7 offices”. The risk of “always on” working has grown since the pandemic, with technology meaning that work is often within easy reach. Legislation allowing workers to disconnect from work has been increasingly adopted around Europe, in…

This study investigates the evolving demand for graduate skills in the British workforce, leveraging a task-based approach with data from the Skills and Employment Survey Series. Focused on the changing importance of job tasks related to graduate skills, the research explores the mapping of these tasks to educational attainment, discerns the price employers pay for…

A forthcoming volume in the Civil Society Book Series with Policy Press.

This evidence paper focuses on working time and places of work as key aspects of the future of flexible working. It addresses how work organisation, including the time structure, intensity, and location of work, can be managed and developed in the post pandemic period in ways that meet the needs of both employers and employees…

This policy brief focuses on working time and places of work as key aspects of the future of flexible working. It considers how work organisation, including the time structure, intensity, and location of work, can be managed and developed in the post-pandemic period in ways that meet the needs of both employers and employees across…

Using data from two national surveys, the Quarterly Labour Force Survey and the Workplace Employment Relations Survey, we establish evidence of a robust disability-related trade union membership differential in the UK. After controlling for differences in other personal and work-related characteristics, disabled employees are found to be 3.6 percentage points (12–14 per cent) more likely…

Purpose This paper has three aims: Firstly, it puts the pandemic-induced surge in homeworking into context by charting trends in homeworking in the UK since the early 1980s. Secondly, it examines what effect the growth in homeworking during the pandemic has had on employees’ self-reported levels of productivity. Thirdly, it assesses whether the spike in…

Welcome from the WISERD director Featuring a variety of news from across the WISERD partner institutions and some of the latest additions to the WISERD blog, I hope this edition of WISERD News demonstrates our ongoing contribution to social science research and the ways in which we are influencing policy in Wales. Against a background…

Read our annual report, WISERD Insight, featuring our key areas of activity, income profile, funding and engagement activities in 2022.

This article is based on data collected from almost 100,000 individuals who completed the www.howgoodismyjob.com quiz either side of the pandemic. The results show that overall non-pecuniary job quality has improved, differences between occupations have shrunk and the growth of remote working is a factor behind these trends.