PhD defence: Working on Well-being of Healthcare Employees

On Friday 31 May at 12.15 hrs., Henrico van Roekel will defend his PhD thesis ‘Working on Well-being. Using Empowerment and Behavioral Insights as Leadership Approaches to Improve the Well-being of Healthcare Employees.’

Although healthcare employees make an invaluable contribution to the well-being of patients, their own well-being is increasingly under pressure. This was also evident during a crisis such as the Covid pandemic. Although this has been mentioned often and widely in research and in the media, the question remains: how do we take better care of healthcare employees?

With his dissertation Working on well-being, Henrico van Roekel first wants to deepen our understanding of the well-being of healthcare employees. In addition, he studied two strategies that managers can use to improve well-being. On the one hand, this is empowerment: empowering employees by giving them more leeway in their work to make their own decisions. On the other hand, these are behavioural insights, in which managers can shape the working environment of employees in such a way that it becomes easier to work healthily.

Deepening understanding of well-being

The PhD research first offers more insight into the well-being of healthcare employees. For example, Van Roekel studied how the recent Covid crisis affected the well-being of specific groups of healthcare employees differently. For example, healthcare employees who worked with Covid patients were found to experience more sleep problems and physical exhaustion. In addition, he has attempted to innovate the measurement of well-being by studying self-written narratives of healthcare employees with text and language analysis software. This study showed, for example, that well-being is reflected in someone's use of language: employees with higher well-being use more first-person plural (‘we’).

How managers can improve employee well-being

Subsequently, Van Roekel studied two innovative strategies for managers to improve employee well-being: empowerment and behavioural insights. His research shows that one can use both strategies to improve well-being, provided that you take into account how such a strategy fits the context and the person.

Within the right conditions, empowerment is a solution. For example, it turned out that empowering leadership, in which the manager gives employees autonomy, can promote the well-being of employees, but not during a severe crisis. Van Roekel also shows that the willingness of employees to show leadership themselves depends on various factors. People prefer to perform leadership tasks that are about relationships (e.g. becoming a confidant) rather than tasks (e.g. chairing team meetings).

Behavioural insights can also be used to improve well-being. Specifically, Van Roekel studied the effect of behavioural insights on two specific actions: reporting undesirable behaviour and reducing email use. One could increase the reporting of undesirable behaviour by patients by reminding employees of their motivation to help others or contribute to society. And in an experimental study on e-mail use, Van Roekel developed various nudges to get employees in a large elderly care organization to e-mail less.

Advice for managers

With his research, Van Roekel tries to give managers in the healthcare sector more tools to influence the well-being of employees positively. On the one hand, these are tools to better measure well-being. With the help of the insights from the thesis, managers can adopt the perspective of a scientist and conduct their own research to better understand their employees. On the other hand, empowerment and behavioural insights are two concrete strategies that managers can use, when appropriate, to promote well-being.

Ultimately, Van Roekel wants to use this dissertation to contribute to the well-being of healthcare employees, which is an urgent challenge for the sector. After all, the well-being of patients or clients in healthcare organizations is unthinkable without appropriate care for the well-being of the employees themselves.

Henrico van Roekel is an Assistant Professor and a PhD student at the Utrecht University School of Governance (USG).