Digital coping: How frontline workers cope with digital service encounters

Abstract

This article addresses how frontline workers cope when dealing with digitally mediated service encounters. It draws on a qualitative study of frontline workers' experiences in an increasingly digitalised work environment in the context of employment assistance services. The material shows that digitalising service encounters leads to two overall types of change for frontline employees, and the article explores related coping responses. First, the technology leads to an increased availability of the frontline workers to the clients. This is coped with by handing over, or ‘outsourcing’, responsibilities to clients through digital platforms, and by reducing what is experienced as ‘noise’ related to incoming enquiries. Second, the technology leads to increased transparency of the service interactions, which is coped with by being careful about the content of client communications. The analysis of these changes and their related coping responses contributes to the research on digital public service encounters and highlights avenues for empirical studies and theoretical development within a topical, yet little studied, field.

‘Damned if you do and damned if you don’t’: a framework for examining double binds in public service organizations

“…This system supports the visions of user-centric services by providing clients with information about their case online and enabling digital interactions between clients and frontline workers (e.g. a chat function; Breit et al 2020;Breit, Egeland, and Løberg 2019). The new system is also designed to allow for more flexibility in the frontline work compared to the 'workflow' design of Arena, which largely contributed to the double binds identified in our analysis.…”

“…This includes extensive ethnographic field research involving participant observation and the 'shadowing' of work practices in a NAV office carried out over a period of six months (Røhnebaek 2012(Røhnebaek , 2014. This study focused particularly on digitalization and standardization of internal work practices in NAV, which was later followed up by studies examining experiences with new digital solutions, organizational visions and new strategies for managing frontline work (Breit et al 2020;Breit, Egeland, and Løberg 2019). Our case example draws together findings from these studies on digitalization, standardization and local autonomy in a synthesizing analysis of double binds in the context of NAV.…”

“…The new system is also designed to allow for more flexibility in the frontline work compared to the 'workflow' design of Arena, which largely contributed to the double binds identified in our analysis. A recent study indicates that the new system better supports frontline employees' efforts to provide usercentred services (Breit et al 2020).…”

Can Robots Understand Welfare? Exploring Machine Bureaucracies in Welfare-to-Work

“…However, even before the pandemic, several countries such as Norway provided the option for jobseekers to meet with advisors remotely via phone or Skype (Breit et al, 2019). While ‘digitally mediated’ (Breit et al, 2020: 3), these virtual encounters remain human-to-human if not-face-to-face.…”

The changing roles of frontline bureaucrats in the digital welfare state: The case of a data dashboard in Rotterdam’s Work and Income department

“…Their daily behavior, as portrayed in work practices, moreover, gives an indication of their attitude toward data-driven tools. Studies that focus on daily work practices that frontline bureaucrats develop when confronted with new data tools have indicated that they develop buffering strategies to minimize the impact of data-driven tools on their daily work, for example, foot-dragging, gaming, open critique, resistance, not adjusting working methods, noise reduction, and client upbringing (Tummers and Rocco, 2015;De Witte et al, 2016;Christin, 2017;Doove and Otten, 2018;Veale et al, 2018;Breit et al, 2019Breit et al, , 2021Flügge et al, 2021). Especially buffering strategies can indicate that frontline bureaucrats experience role conflicts because of the implementation of a data-driven tool.…”