Dataset Information

"Because Work Time Is Life Time" - Employees' Perceptions of Individual Overemployment, Its Causes and Its Consequences.

ABSTRACT: Many employees would prefer to reduce work time and can be defined as overemployed. However, the concept of overemployment is poorly understood. The purpose of this article is to define overemployment from employees' point of view, to explain why people work more than they prefer, and to understand the individual consequences it has. We investigate 26 overemployed employees using a Grounded Theory approach. We find that overemployment is a four-dimensional experience consisting of work time length, work time competition (with time outside work), work time distribution on tasks, and work density. A self-reinforcing circle of personal and situational drivers seems to explain the persistence of overemployment. Regarding the psychosocial consequences of overemployment, our findings show large variations, whereby work time sovereignty seems to play a moderating role. This study provides a multidimensional framework of overemployment that provides a basis for understanding employees' perceptions and behavior regarding overemployment and for deriving appropriate actions to reduce overemployment.

SUBMITTER: Hiemer J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6707378 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

"Because Work Time Is Life Time" - Employees' Perceptions of Individual Overemployment, Its Causes and Its Consequences.

Hiemer Julia J Andresen Maike M

Frontiers in psychology 20190816

Many employees would prefer to reduce work time and can be defined as overemployed. However, the concept of overemployment is poorly understood. The purpose of this article is to define overemployment from employees' point of view, to explain why people work more than they prefer, and to understand the individual consequences it has. We investigate 26 overemployed employees using a Grounded Theory approach. We find that overemployment is a four-dimensional experience consisting of work time leng ...[more]

PMID: 31474921

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Project description:Burnout in healthcare professionals can lead to adverse effects on physical and mental health, lower quality of care, and workforce shortages as employees leave the profession. Hospice professionals are thought to be at particularly high risk for burnout. The purpose of the study was to evaluate workplace perceptions of interdisciplinary hospice care workers who provide care to patients at end of life. Six focus groups and one semi-structured interview were conducted with mixed group of social workers, managers, nurses, hospice aides, chaplains, support staff, and a physician (n = 19). Findings from the groups depicted both rewards and challenges of hospice caregiving. Benefits included intrinsic satisfaction from the work, receiving positive patient and family feedback, and teamwork. Challenges reflected issues with workload, technology issues, administrative demands, travel-related problems, communication and interruptions, difficulties with taking time off from work and maintaining work-life integration, and coping with witnessing grief/loss. Hospice workers glean satisfaction from making meaningful differences in the lives of patients with terminal illness and their family members. It is an expected part of the job that certain patients and situations are particularly distressing; team support and targeted grief support is available for those times. Participants indicated that workload and administrative demands rather than dealing with death and dying were the biggest contributors to burnout. Participants reported episodic symptoms of burnout followed by deliberate steps to alleviate these symptoms. Notably, for all except one of the participants, burnout was cyclical. Symptoms would begin, they would take steps to deal with it (e.g., taking a mental health day), and they recovered. At an organizational level, a multipronged approach that includes both personal and occupational strategies is needed to support professional caregivers and help mitigate the stressors associated with hospice work.

Project description:Animal movement comes in a variety of 'types' including small foraging movements, larger one-way dispersive movements, seasonally-predictable round-trip migratory movements, and erratic nomadic movements. Although most individuals move at some point throughout their lives, movement patterns can vary widely across individuals within the same species: differing within an individual over time (intra-individual), among individuals in the same population (inter-individual), or among populations (inter-population). Yet, studies of movement (theoretical and empirical alike) more often focus on understanding 'typical' movement patterns than understanding variation in movement. Here, I synthesize current knowledge of movement variation (drawing parallels across species and movement types), describing the causes (what factors contribute to individual variation), patterns (what movement variation looks like), consequences (why variation matters), maintenance (why variation persists), implications (for management and conservation), and finally gaps (what pieces we are currently missing). By synthesizing across scales of variation, I span across work on plasticity, personality, and geographic variation. Individual movement can be driven by factors that act at the individual, population, community and ecosystem level and have ramifications at each of these levels. Generally the consequences of movement are less well understood than the causes, in part because the effects of movement variation are often nested, with variation manifesting at the population level, which in turn affects communities and ecosystems. Understanding both cause and consequence is particularly important for predicting when variation begets variation in a positive feedback loop, versus when a negative feedback causes variation to be dampened successively. Finally, maintaining standing variation in movement may be important for facilitating species' ability to respond to future environmental change.

Project description:BackgroundPoor physical and mental health of employees create significant problems in the workplace. Physical activity (PA) has been shown as an effective strategy for preventing and treating numerous physical and mental health issues as well as work performance outcomes. However, there are many barriers to taking part in PA (such as lack of time) with participation rates typically low. Providing PA in paid work time might be a way to overcome these issues, yet employers' and employees' opinions of this concept are unknown. The aim of this study was to explore employee and employer perspectives of PA in paid work time.MethodsWorkplaces were recruited through existing contacts on the research team. Focus groups and interviews were conducted with employees and managers at one University and two executive non-departmental public bodies in central Scotland with mainly desk-based employees. Both managers and employees were involved to gain perspectives throughout the organisational hierarchy and were interviewed separately to reduce social desirability bias. All discussions were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed thematically for both managers and employees but due to significant overlap in themes between the groups, these are reported together in the results.ResultsThree out of five organisations approached took part in this qualitative study. Two individual interviews were held with strategic managers, five focus groups with middle managers (n = 16) and nine with employees (n = 45). Benefits were anticipated by managers and employees for both employees themselves and the organisation and included improved mental health, productivity and more favourable perceptions of the employer. Despite these widely acknowledged benefits, significant barriers were identified and included the structure and nature of the working day (high workload, front line job requirements), workplace culture and norms (resentment from colleagues, no break culture) and organisational concerns (cost of lost time, public perceptions).ConclusionThis study suggests that there are significant barriers to PA in paid work time. Whilst numerous anticipated benefits were conveyed by both employees and managers, PA in paid work time is unlikely to become common place until changes in attitudes and the culture towards movement at work occur.

Dataset Information

"Because Work Time Is Life Time" - Employees' Perceptions of Individual Overemployment, Its Causes and Its Consequences.

Publications

"Because Work Time Is Life Time" - Employees' Perceptions of Individual Overemployment, Its Causes and Its Consequences.

Similar Datasets

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