Knowledge work productivity framework – new ways of working context

Knowledge work productivity has been a popular topic in many research areas for decades. Current interest towards it has arisen due to organizations’ needs to make major changes for improving the productivity and lowering the costs. In the New Ways of Working concept, organizations change their work environment to support flexibility and employees’ opportunities to find the best ways to do their work. These changes impact the workplace, technology and management of the organization. Productivity is a typical dependent variable in many research areas, but fewer studies have been made that combine productivity drivers with the same model or study it from the knowledge worker perspective. The purpose of this paper is to identify key factors of knowledge work and what their impacts are on knowledge work productivity. The paper creates a knowledge work productivity framework. The framework consists of two major elements, the knowledge worker itself and the work environment. The value of the framework for researchers is that it increases the understanding of the phenomenon of knowledge work productivity and offers future research opportunities. For managers looking for competitive advantage or planning work environment changes, it gives a good grasp of what to focus on.