Quarter of healthcare workers want to work more

Contract extension among existing employees not enough priority within healthcare industry

Almost a quarter of healthcare employees are open to a larger contract of an average of six hours more per week. These are mainly women with contracts of less than 25 hours per week. Increasing part-time jobs offers opportunities to reduce the expected staff shortages in the care sector by tens of thousands of workers. However, expanding existing contracts is not given enough priority within healthcare organizations. 46 percent of healthcare employees never speak to their employer about contract expansion. This is the conclusion of the Potential Grab Foundation based on research among 17,500 healthcare employees and ‘living labs’ at two healthcare institutions. Today, the foundation presents the report “Tapping the Potential in Healthcare – The Opportunities of Higher Part-time Employment” to Minister Van Engelshoven of Education, Culture and Science. With this report, attention is drawn to making better use of the female potential on the Dutch labor market.

Wieteke Graven, chairwoman of the Foundation to Grab the Potential: ‘We started this initiative because the healthcare sector is under great pressure due to growing labor shortages. At the same time, more than 900,000 women work part-time here, and the contract size is 24 hours on average. Part-time work has become the norm within the healthcare sector. The feeling is that women do not want to work more hours. Our research shows that this image is not correct. 23 percent of the employees surveyed, more than 90 percent of whom were women, indicated that they would be open to a larger contract. The only thing that has not been investigated before is what is stopping them and how we can remove these obstacles. Our approach is certainly not “all work full time.” We do want to give women who want to work more hours the opportunity to do so. And four extra hours can make a huge difference.

Reducing labor shortages

By 2022, staff shortages in the healthcare sector are expected to reach eighty thousand workers.[1] Increasing a contract by an additional four hours per week can make a huge difference in reducing the shortages. The study found that a quarter of healthcare workers would be open to a larger contract averaging six more hours per week. This is equivalent to tens of thousands of additional jobs.

Larger contract not often a topic of discussion

The report shows that 70 percent of the respondents who want contract extensions work for an organization with (large) shortages. However, the conversation about this is still not being had enough on the shop floor: 46 percent of healthcare employees never talk to their employer about their contract size. Healthcare institutions have all kinds of programs around recruitment, vitality, absenteeism, but few organizations have a structural and systematic approach around contract expansion. One of the solution directions in the report is to prioritize ‘increasing the part-time factor’ among directors, managers and HR and make them aware of the opportunities here. More hours not only means a lower staff shortage, it can also provide other positive ‘side benefits’, such as higher employee engagement. The added value of extending contracts must also be made clear to employees, such as a higher income and pension, more development opportunities and better opportunities on the labor market.

Motives for extending hours

Almost a quarter of the employees surveyed are open to a larger contract. A much larger group of employees (46%) are basically satisfied with the current contract size, but indicate that they would like to work more under certain conditions. These include, for example, having influence on the schedule (65%) and flexibility to adjust hours later (70%). Extra remuneration, financial and non-financial (66%), and a pleasant organizational culture (67%) are also considerations for working more. What is also striking is that employees with young children in particular consider flexibility more important than well-organized and affordable childcare. Graven: “31 percent of the employees in the survey indicated that they would prefer to work a number of hours less. During this study we learned that asking the question, “Would you like a larger contract?” certainly does not immediately result in a “Yes. But when we ask: ‘Under what conditions would you like to or be able to work more?’, this risk group also sees the right conditions to do so. The good news is: employers can largely create these conditions themselves. Our research shows that much more is possible on the part of both employers and employees than we initially thought. So we need to think much more in terms of possibilities.’

[1] Progress Report Working in Care, Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, 2019.