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Background: Within a few months coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread around the world. Some studies showed a significant reduction in medical consultations. Due to new discussions about restrictions in the case of rising COVID-19 case numbers, this study investigated the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on surgical emergencies at the Rostock University Medical Center and compared the results to the years before. Material and methods: The aim of the study was to compare the case numbers of the surgical emergency department of the Rostock University Medical Center from the period 2020 and 2021 to the years before (2018, 2019). Furthermore, the consequences of COVID-19 case numbers for the case numbers of the surgical emergency department were investigated. Results: A total of 74,936 patient cases could be included in this study. The results showed a significant reduction of surgical emergencies during the COVID-19 pandemic (p < 0.001). There was a significant negative correlation with the COVID-19 case numbers (p < 0.001). The restrictions of the government showed a direct influence on COVID-19 case numbers and emergency visits. Conclusion: The results showed a correlation of COVID-19 case numbers with the case numbers of the surgical emergency department. Due to difficult workforce planning during a pandemic, this can be important information for workforce management in similar future events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Coronavirus pandemic has badly affected everyone on the earth. Apart from losing thousands of lives, businesses and individuals are going to be affected by the long-lasting financial effects due to an expected global recession. The impact of the financial crises can, however, be reduced if proper measured are put in place. This article aims to investigate the impact of Coronavirus on the construction industry in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countries and provide recommendations to help the industry to sustain during this period of crisis. A qualitative research method involving face-to-face online interviews held with the construction industry professionals was adopted to achieve the aims and objectives of the research. Four main aspects of the impact on the construction industry are derived from analysis of interviews: 1) delays, 2) workforce management, 3) health and safety, and 4) legal issues. Recommendations are provided so that construction organizations in the GCC region can reduce the impact of Coronavirus on its businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The increasing nursing shortages worldwide has focused attention on the need to find more effective ways to recruit and retain nurses. The aim of this study was to gain understanding of factors that keep German nurses in nursing and explore their perceptions of factors that contribute to nurses leaving or staying in the profession. Methods: An explorative qualitative study was undertaken at four different hospitals (two university hospitals and two public hospitals) in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a state in South Germany. Semi-structured face-to-face or telephone interviews were conducted with 21 state-qualified nurses who had graduated from a German nursing program. Each interview was pseudonymized and transcribed. Transcripts were coded according to Qualitative Content Analysis with data structured into themes and subthemes. The study was reported according to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Studies (COREQ) checklist for qualitative research. Results: Two themes emerged from the analysis and each theme had several subthemes: a) PUSH FACTORS i.e. factors that may push nurses to consider leaving the profession included limited career prospects, generational barriers, poor public image of nursing, and workplace pressures; b) PULL FACTORS i.e. factors that nurses wished for and could keep them in the profession included professional pride, improved remuneration, recognition of nursing, professionalisation, and improving the image of nursing as a profession. Conclusion: The decision to leave or stay in nursing is influenced by a complex range of dynamic push and pull factors. Nurse Managers responsible for stabilizing the workforce and maintaining their health system will continue to have to navigate challenges until working conditions, appropriate wages and career development opportunities are addressed. A key to tackling nursing shortages may be focusing on pull factors and nurse managers listening in particular to the perspectives of junior nurses directly involved in patient care, as giving them opportunity to further develop professionally, reinforcing a strong and supportive workplace relationships, paying an appropriate salary, and improving the public image of nursing profession. Registration number: The study has been prospectively registered (27 June 2019) at the German Clinical Trial Register (DRKS00017465). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The increasing nursing shortages worldwide has focused attention on the need to find more effective ways to recruit and retain nurses. The aim of this study was to gain understanding of factors that keep German nurses in nursing and explore their perceptions of factors that contribute to nurses leaving or staying in the profession. Methods: An explorative qualitative study was undertaken at four different hospitals (two university hospitals and two public hospitals) in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a state in South Germany. Semi-structured face-to-face or telephone interviews were conducted with 21 state-qualified nurses who had graduated from a German nursing program. Each interview was pseudonymized and transcribed. Transcripts were coded according to Qualitative Content Analysis with data structured into themes and subthemes. The study was reported according to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Studies (COREQ) checklist for qualitative research. Results: Two themes emerged from the analysis and each theme had several subthemes: a) PUSH FACTORS i.e. factors that may push nurses to consider leaving the profession included limited career prospects, generational barriers, poor public image of nursing, and workplace pressures; b) PULL FACTORS i.e. factors that nurses wished for and could keep them in the profession included professional pride, improved remuneration, recognition of nursing, professionalisation, and improving the image of nursing as a profession. Conclusion: The decision to leave or stay in nursing is influenced by a complex range of dynamic push and pull factors. Nurse Managers responsible for stabilizing the workforce and maintaining their health system will continue to have to navigate challenges until working conditions, appropriate wages and career development opportunities are addressed. A key to tackling nursing shortages may be focusing on pull factors and nurse managers listening in particular to the perspectives of junior nurses directly involved in patient care, as giving them opportunity to further develop professionally, reinforcing a strong and supportive workplace relationships, paying an appropriate salary, and improving the public image of nursing profession. Registration number: The study has been prospectively registered (27 June 2019) at the German Clinical Trial Register (DRKS00017465). