Every organization has its own standards that employees must follow. However, such rules can often seem to be not very important compared to the primary tasks and goals set. This paper provides a brief outline of the research made in the sphere of health care that investigated how the time off from work can influence the employees’ compliance with one of the most important rules – hand hygiene.
It is not always easy to follow all the work standards as employees often face many other demands and have to meet all the goals set. In practice, violation of professional rules can be seen at all organizations, especially when these standards “require frequent, routine compliance” (Dai, Milkman, Hofmann, & Staats, 2015). Beginning with the statement that professional standards are important at all organizations, authors of the article present the main hypothesis about the compliance with these standards. They presuppose that the accumulation of impacts of different job demands on the compliance with the routine professional rules can accumulate very quickly and can affect work efficiency in general. In addition, authors hypothesized that the time spent away from work and having longer breaks will improve the compliance statistics. It is stated that employees perceive compliance with professional standards as a secondary task and can just omit them when having high demands to complete the primary tasks. Another reason for not following the standard rules can be the fatigue caused by the high work demands and constant endeavor to meet the expectations and to reach the goals set.
The method used in the article to test the hypothesis was a research of the compliance issues in the field of health care, hand hygiene in particular. There were longitudinal field observations used to get the statistics, over 4,157 caregivers working in 35 different hospitals were observed. The data was taken from Proventix, a company that helps health care organizations to improve the hand hygiene compliance indicators. Such variables were taken to calculate the results: hours at work, hours off work, compliance in the final hour of the preceding shift, total hours at work in the past week and cumulative average frequency of patient encounters. To test the hypothesis, authors used Bernoulli distribution hierarchical linear models because of the hierarchical structure of the data.
According to the research presented in the article, there was observed an 8.7 percent decrease in hand hygiene compliance rates by the end of the working day (Dai, Milkman, Hofmann, & Staats, 2015). These results are not just explained by the fatigue accumulated during the working day, there are other explanations the authors have found while making a research. First, health care employees work with patients less frequently by the end of their shifts and thus, think about hand washing as not that important over time. Another reason is that accumulation of hand washing over the shift makes the caregivers think that it may harm their skin or that additional hand washing is not needed. The research showed that the time off between shifts results in a greater increase in hand hygiene compliance while the compliance level at the end of the previous shift is low.
In conclusion, there are five main hypothesis introduced in the article, mainly stating that the work demands have a tendency to accumulate over the shift becoming the reason of ignoring secondary working tasks, such as following the standards. The authors chose health care workers as the purpose of observation because hand hygiene compliance is one of the most significant challenges in the sphere today. Different variables were taken into account when calculating the average indicators, and Bernoulli distribution hierarchical linear models were used to test the hypothesis. The research results presented in the article prove that the time for breaks as well as the time off the work has a great impact on the level of compliance with the organizational standards.
References
Dai, H., Milkman, K., Hofmann, D., & Staats, B. (2015). The impact of time at work and time off from work on rule compliance: The case of hand hygiene in health care. Journal Of Applied Psychology, 100(3), 846-862. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038067
