Factors associated with work-private life conflict and leadership qualities among line managers of health professionals in Swiss acute and rehabilitation hospitals – a cross-sectional study

Background: The workforce shortage of health professionals is a matter of global concern. Among possible causative factors in this shortage are work-private life conflicts related to increased stress and burnout symptoms, job dissatisfaction and a higher intention to leave the profession prematurely. Also, poor leadership qualities among direct line managers (e.g. clinic directors, leading physicians, ward managers, team leaders) have been associated with health professionals’ job dissatisfaction and intention to leave in previous studies. Therefore, this study aimed to identify key associated factors of work-private life conflicts and managerial leadership quality among health professionals.Methods: The study is based on a cross-sectional survey in 26 Swiss acute and rehabilitation hospitals, consisting of 3398 health professionals from various disciplines. For data analysis, multilevel models (with hospitals as the second level variable) were performed for ‘work-private life conflict’ and ‘quality of leadership’, considering significant main effects (using AIC) and significant interactions (using BIC) of potential explanatory variables.Results: The main findings reveal that the compatibility of health professionals’ work and private life is associated with topics of shift planning, in particular workers’ influence on shift planning (possibility of exchanging shifts, B=-2.87, p<0.01), the extent to which their individual preferences are considered (e.g. working on one specific shift only, B=6.31, p<0.01), number of shifts per weekend (B=1.38, p<0.01) and number of hours per week (B=0.13, p<0.01) that they had to work. In addition, high quantitative demands (B=0.25, p<0.01), being required to hide their emotions (B=0.16, p<0.01) and poor social community support at work (B=-0.12, p<0.01) were also related to severe work-private life conflict. Regarding managerial leadership, health professionals perceived the leadership qualities of their direct line manager as being better if they received more social support (B=0.61, p<0.01) and rewards (B=0.41, p<0.01) at work. Conclusions: The results show key components of improving the compatibility of work and private life as well as managerial leadership qualities among health professionals and may help health care leaders working in acute or rehabilitation hospitals to develop appropriate interventions.

Factors associated with work-private life conflict and leadership qualities among line managers of health professionals in Swiss acute and rehabilitation hospitals – a cross-sectional study

Background: The workforce shortage of health professionals is a matter of global concern. Existing work-private life conflicts among health professionals are related to increased stress and burnout symptoms, job dissatisfaction and a higher intention to leave their profession prematurely. Also, poor leadership qualities among direct line managers have been associated with health professionals’ job dissatisfaction and intention to leave in previous studies. Therefore, this study aimed to identify key associated factors of work-private life conflicts and managerial leadership quality among health professionals.Methods: This study is based on a cross-sectional survey in 26 Swiss acute and rehabilitation hospitals, consisting of 3398 health professionals from various disciplines. For data analysis, multilevel models (with hospitals as the second level variable) were performed for ‘work-private life conflict’ and ‘quality of leadership’, considering significant main effects (using AIC) and significant interactions (using BIC) of potential explanatory variables.Results: The main findings of this study reveal that the compatibility of health professionals’ work and private life is associated with topics of shift planning, in particular their influence on shift planning (possibility of exchanging shifts, B=-2.87, p=0.000), the extent to which their individual preferences are considered (e.g. working on one specific shift only, B=6.31, p=0.000), number of shifts per weekend (B=1.38, p=0.002) and number of hours per week (B=0.13, p=0.000) that they had to work. In addition, high quantitative demands (B=0.25, p=0.000), being required to hide their emotions (B=0.16, p=0.000) and poor social community at work (B=-0.12, p=0.000) were also related to a severe work-private life conflict. Regarding managerial leadership, health professionals perceived the leadership qualities of their direct line manager as being better if they received more social support (B=0.61, p=0.000) and rewards (B=0.41, p=0.000) at work. Conclusions: These study results show key components of improving the compatibility of work and private life as well as managerial leadership qualities among health professionals and can help top executives working in acute or rehabilitation hospitals to develop appropriate interventions.

Shift Planning Under Delay Uncertainty at Air France: A Vehicle-Scheduling Problem with Outsourcing

Airlines must operate many jobs in airports, such as passenger check-in or runway tasks. In airlines’ hubs, airlines generally choose to perform these jobs with their own agents. Shift planning aims at building the sequences of jobs operated by the airline agents and has been widely studied given its impact on operating costs. The impact of delayed flights is generally not taken into account despite the propagation of flight delays along these sequences: If a flight is late, then the agents doing the corresponding jobs are delayed, and may arrive late to their next jobs and delay the corresponding flights. Since delay costs are much higher than the costs of outsourcing jobs, if the agent who is supposed to operate a job is still working elsewhere when the job begins, then airlines tend to outsource the job to their own dedicated team or to a third party. We introduce a stochastic version of the shift-planning problem that takes into account outsourcing costs due to delay. It can be seen as a natural stochastic generalization of the vehicle-scheduling problem in which delayed jobs are outsourced. We propose a column-generation approach to solve it, whose key element is the pricing subproblem algorithm, modeled as a stochastic resource-constrained shortest-path problem. Numerical results on Air France industrial instances show the benefits of using our stochastic version of the shift-planning problem and the efficiency of the solution method. Moving to the stochastic version enables Air France to reduce total operating costs by 3.5%–4.8% on instances with more than 200 jobs, and our algorithm can solve to near optimality instances with up to 400 jobs.

Factors associated with work-private life conflict and leadership qualities among line managers of health professionals in Swiss acute and rehabilitation hospitals – a cross-sectional study

Background: The workforce shortage of health professionals is a current concern, with a high level of work-related stress being an important reason why health professionals leave their career prematurely. In particular, incompatibility between work and private life and a lack of leadership qualities among line managers are important factors in health professionals’ satisfaction and health at work. This study therefore aimed to identify key associated factors of work-private life conflicts and of poor managerial leadership quality among health professionals. Methods: This study is based on a cross-sectional survey in 26 Swiss acute and rehabilitation hospitals, consisting of 3398 health professionals from various disciplines. For data analysis, multilevel models (with hospitals as the second level variable) were performed for ‘work-private life conflict’ and ‘quality of leadership’, considering significant main effects (using AIC) and significant interactions (using BIC) of potential explanatory variables. Results: The main findings of this study reveal that the compatibility of health professionals’ work and private life is associated with topics of shift planning, specifically regarding their influence on shift planning (possibility of exchanging shifts, β=-2.87, p=0.000), the extent to which their individual preferences are considered (e.g. working in one specific shift only, β=6.31, p=0.000), the number of shifts per weekend (β=1.38, p=0.002) and the number of hours per week (β=0.13, p=0.000) they had to work. In addition, high quantitative demands (β=0.25, p=0.000) as well as being required to hide their emotions (β=0.16, p=0.000) and poor social community at work (β=-0.12, p=0.000) were also related to a severe work-private life conflict. Regarding managerial leadership, health professionals perceived the leadership qualities of their direct line manager as better if they received more social support (β=0.61, p=0.000) and rewards (β=0.41, p=0.000) at work. Conclusions: These study results show key components of improving the compatibility of work and private life as well as managerial leadership qualities among health professionals and can help top executives working in acute or rehabilitation hospitals to develop appropriate interventions.