Diversity and inclusion remain issues in the agendas of today’s organizations. Despite significant advances in managing workforce differences, there are still challenges to face in order to truly achieve fully inclusive organizations. Diversity management is set up as the key success factor in recognizing and integrating employee differences, so it is particularly relevant for companies to become aware of the need to improve their management capability in this area. This article provides a literature review of the terms diversity and inclusion, the analysis of the main effects they have and their management and the specific case study of functional diversity. A conclusion section is provided in the last section of the article.
Digitization is currently one of the main priorities for companies and entities in the Spanish market. Understanding digital transformation as the “transformation of the business based on digital technologies”, in this article we developed a key aspect to ensure its success: taking special care of the employee, guiding the evolution of the organization’s cultural change to a digital culture that allows the customer to be placed at the centre. Only through a methodological and planned approach is it possible to accompany employees.
The lack of consensus on the definition of innovation could lead to different interpretations affecting the understanding and relevance of innovation in business. Business strategy needs innovation because innovation is a key element that that clearly improves performance when applied. Up to three-quarters of productivity development in European industry can be attributed to innovation, and companies that apply innovation in their strategies show better performance. Innovation is a fundamental pillar of business strategy; it is not just a technological project, it is a culture, a mindset, a tool that provides competitive value to the company and added value to customers.
Business innovation needs its own strategy in order to be ready for firm sustainability and competitiveness. Innovation strategy is a set of actions that drive all procedures and guidelines in an organization to generate and manage innovations toward achieving the business objectives. It involves planning, prioritizing, and developing the right types of innovation (technological or not) ensuring the appropriate resources, knowledge, capabilities, and organizational structure, among others. It is important not to manage an innovation strategy in isolation or independently of the rest of the company’s functions. Innovation strategy should be based on corporate strategy and understood as an integral component of long-term strategic business management. With innovation strategy, a company can control and manage the generation of innovation, even though few companies have a clear innovation strategy.
It is positive to incorporate innovation strategy into business strategy to be better placed to compete in terms of differentiation, productivity and economic growth, and to achieve better financial results. This Final Work for the Master in Innovation and Digital Transformation, analyses different innovation strategies and their possible influential factors.
This article presents a summary of the results obtained by the research carried out by the author of the article and his colleagues from IDOCAL at the University of Valencia and the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Seville into two interventions designed to improve collaboration in virtual teams. One of these interventions is based on feedback, while the other is based on training team members in emotional management. These interventions have been examined based on experimental studies with a group that received feedback on or training in emotional management and a control group. The results confirmed that virtual teams that received process and outcome feedback experienced an improvement in their perception of group learning and reduced social loafing. The latter also improved virtual teams’ affective outcomes. On the other hand, training in emotional management improved virtual teams’ resilience and reduced relational conflict. There is also an improvement in group engagement in those teams that received training in emotional management. The article concludes with a series of recommendations for improving virtual team collaboration based on the results of this research.
Despite the high number of passengers using metropolitan public transport systems, the limited growth rates of travel demand have not been enough to reduce the use of private vehicles in the main points of access to the city, which continue to show unsustainable patterns with an excessive presence of private vehicles.
With economic activity halfway through, months of the pandemic caused us to forget day-to-day congestion. But with the gradual recovery of metropolitan activity and mobility and the impact of lifting highway tolls and mobility policies that reduced road capacity within the city, road congestion is back, with the consequent aggravation of air pollution levels.
Due to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and its Economic and Business Studies, three professors in the field of Finance from the institute perform an analysis of the evolution of the financial function and a projection of future scenarios in order to identify challenges and opportunities. Joan Llobet introduces the topic based on an academic vision that has adapted to the substantial changes that have occurred and which takes on the challenge of facing the changes still to come. On the other hand is the article by Jorge M. Uribe, a compilation of the most important events of the past 25 years in order to understand how the financial field is currently structured. Through his experience, we will see how concrete aspects evolve (valuation of assets, quantitative risk management, etc.) in order to profile what they are like today. Finally, Àngels Fitó describes the current context of the financial field, establishing its conditioning factors and future direction.
Human resources of a company constitute one of its main competitive advantages. Valuing the importance of this resource and working intensively in order to retain this talent will constitute one of the main challenges of the future for companies. The study of one of the most important sectors in the Spanish economy, the commercial retail sector, allows an analysis of the importance of the management of human capital through motivation. As part of this point, the concept of personal, family and work balance gains importance as a tool for human management and for the retention of talent. In order to facilitate the application of measures for balancing life, the following conditions are required: gender equality, parity and joint responsibility. The benefits for both workers and companies are many. Among them, the minimal or zero cost which the implementation of these kinds of measures involve. New technologies in particular assist a real balance. Providing knowledge about and spreading the concept of personal, family and work balance, by analysing its applicability in one of the most important sectors in the Spanish economy, is the objective of this study.
This article is a summary of the work which obtained the prize for the best Bachelor’s Thesis (TFG) in Economics and Business Studies concerning gender during the 2018/19 course. The complete work is held in the UOC’s institutional repository (O2), the portal which collects, disseminates and preserves the UOC members’ free-access digital publications that were produced in the development of their research, teaching and management activities. You can consult the complete work at: http://hdl.handle.net/10609/110566.
The Mediterranean Corridor is a double high-speed railway that will run from the French border to Algeciras, joining cities as important as Barcelona, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Malaga, and connecting them in turn with the rest of Europe. However, it is necessary to develop gauge change technologies for railway platforms, since, in Europe, there are several track gauges that hinder the transit of goods by rail.
Logistics 4.0 modifies business operations and business processes to incorporate new tools and digital uses. It is a complete and integral transformation process, based on the digitization of information throughout the whole process, from the initial phases right through to the arrival of the end product to the customer, as well as integrating reverse logistics.
The convergence of variable-width axes rail technology for freight transport with Logistics 4.0 in SCM (Supply Chain Management) processes will allow increasing productivity and business competitiveness at an international level.
Human Resources Management (HRM) with a focus on Supply Chain Management (SCM) empowers companies to effectively manage their supply chains. This article justifies the importance of the study of Human Resources in the Supply Chain (HRSC) and provides an in-depth analysis of research in these two fields, which reveals their potentialities and shortcomings. Thus, the thematic areas addressed have been identified, as well as their main contributions and the existence of gaps in the literature. From the analysis, 53 publications have been identified that highlight the potential of HRSC. The results show that, in the last four (4) years between 2012 and 2017, there has been a significant increase of 49% in HRSC research.
Concern for the future of employment is a recurring theme whenever a process of disruptive change in technology takes place. Economic analysis has shown that technology does not destroy work, but it skews skills and abilities, and displaces tasks, jobs, occupations and people. Generally, in the long term, the consequences of these technological waves on work tend to be positive because they are linked to increases in productivity, new economic activity, higher employment and salary improvements for people working in firms or sectors related to technological innovation. In addition, the effects of job substitution can be offset in the long term if firms’ strategies and policies, especially in terms of human resource management, take the form of active employment policies that train and reskill displaced people. This general form of interaction of technology with work has been questioned with the recent digital wave characterized, among other factors, by the explosion of intelligent robotics. According to some authors, the rate of substitution of human labour by robots will be so fast that they can hardly be compensated by the usual route of increases in demand and productivity. Other authors argue just the opposite, and frame the current dynamics within the context of the traditional interactions between technology and work. However, robotics is non-human work, has very particular and dynamic characteristics, offers a wide range of possibilities of use and, at the same time, generates fears too. In this article, we will analyse the employment implications of new robotics, paying special attention to the human resources management.