Promoting Employees’ Recovery During Shift Work: Protocol for a Workplace Intervention Study

BACKGROUND: Shift work can be demanding owing to disturbances in the biological and social rhythms. This can cause short-term negative effects in employees, such as increased fatigue and reduced alertness. A potential way to counteract these negative effects is to enhance employees’ recovery from work during working hours. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to develop and implement an intervention that focuses on promoting “on-job” recovery of shift workers. METHODS: This study is performed in 2 department units with shift workers at a multinational company in the steel industry. For each department, an intervention will be developed and implemented through an iterative process of user-centered design and evaluation. This approach consists of various sessions in which employees and a project group (ie, researchers, line managers, human resource managers, and occupational health experts) provide input on the intervention content and implementation. Intervention effects will be evaluated using pretest and posttest web-based surveys. Digital ecological momentary assessment will be performed to gain insight into the link between the intervention and daily within-person processes. The intervention process and participants’ perception of the interventions will be assessed through a process evaluation. Intervention results will be analyzed by performing mixed model repeated measures analyses and multilevel analyses. RESULTS: This study is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research Work and Health Research Program, which is funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and supported by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, program number 19.204.1-3. This study was approved by the institutional review board on February 7, 2019. From June to August 2019, baseline data were collected, and from November to December 2019, the first follow-up data were collected. The second follow-up data collection and data analysis are planned for the first two quarters of 2020. Dissemination of the results is planned for the last two quarters of 2020. CONCLUSIONS: A strength of this study design is the participatory action approach to enhance the stakeholder commitments, intervention adherence, and compliance. Moreover, since the target group will be participating in the development and implementation of the intervention, the proposed impact will be high. In addition, the short-term as well as the long-term effects will be evaluated. Finally, this study uses a unique combination of quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods. A limitation of this study is that it is impossible to randomly assign participants to an intervention or control group. Furthermore, the follow-up period (6 months) might be too short to establish health-related effects. Lastly, the results of this study might be specific to the department, organization, or sector, which limits the generalizability of the findings. However, as workplace intervention research for shift workers is scarce, this study might serve as a starting point for future research on shift work interventions.