Presenting Recommendations

Compiling a Mini-Project Proposal Student’s Name Institution Course # and Name Professor’s Name Submission Date Introduction Nurses are dedicated leaders in healthcare organizations whose caregiving responsibilities directly ensure the quality of service to the patients. Since they spend more time with the patients than other healthcare professionals, they are vital to providing evidence-based and personalized care in hospitals. A hospital’s administration should always give the nurses conducive conditions that optimize their potential. The physical and organizational environments determine nurses' job satisfaction and task performance. An administrative team in a suburban community hospital experiencing growing dissatisfaction attempts to identify how these environmental issues influence nursing task performance. A quasi-experimental research design best fits this proposed work. This design will allow the researcher to control other confounding variables that might interfere with the outcome. These include factors such as job satisfaction and other commitments of the employees. Hence, the impact of flexible work start times and rigid fast times on attendance rate will be compared. This is appropriate because the design establishes causative elements without random assignment, which may not be workable in real-world workplace situations. Workplace issues involving nurses should be assessed and addressed to ensure optimum working conditions and improved health outcomes. Researchers on healthcare issues must employ the best techniques to meet research objectives and positively impact care delivery. Scientific studies on the nursing workplace should aim to identify factors affecting job satisfaction and solutions to improve work-life balance. Sampling and data collection are key steps in any research project, and all prior preparations are targeted towards it. This research will employ rigorous sampling and data collection to retain the study’s validity. The context of this research is a community urban hospital whose nurses have reported poor workplace conditions that affect their performance. Attendance rates of nurses have been decreasing, with many employees citing burnout and uncooperative administration. This situation has existed for a long time, and it is detrimental to healthcare delivery in the hospital. This paper discusses the problem statement, problem background, purpose statement, research questions, theoretical framework, research design and methodology, sampling, and data collection. Problem Statement and Problem Background The problem of focus for this study is a detrimental trend in the meager attendance rates of employees in a suburban company. Low employee attendance rates translate to lowered productivity and higher expenses (Landivar et al., 2022). In organizations, truancy levels are essential determinants of team productivity and satisfaction. In addition, low attendance rates interrupt employees and organizational work schedules, increasing pressure on the remaining workers and reducing their job satisfaction (Belkin et al., 2020). The authors recommend that several factors could potentially reduce attendance rates, including a greater understanding of those factors that can affect attendance rates, including work schedules and job satisfaction. Policies implemented in an organization about attendance and absenteeism need to be understood. In this case, the attendance data reveals a massive difference across different start times, which creates the potential for studying the effects of flexibility on employee attendance (Berkery et al., 2020). Because attendance has been found to influence various organizational performances, it is essential to understand what does or does not influence attendance. A possible aim of researching this topic is to determine whether flexible start times or adjusted working hours positively impact attendance. They may wish to know how starting hours interfere with work, other commitments, and health, among other factors. A researcher might be interested in this information to develop ways of enhancing employee attendance levels and, therefore, employee performance (Latham, 2023). There is also evidence in the literature that researching corporation's policies on truancy can assist firms in adopting better management mechanisms. Therefore, this research could open up theoretical and practical applications by tackling the general organizational issue of absenteeism while at the same time helping to inform the growing field of workplace flexibility and its consequences on employees. Purpose Statement The purpose is to establish the degree of difference in employee attendance rates for an organization operating in a suburban area depending on their work start rates for three months. This study compares the attendance amongst those employees who are allowed flexibility and staggering working time with those who work with regular standard working hours. Knowledge of such associations is essential in developing policies that support employee health, encourage them to go to work, and improve their efficiency (Belkin et al., 2020). For many years, lack of employee attendance has constituted a significant problem in human resource management and organizational behavior. Previous studies have affected job satisfaction, working conditions, and other committed responsibilities. However, flexible scheduling has been emphasized as an effective attendee management instrument. This means that if employees are allowed to work flexibly, they can balance personal and work responsibilities, hence being able to come to work as directed (Franken et al., 2021). This research seeks to form part of this line of thinking by looking more closely at the effects of start times on attendance. In underpinning a suburban company, this study examines a typical business environment where fixed start times are incurred. The present research results show how such flexible scheduling benefits organizational leaders in the more extensive discussions on enhancing work-life quality in contemporary organizations. Lastly, the study must identify possible strategies for reducing absenteeism that can be adopted across different fields. Research Questions Based on the problem and purpose statements, the following research questions are proposed: Research question one: To what extent do employees' attendance rates vary depending on when they have started their working day (flexibly or based on a set timetable) while working in a suburban organization for three months? Research question two: Can employee attendance rates be derived from flexible work start times while considering the impact of other variables such as job satisfaction and other cares? These research questions are developed to understand the relationship between work start times (independent variable) and the rates of attendance by employees (dependent variable). The target population will be the employees of a suburban organization, and the study will gather data within three months. Through such relationships, the study seeks to enhance the knowledge base of the impact of workplace policies on those primary organizational outcomes. It is an effort to provide information to create a healthier and more productive workforce. Theoretical Framework The theoretical framework in this project proposal connects flexible work start times and employee attendance rates. The area of focus is nursing employees in a suburban hospital. This framework is grounded in organizational behavior and human resource theories, which suggest that job satisfaction and workplace policies significantly influence employee performance and