• Project number: F 2560
• Institution: Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA)
• Status: Ongoing Project
• Planned end: 2026-03-31

Description:

Interactive work has gained in visibility in the context of the growing need for services and the Covid-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, this particular form of employment which involves micro-level exchanges with customers, patients or similar groups, has hardly been explicitly considered in academic and policy debates. In addition, social interactions with a third party in the context of paid employment are rarely perceived as ‘real work’ by organisations.

In order to underline the importance of interactive work, the present project utilises the extensive data collected in the context of the InWiGe project between 2020 and 2022, which was funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). Based on qualitative methods, we investigated the working conditions of interactive workers in six different economic sectors (i.e., retail, hospitality, elderly care, consulting, public employment services, police).

The analyses of the data will allow us to produce several academic publications which will contribute to the further development of the field of study. Furthermore, we will validate an already developed risk assessment instrument specifically pointed towards interactive work and disseminate our findings widely, also addressing the Joint German Occupational Safety and Health Strategy (GDA). To further develop the field of study based on the generated research findings, we also plan to apply for additional third-party funding.

All these activities do not only contribute to increasing the visibility of interactive work in academic and policy debates; they also emphasise that interactive work should be considered as an analytical category in its own right in employment-related research. In addition, the project will provide practical recommendations for organisations on designing interactive work in a humane and health-promoting way.