Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Apr 29, 2023
Date Accepted: Nov 30, 2023
Understanding employee voice behavior: experiences of long-term care with a digital voice channel: a research protocol for the embedded multiple-case study ADVICE
ABSTRACT
Background:
Specific challenges in the health care sector, such as hierarchical structures, shortages of nursing staff and high turnover of nursing staff, can be addressed by a change process of organizational culture into shared governance. Data from business organizations show that the use of digital voice channels provides employee voice. This approach makes concrete the opportunity for employees to speak up by answering surveys and making comments in an anonymous forum, which subsequently positively influences staff turnover and sick leave. Since there is no clear understanding of how a digital voice channel can be used in long-term care to address employee voice, a research gap is identified.
Objective:
The purpose of ADVICE—understanding employee voice behavior: experiences of long-term care with a digital voice channel—is to understand how the use of a digital voice channel performs in long-term care (nursing homes and home care facilities). The aim of the current study is to understand how the digital voice channel can support staff in making their voices heard and to see what managers need to use the voice channel to change the work environment.
Methods:
An embedded multiple-case study will be used to explore the experiences of two health care providers who have already implemented a digital voice channel. ADVICE is organized into two main phases: (1) a scoping review and (2) an embedded multiple-case study. For this purpose, focus group interviews with employees, discursive-dialogical interviews with managers, meeting protocols, and data from the digital voice channel will be analyzed. First, all units of analysis from every embedded unit will be separately analyzed and then comprehensively analyzed to obtain a case vignette from every embedded unit (within-analysis). In the second stage, the analyzed data from the embedded units will be compared with each other in a comparative analysis (cross-analysis).
Results:
The results will provide insight into how digital voice channels can be used in long-term care to address employee voice. We expect to find how the digital voice channel can empower nurses to speak up and consequently create a better work environment. Furthermore, we aimed to understand how managers deal with feedback and therefore what support they need to do so. From a current perspective, data collection will start in August 2023 and the first results are expected in summer 2024.
Conclusions:
In summary, the results may help to better understand the use of a digital voice channel in the health care sector and its transformative potential for leadership. Clinical Trial: -
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.