📌 Key facts
💡 Background
After two years of the Covid pandemic, knowledge workers love flexible work. In fact, most knowledge works are more satisifed and more productive when working from home and would rather quit their job than returning to office work. But what about workers like production workers, front-line service personnel who were not able to work from home during the pandemic? What’s their perspectve on working on-site while the other part of the company is working from home?
Besides the changing work environment through the pandemic, how attractive is production work? and how can employers make it more attractive? Your task within your thesis is to find answers to these and the following questions:
- How attractive is production work?
- For whom is production work attractive?
- How can work in production be made more attractive?
- What’s the role of shift work?
- How do you deal with inequalities in the organization when some employees work on-site vs from home?
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership, and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies, and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
- Literature research about employer branding in production
- Define key indicators for the attractivity of work in production
- Develop a framework that includes attraction factors
- Give recommendations for production companies about how to increase production work
🧠 Topics of Interest
- Employer branding
- Production
- Industry
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Enthusiasm for the topic and scientific work
- Ability to do sophisticated internet, desk research, and connect with practitioners
- Passion to learn more about the future and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside the university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to Apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!
👉 welpe@tum.de