Ergonomic Workplace: An analysis based on Gender and Employee Wellbeing

Abstract

Garment production industry is often characterized by long working hours and overtime, putting an extra burden on women who serve as main caregivers in their families and societies. Thepurpose of this research paper is to investigate the organisational ergonomics involved in designing physical workplace Environment, Task, Machines and Psychosocial factors at the industry .The employee resilience and wellbeing of employees are to be probed based on gender. The methodology is by administering  questionnaire with seven variables  to various garment industry employees at Tirupur (India’s Knitwear Capital)  a place in Tamilnadu .The sample size is 453 in which , 268 (59.2%) are Men and 185(40.8) are Women .The reliability test , test of significance using analysis of variance and a Path model  is done by SPSS 21.0 and AMOS software .The findings narrates there is  significant difference in their perception based on gender on the variables   Physical workplace environment, Machines, Task, Psychosocial factors ,  Organisational ergonomics, Resilience, and Well-being. Though the education level and employee retention is the same across gender there is still discrimination as per their view regarding workplace ergonomics. As the expectation of Women at the garment industry is different, it is high time to reframe the Human resource policies at Workplace.

Keywords: Workplace gender based Discrimination, Ergonomics, Physical workplace Environment, Task, Well-being, organisational ergonomics.