Business Value and Worker Wellbeing? Foregrounding Workers in Process Management

Digital technologies play an important role in arranging and managing work and workers in organizational settings. Particularly, the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) has developed techniques, artefacts, and methods for analysing and improving processes in organizations. However, the role and involvement of workers themselves has mainly been considered in technical terms. This is related to greater issues societies face because of digital technologies: By reducing workers and work to technical and economic aspects, workers’ participation in, and thereby the wellbeing of, societies is threatened. Therefore, in this problem statement we propose a novel direction—Worker Process Management— for foregrounding workers in a departure from traditional BPM into the direction of Responsible BPM. We motivate and sketch this novel direction, and discuss challenges and opportunities resulting thereof.