University of Cologne, Faculty of Human Sciences & Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Cologne, Institute of Medical Sociology, Health Services Research and Rehabilitation Science, Chair of Quality Development and Evaluation in Rehabilitation, Eupener Str. 129, 50933, Cologne, Germany.
BMC Public Health. 2024 May 7;24(1):1249. doi: 10.1186/s12889-024-18744-y.
Increased working from home has imposed new challenges on public service employees, while also granting opportunities for job crafting. Grounding on the Job Demands-Resources model and Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory this exploratory research aims to investigate the work-nonwork balance of employees one and a half years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the research focus lies on employees' job crafting strategies to optimize their working from home experience concerning boundary management and energy resource management.
Twelve semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with public service employees from different sectors in Germany. The experiences were content analyzed using the software MaxQDA and inductive and deductive categories were derived.
Boundary management comprised different strategies such as communicative (e.g., negotiating work time), physical (e.g., going to the garden), temporal (e.g., logging off in between the work day) and behavioral (e.g., prioritizing tasks) strategies. The job crafting strategies regarding energy management included preventing exhaustion (e.g. taking breaks), healthy cooking and energy management in case of sickness (e.g. deciding on sick leave).
This qualitative case study enriches research on job crafting by offering insights on boundary tactics and energy resources management strategies for remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results point out different starting points for employees and decision makers, how a work-nonwork balance, energy management and thus employees' wellbeing may be increased when working from home in the future.
The study design and methodology were approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Cologne and the study was prospectively registered (Ref No. 21-1417_1).
居家办公增加了对公共服务员工的新挑战，同时也为工作重塑提供了机会。本探索性研究以工作要求-资源模型和霍布福勒的资源保存理论为基础，旨在探讨 COVID-19 大流行爆发一年半后员工的工作-非工作平衡。因此，研究重点在于员工的工作重塑策略，以优化他们的居家办公体验，包括边界管理和能源管理。
对来自德国不同部门的公共服务员工进行了 12 次半结构式电话访谈。使用 MaxQDA 软件对经验进行内容分析，并推导出归纳和演绎类别。
边界管理包括不同的策略，如沟通（例如，协商工作时间）、物理（例如，去花园）、时间（例如，在工作日之间离线）和行为（例如，优先处理任务）策略。关于能源管理的工作重塑策略包括防止精疲力竭（例如，休息）、健康烹饪和生病时的能源管理（例如，决定病假）。
这项定性案例研究通过提供有关远程工作期间边界策略和能源管理策略的见解，丰富了工作重塑研究。研究结果指出了员工和决策者的不同起点，以及在未来居家办公时如何提高工作-非工作平衡、能源管理和员工幸福感。
该研究设计和方法已获得科隆大学伦理委员会的批准，并进行了前瞻性注册（注册号：21-1417_1）。
