Medarbetares upplevelser av attraktivt arbete inomen kommunal hemtjänstverksamhet

Sammanfattning: Swedish elderly care stands before vast employee related challenges in a future with an aging population that will require welfare. By studying what makes working in elder care attractive and what can be done to strengthen its’ attractiveness, tools can be made to attract employees to the occupation and thereby secure the future needs. This qualitative study has investigated employees' experiences of attractive work in a municipal home care service. Through two focus groups based on a model for attractive work, six employees' experiences of what makes their work attractive in a municipal home care organization have been identified. The results show these are social contact and relationships with colleagues, helping others, having varied tasks and care recipients, present and understanding leadership, and problem-solving in work. Improvement points such as increased salaries, more flexible schedules, raising the status of the home care profession, improving employees' ability to show appreciation for each other, and expanding employees' autonomy in their work have also been identified as ways to enhance the attractiveness of the work according to respondents. The study was inspired by hermeneutic-oriented empirical phenomenology, where respondents' experiences of the phenomenon of attractive work are central, but pre-understanding is used to gain a deeper understanding of these experiences and put them in a broader context. Using the model for attractive work, respondents' experiences have been compared to the model and previous research in the field, where similarities and differences have been identified and discussed.