My research usually revolves around two areas: work and non-work life. The first includes areas such as HR management, job crafting and strength use – the idea that as employees we should be focusing on our own strongest elements.

The second focuses on how we as potential employees can seize the opportunity and maximise the benefits that we obtain from our non-work life in relation to work.

How can we integrate fun and competition in our work? How can we integrate an element of playfulness in to our family life so that our work lives become more productive and more motivating? How do things like self-care, sleep quality and exercise affect us in the workplace?

My involvement dates back to 2017, when I became the Centre’s Deputy Director. After a year, I became Co-Director alongside Professor Nancy Harding for two years.

From 2020 onwards, I remained an active part of the Future of Work, and as of September 2023 I am its Director. I’m looking forward to taking its successes forward for future years.

The main attraction point of the Centre for me, initially, was the chance to develop its outreach externally and support a research culture internally within the School of Management.

I think the research centre that I’m crafting and developing sits at the intersection of research and practice in the future. It’s got a very strong, hands-on approach in terms of supporting, facilitating and running sessions, workshops and events that are research-oriented, but on topics around new and hybrid ways of working.

So there’s a research element, but there’s a practitioner side to it as well now. I’m trying to establish and strengthen our relationships, and so far we’ve held events about AI’s impact on HR management practices, and practitioner oriented talks and seminars, as well.

I think because of the nature of the Centre and the topics that it touches upon, it’s research driven, but we can then also use that evidence to impact on practice.

We’ve published a really interesting paper called 'The More You Connect, The Less You Connect', which examines the impact of ‘phubbing’ (when you ignore someone in favour of your phone or other devices) at home and the effect it has on your dynamics with your significant other. We then carry this with us from the home to the work domain.

Our study showed that over time when people distract their attention from the other party to their phones, this impacts negatively on their exchanges with their partner. That negative impact is taken with you to work, where you’re less able to craft your job: your distraction and depleted energy at home are reflected in your work domain as reduced cognitive job crafting and creativity.

It will manifest in different ways. You can talk about the emergence of, for instance, big data and analytical tools, but there are different windows through which we can understand the impact of AI or other technologies. I think the more monotonous and repetitive tasks of every job will be facilitated.

But for the more creative and innovative side of work, I think the trick will be in how you use the right prompts as triggers for AI tools to accelerate your output – and I think everybody has started to learn those skills. It will be the form and the nature of questions that you’ll be inputting that will create the impact.

I’ve experienced that positive impact when developing the presentation slides for some of my classes, for example. If I’ve come up with the basic content, I can then use trigger questions to generate the case studies. This then gives me more time to read and reflect on the discussion points.

I think with AI, we’re already test crafting our jobs, but in the future we’ll have more time to redefine the boundaries of what we are doing cognitively – so more cognitive job crafting.