Key trends and drivers of change in information and communication technologies and work location
Foresight on new and emerging risks in OSH : working report
Metadane publikacji
Information and communication technologies (ICT) and work location have been identified during a consultation exercise across Europe as the topics most likely to have the greatest impact on occupational safety and health (OSH) in the future and how it will be governed. ICT encompasses and enables a wide range of technologies with significant overall implications for the workforce and others affected by work activities. It is expected to fundamentally change where we work, how we work, who will work and how people will perceive work. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) has, therefore, commissioned a foresight project on ICT and work location. This foresight project is made up of three work packages. The objective of Work Package 1 is to identify the key trends and drivers of change in ICT and work location. The objective of Work Package 2 is to use the key trends identified during Work Package 1 to develop and test scenarios of the future that will allow policy-makers to consider a range of potential future OSH implications. The objective of Work Package 3 is to disseminate the scenarios developed in Work Package 2 to policy-makers and other interested stakeholders. This report is the final report on Work Package 1. It describes the process by which the key trends and drivers were identified. The process was broken down into three distinct tasks. The objective of Task 1 was to identify a wide range of relevant trends and drivers through horizon scanning. The objective of Task 2 was to consolidate the trends and drivers through consultation with experts via telephone interviews and a two-stage Delphi-like web survey. There was some indication that participants in the various consultations were influenced by current thinking and media reporting of events that were recent at the time. The second web survey was particularly useful in providing data that helped identify weak signals of longer term trends so that they could also be taken into account. The objective of Task 3 was to select those trends and drivers considered to be the key ones via debate at a mini-workshop of the project team and a small number of invited experts. This report (on the completed Work Package 1) is structured so that each task is described in turn, first the method used and then the results obtained. The results from all three tasks are then discussed overall and conclusions drawn with a view to the implications of the results for Work Package 2.