attendance. The framework posits that environmental conditions like flexible scheduling may directly impact attendance by addressing burnout and work-life balance issues. The research will build upon existing workplace theories by examining how flexible work schedules could serve as a strategy to enhance employee attendance and productivity. This is a familiar concept discussed in studies on workplace satisfaction and absenteeism (Shiri et al., 2022). Integrating job satisfaction theories and flexible work arrangements provides a basis for exploring how flexibility might alleviate absenteeism-related challenges in healthcare. The framework also acknowledges external factors like job satisfaction and commitment, which could influence attendance. Research Design and Methodology As mentioned in the previous paper, a quasi-experimental research design best fits this proposed work. Such a design enables the researchers to control confounding factors like job satisfaction and other commitments of the employees to compare the impact of flexible work start time and rigid fast times on attendance rates. This is a suitable design since it allows the determination of causative elements without random assignment, which may not be workable in real-world workplace situations (Franssila & Kirjonen, 2022). Design Justification Indeed, the design fits well with the research problem and the purpose that is intended to serve the study. The issue is that actual employee attendance should be much higher. Hence, the goal is to use flexible work start times to solve this problem (Davidescu et al., 2020). This vice is prevalent in organizations since the quasi-experimental design enables the experimenter to allocate the independent variable (start times) in a naturalistic manner and examine the effect on the organization's dependent variable (attendance) in a similarly naturalistic fashion. Furthermore, it permits comparison of groups that have not necessarily demanded complete randomization, and this may not be possible in a workplace whereby schedules are rotated according to an individual's rank or position. Ariel et al. (2022) collectively argues that quasi-experimental designs are helpful in field research because ethical or practical requisites prohibit random assignment. However, this design may create numerous confounding factors, which can be held statistically or through careful experiments. For this reason, a quasi-experimental research design is well suited to meet this study's objectives; it enables data collection that has meaningful analysis while still showing causality. These are creating treatment groups with the independent variable, flexible and fixed start times in this study, and controlling for extraneous variables to ensure the effects are attributed to the manipulated independent variable. Although the internal validity of quasi-experimental designs is lower than that of accurate experimental designs, their external validity is usually higher because the study is conducted in real-life conditions (Jaciw, 2024). This design aims to establish variables that can be generalized across similar contexts of work environments despite acknowledged shortcomings for excluding all external factors. Independent and dependent variables The independent variable in this study is the flexibility of work start times. This variable is operationalized by categorizing employees into two groups: those with flexible start times and those with standard, fixed start times. In this case, the independent variable is the flexibility of work start time. It allows one group to perform a variable schedule with work starting times while the other follows a fixed schedule. This approach will enable us to observe direct impacts on attendance. The attendance rate is the dependent variable, quantified by the frequency of each employee's attendance in a given time frame. The study will calculate attendance rates from the attendance record for three months. This will enable the researchers to plot the patterns and compare the flexible start-time groups with fixed start times. Subgroups This study will involve two groups: This gave us one group of students in their first course with the option to have flexible start and stop times each week and one group with fixed start and stop times each week. The difference in the two groups' attendance rates will be compared to establish whether there is a difference within three months. Because the study will be quasi-experimental, the groups cannot be randomly established but will include employees experiencing flexible or fixed start schedules due to organizational practice. In such subgroups, the researchers can consider other variables like job roles, years of experience, and type of shift to explain attendance variance (Tiersma et al., 2022). These will give insight into whether the effect of flexible start times on attendance differs across employee demographics and organizational roles. The subgroups based on years of experience may indicate whether the seasoned employees respond differently to the flexibility in start times compared to newer employees. This would be important in controlling for confounding variables that may mask the study's findings. In addition, a between-group comparison will be conducted to compare the attendance levels of these two groups. The independent variable in this work is the type of work schedule – flexible or fixed start times, and the dependent variable is the employees ' attendance rate. Based on Wallace et al. (2004), control factors like job satisfaction and personal commitments will be quantified using a complementary questionnaire since these may affect attendance. A split-group design will be used, with subjects partitioned into flexible and fixed start-time groups according to the organizational policies. No measures will be repeated, mainly because this study aims to compare the overall attendance of these two different groups throughout the study. Significance tests, such as t-tests or ANOVA, will be used to compare the independent variable (start time) with the dependent variable (attendance) regarding the distribution of data obtained. These comparisons will help to understand if the flexible start times became the determinant of attendance rates other than fixed start times and may give insight into the effectiveness of the scheduling policies. Instrumentation The primary instrument for data collection in this study will be the organization's attendance tracking system (ATS), which maintains detailed, time-stamped records of employee attendance. This archival data source conveys some advantages in several ways. First, it minimizes the potential for response bias with self-reported attendance data, as people may feel inclined to overstate their attendance. Second, the ATS provides consistent, objective data that is reliably suitable for analysis, increasing the present study's validity. Since the organization has uniform attendance recording, the ATS would allow a standardized measure of attendance for both the flexible and the fixed start-time groups (Ali et al., 2022). The records of the ATS themselves would need to be checked for accuracy and completeness beforehand for analysis because any discrepancies could affect the result's accuracy. The data to be collected from the ATS will span three months to capture an adequate sample size and allow for any seasonal variations in attendance that will further enhance the robustness of the study. A longer time frame allows the researchers to monitor the attendance trend and make meaningful comparisons between groups. Scope and Delimitations This study is based on a single suburban organization, and its findings will be g...