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhancing workforce performance is the key to success for professional firms. Firms often evaluate workers based on their performance compared with their peers or against an objective standard. Which of these rating systems leads to higher workforce performance? To answer this question, we construct game-theoretic models of two performance rating systems: (i) a Relative rating system where workers compete with each other for a constrained number of high ratings, and (ii) an Absolute rating system where workers are awarded high ratings by performing at or above a standard threshold. We derive the workers' equilibrium performance as a function of their ability and the characteristics of the rating pool. From a firm's perspective, we find that an Absolute rating system can lead to higher performance than a Relative rating system when the rating pool size is small or the workers' cost of effort relative to their efficiency rate is low, and the reverse holds true otherwise. When considering the workers' perspective, we find that higher ability workers prefer an Absolute system due to its predictable nature, while lower ability workers prefer a Relative system as it provides them an opportunity to outperform other workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nurse practitioners (NPs) are valued members of the health care team, and their numbers are growing each year. The volume of literature demonstrating the impact on quality, safety, patient satisfaction, and access measures is substantial and growing. There is a significant lack of measurement methods and outcomes related to NP contributions to organizational productivity. The construction of strategy for measurement of NP productivity is a prerequisite for studies focusing on impact. Models that are being used to measure physician productivity are available to be examined in terms of their applicability to the NP work force. In 2005, the Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Operations and Management directed Veterans Healthcare Administration (VHA) to develop a productivity-based model for physicians using the Medicare Resource-Based Relative Value Scale, which was created in 1992 to provide guidance on determining payment for physician services. In 2015, the VHA set out to set standards for productivity measurements for NPs, physician assistants, and clinical nurse specialists, and in doing so, the physician productivity model was adapted for the NP workforce. The work of adapting the model will be presented in this article. The specific steps in the process of measurement, operational definitions for work activities, and calculations are provided. The article concludes with a discussion of lessons learned and next steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to conduct a systemic analysis relating investment in knowledge for a production line to financial losses and returns. A systemic map was created based on the experience of a multidisciplinary group and a review of the literature about knowledge management, people management, and quality management systems. From estimates and initial data of a food production line, a dynamic model was created to simulate scenarios for five years. Concerning the studied production line, in the best-case scenario, within two years and five months after investing the capital, the investor will recover, due to loss reduction, all the investment in knowledge. In five years, the estimated return on investment was approximately twenty times the amount initially invested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Libraries play a critical role in enhancing the learning landscape of the schools they support. In order for any library to become a powerhouse and a community meeting place, all library team members need to align with the library's vision, own it and begin to add their own strengths and talents purposefully. This article explores practical strategies for developing a visionary team, including supportive leadership, daily stand-up meetings, weekly staff meetings, special-focus teams, rostering and the “five conversations” approach. These effective strategies can be implemented across a broad range of library workforce contexts in order to ensure the most effective workforce teams are built. Guest writer Cathy Oxley is an enthusiastic and supportive change leader who was recently tasked with transforming the library culture within her school, to reflect an evolving school vision. Oxley explores contemporary dilemmas in library service delivery and workforce management, highlighting the drivers for change in her context. She then outlines the strategies that made this transition successful, and it is easy to see how this approach is transferrable beyond the school library context, with broader relevance for library workforce management in general. If you would like to contribute a column to further this area of inquiry, or explore another dynamic area within the library workforce, please send your contributions tom.merga@murdoch.edu.au [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study analyzes work safety perceptions among workers and safety experts in the construction industry. Furthermore, we evaluate whether experiential learning (i.e., labor experience) and knowledge-enhancing practices, that we link to safety training, explain the differences in work safety perceptions of workers and safety experts by triggering different types of overconfidence biases. Design/methodology/approach: The proposed hypothesis are tested by applying ordered