How to lead health care workers during unprecedented crises: A qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic in Connecticut, USA

Health Care Leaders (HCLs) faced unprecedented challenges during the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaders played an important role in shaping the experiences of Health Care Workers (HCWs) during this time. However, research is needed on how HCWs experienced and characterized HCLs’ response and support. The aim of our study was to examine HCWs’ experiences with leadership and to identify aspects of HCLs’ response that were effective in supporting HCWs in their roles during the early phases of the pandemic. This was a qualitative study based on open-ended semi-structured interviews conducted (June 1- July 18, 2020) with frontline HCWs during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Connecticut, USA. Participants (N = 45) included physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and patient care assistants who worked in inpatient and outpatient settings in various specialties, roles and 3 health systems across Connecticut, USA during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were offered a $25 gift card as an incentive for participation. We used inductive techniques derived from grounded theory to develop themes. We identified 6 main themes related to leadership response and support of HCWs during the pandemic namely: 1) Effective communication and transparency; 2) Prioritizing their health and safety; 3) Employee scheduling considerations: autonomy, assignment support and respite; 4) Appreciation- financial and nonfinancial; 5) Showing up and listening and 6) Stepping up with resources. Our findings can inform leadership responses to future pandemics and other unanticipated crises leading to strengthening of the health care system as a whole.

A competency-driven staff assignment approach to improving employee scheduling robustness

Presented paper concerns the competency-driven staff assignment and scheduling approach to the management of project portfolios subject to perturbations caused by employee absences and/or unexpected arrival of high priority jobs. Proactive strategy is considered, which exploits the concept of employee substitutability to improve the robustness of personnel allocation in the case of occurrence of specific types of disruptions. Solutions obtained using the model of a constraint satisfaction problem developed in this study are validated in series quantitative and qualitative experiments. With a view to future implementation in a Decision Support Systems dedicated to prototyping of proactive personnel allocation, a methodology employing the concept of a competency framework-based robustness measure is proposed. Implemented in a declarative framework, the proposed approach allows one to find a redundant competency framework robust to a given set of disruptions.

Integrated employee scheduling with known employee demand, including breaks, overtime, and employee preferences

Purpose: This research paper introduces an integrated employee scheduling problem that considers various real-life problems such as varying employee demand, different employee working conditions, and individual preferences regarding schedules.Design/methodology/approach: The proposed model, which is a combination of Analytic Hierarchy Process and Mixed Integer Linear Programming, is used to solve the problem with multi-dimensional objectivesFindings: Results show that the proposed model generates optimal and feasible solutions for weekly employee schedules.Originality/value: Many employee scheduling problems in literature are able to solve the employee scheduling problem to a large extent but still do not fully reflect current realistic organizational problems such as varying employee demand per hour inteval, different employee working conditions on disjoint shifts and breaks, and individual preferences regarding schedules all at the same time.

Model Scheduling Optimization Workforce Management Marketing

This research focuses on completing workforce management marketing scheduling using genetic metaheuristic methods. Optimal scheduling to determine the duration of a job, the quality of employees, and meet the challenges to increase work scheduling targets according to marketing employee skills by maximizing operational time while providing satisfactory services to customers. Marketing employees increasingly rely on the right time to connect with their customers. The problem in this study considers marketing skills and activities to carry out work activities, namely promotion, follow-up, and stand-by in the office with the limitations of the existing workforce. This problem has the nature of NP-Hard so a quick solution requires the use of metaheuristic methods. The metaheuristic method was built in 11 constraints. The results show that the genetic metaheuristic method is capable of producing far better results. Therefore, employee scheduling is very important. This study aims to develop an optimization model for employee scheduling and to maximize operational time work. With this model, it is expected to achieve optimal scheduling for marketing management workforce.