probit models on a unique dataset comprising information for 558 employees and 215 safety experts working in the Spanish construction sector. Findings: The results reveal that previous labor market experience has a significantly negative effect on perceived work safety, that is, risk awareness decreases with respect to labor experience. However, the findings indicate that differences in perceived work safety between workers and safety experts are not explained by previous labor experience. Furthermore, the results suggest that higher levels of safety training, which we link to the acquisition of codified knowledge, negatively impacts workers' safety perceptions, while this effect turns positive among safety experts. This result suggests that safety experts' perceived work safety is affected by overconfidence that results from their greater safety-specific training (over-precision bias). Originality/value: Work safety constitutes a relevant key performance indicator. The proposed analysis of the role of labor experience and safety training on perceived work safety in different types of employees contributes to better understand how organizations can improve the management of their workforce by triggering specific actions, such as the design of customized training programs, that may help in reducing the safety disconnect between employees, in terms of perceived work safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The loss of critical human skills that are either nonreplenishable or take very long periods of time to reconstitute impacts the support of legacy systems ranging from infrastructure, military, and aerospace to information technology. Many legacy systems must be supported for long periods of time because they are prohibitively expensive to replace. Loss of critical human skills is a problem for legacy system support organizations as they try to understand and mitigate the effects of an aging workforce with highly specialized low-demand skill sets. Existing literature focuses on workers that have skills that are obsolete and therefore need to be retrained to remain employable; alternatively, this paper addresses the system support impacts due to the lack of workers with the required skill set. This paper develops a model for forecasting the loss of critical human skills and the impact of that loss on the future cost of system support. The model can be used to support business cases for system replacement. A detailed case study of a legacy control system from the chemical manufacturing industry is provided and managerial insights associated with the support of the system drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This systematic review synthesizes findings from 19 empirical studies published between 1970 and 2014 that examine the relationship between job burnout and affective, psychological, physiological, and behavioral well-being among human service workers. Study findings point to the detrimental impact of job burnout on the well-being of workers. Studies in this area of research continue to use the Maslach Burnout Inventory as the primary measure of burnout, are largely cross-sectional in design, and focus mostly on affective well-being as an outcome. A discussion on the impact of study findings for human service workforce management and future research is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Service quality and driver efficiency in the delivery industry may be enhanced by increasing the regularity with which a driver visits the same set of customers. However, effectively managing a workforce of drivers may increase travel distance, a traditional metric of the vehicle routing problem (VRP). This paper evaluates the effect that workforce management has on routing costs, providing insight for managerial decision making. The analysis is presented in the context of the period vehicle routing problem (PVRP), an extension of the VRP with vehicle routes constructed to service customers according to preset visit frequencies over an established period of time. We develop models to apply workforce management principles. Through a computational study with standard PVRP test cases and real-world delivery data, we show that multiobjective PVRP models can achieve a balance between workforce management and travel distance goals. With the proper parameters in place, workforce management principles may be successfully applied without sacrificing other operational objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workforce management is critical in call centers, where thousands of calls are handled by hundreds of agents every day. In a call center, where the call arrival rates tend to fluctuate during the day, the agent allocation plans are required to be planned flexibly and the number of operating call center agents ought to be updated whenever needed, in order to keep the customer satisfaction level over a predefined level. Workforce plans are usually generated by the use of queuing models that are based on Erlang C calculations. However, they have assumptions that oversimplify the real system and jeopardize the validation of the model. At this point, the simulation models, which do not have such restrictive assumptions, are effective in calculating the required number of agents for each time period and measuring the performance of a given shift schedule. In this study, a simulation-based decision support system (DSS) is developed that runs on real-time data for one of the largest call centers in Turkey. The graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are designed in accordance with the man–machine interaction consideration to increase the usability, functionality and effectiveness of the DSS. It is shown that the combination of the advantages of simulation with a flexible and user-friendly DSS environment provides more effective and efficient workforce planning and performance reporting in call centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores whether dynamically reassigning servers to parallel queues in response to queue imbalances can reduce average waiting time in those queues. Approximate dynamic programming methods are used to determine when servers should be switched, and the performance of such dynamic allocations is compared to that of a pre-scheduled deterministic allocation. The proposed method is tested on both synthetic data and data from airport security checkpoints at Boston Logan International Airport. It is found that in situations where the uncertainty in customer arrival rates is significant, dynamically reallocating servers can substantially reduce waiting time. Moreover, it is found that intuitive switching strategies that are optimal for queues with homogeneous entry rates are not optimal in this setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an analytic-based decision analysis tool called Employee-Job Assignment System (EJAS) for solving the employee-job assignment problem (EJAP). The EJAS is intended to determine an employee-job assignment (EJA) solution that optimizes the employees' work efficiency and job satisfaction. Two person-job (P-J) fit criteria are considered: (1) competency-based P-J fit, and (2) preference-based P-J fit. Depending on the decision-maker's selection, the EJAS determines an EJA solution that maximizes the chosen P-J fit. Additionally, it is capable of generating several near-optimal solutions to assist the decision-maker in selecting a suitable EJA solution. Significance: Effective management of the human resource is an important issue for every business organization. Assigning the right employees to the right jobs can help the organization to increase its productivity and/or enhance its service efficiency. The proposed decision analysis tool enables responsible decision-makers to develop the employee-job assignment solution that considers both competency and job preference; thus, achieving increased productivity and better job satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five common options for workforce flexibility and their robustness under uncertain demand are investigated. In the first stage, a firm makes optimal staffing decisions according to estimated demand and a given workforce flexibility policy. In the second stage, it reallocates its workforce to react to demand shocks. Numerical results are presented that show that flexibility can lead a firm to staff with too little slack to be flexible to demand shocks, thus leading to higher total costs, i.e., staffing and inventory costs. The forms of flexibility that give robust benefits are identified and an analysis on how different forms of flexibility interact with each other is performed. [Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of IIE Transactions for the following supplemental resource: Appendix with additional tables of results.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a multi-server queue with K priority classes. In this system, customers of the P highest priorities ( P< K) can preempt customers with lower priorities, ejecting them from service and sending them back into the queue. Service times are assumed exponential with the same mean for all classes. The Laplace–Stieltjes transforms of waiting times are calculated explicitly and the Laplace–Stieltjes transforms of sojourn times are provided in an implicit form via a system of functional equations. In both cases, moments of any order can be easily calculated. Specifically, we provide formulae for the steady state means and the second moments of waiting times for all priority classes. We also study some approximations of sojourn-time distributions via their moments. In a practical part of our paper, we discuss the use of mixed priorities for different types of Service Level Agreements, including an example based on a real scheduling problem of IT support teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work managers are increasingly challenged by the growing need to effectively manage workforce diversity and to create a welcoming and inclusive organizational environment. This is particularly important in light of the disproportional representation of women and members of minority groups in human service organizations and the gap between diversity of the client population versus the diversity of the staff. With social identity theory and inclusion-exclusion conceptual framework as a backdrop, this study tests a comprehensive theory-based model of the relationship between diversity, organizational culture, and employee outcomes. Using structural equations modeling, the proposed model was tested in a representative sample of one hundred and fourteen employees in a high tech company in Israel. The results point to significant paths between diversity and organizational-culture variables and between organizational-culture variables such as fairness, inclusion, stress, and social support to employee outcomes of well-being, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Within the context of globalization, implications for social work management practices are drawn, particularly for implementing policies and practices that promote an inclusive organizational culture and a sense of belonging, satisfaction, and commitment in employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of home care services is a key component in avoiding inappropriate admission of older people to institutional care and preventing delayed discharge from hospital. However, there is a growing problem of retention of home care workers (HCWs), creating problems for delivering this increasingly essential service. The present study was based in a health and social services trust in Northern Ireland, and was designed to explore the growing problem of retention of HCWs from their own perspective. The cross-sectional survey design used a convenience sample and questionnaires were completed by 45 HCWs (response rate = 45 of 147, 31%). Responses to most questions were on five-point ordinal scales. Focus groups in which 12 HCWs participated were used to explore emerging themes. The variables studied were HCWs’ perspectives on: (1) reasons for considering leaving; (2) working hours; (3) supervision and support, and qualifications and training; (4) workload pressures; (5) client attitudes; (6) pay; and (7) job satisfaction. The main reasons given by HCWs for dissatisfaction and considering leaving were (in rank order): (1) irregular and antisocial hours; (2) lack of management support; and (3) workload pressures. Commitment to caring seemed to be the reason why pay did not feature more highly for those who did not leave. Home care workers are being required to provide care for people with evermore-complex health and social care needs, and in an environment increasingly regulated in terms of quality and risk. This makes it an increasingly demanding job, which does not seem to be recognised in the training and working conditions of HCWs. The most significant factors identified give scope for service managers to improve the retention of HCWs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]