Yes / The recruitment and retention of a digital health and social care workforce in the United Kingdom (UK) is challenging for several reasons that include the shortages of these employees in the National Health Service (NHS) and social care and the high demand for digital skills from other sectors (HEE, 2021a; NHS Providers, 2017). Brown (2022:7) notes that ‘high staff turnover rates, chronic recruitment and retention issues, and low morale are increasingly identified as major challenges for those working in social care’. Liu et al., (2019:5) in their report ‘NHS Informatics workforce in England: Phase 1 Project Report’ estimated that the size of the NHS informatics workforce in 2019 was between 40,640 Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) to 53,936 FTEs based on electronic staff records. However, significant shortages in digital and information technology staff in health and social care were identified that pose a challenge. This rapid review examines the strategies used to recruit and retain the health and social care digital workforce and potential solutions to issues raised.

Technological developments have brought at the forefront the virtual communication in the business world. In our day and age it is difficult to find teams in organizations that do not rely in long distance communication even partially. Leaders bear the responsibility to secure quick and smooth transition of information among the members of their teams as well as to foster an environment that promotes trust and fuels motivation. We conducted this exploratory case study using the abductive approach and the qualitative method. Our aim was to gain a better understanding on how the leaders perceive trust and motivation in a virtual communication setting. Therefore, we send out questionnaires to leaders that volunteered to participate in our study and we adopted the pragmatist philosophy in an attempt to provide valuable insights and practical recommendations to leaders that are managing teams in an electronic environment. The results of our study suggest that leaders perceive the long distance communication mediated through technology to be something positive to the success of their teams as they consider it to actually increase efficiency, provide a more straightforward style of communication that enables their followers to take on more responsibility for the results of their work as well as an increase in productivity.

In today’s upstream oil and gas industry, employees are encouraged to develop digital competencies to support their organisations’ digital transformation initiatives. However, there is limited understanding from the employee viewpoints, of what influences their motivation to support digital workforce transformation in the context of upstream oil and gas companies’ organisational culture. This study proposes the need to comprehend the relationship between organisational culture and employees’ motivation to develop and use digital competencies from the employees’ viewpoints rather than from managers and business leaders only. Building on the digital workforce transformation and employee-driven innovation literature, the aim of this study was to explore the lived experiences of employees who are required to develop and use digital competencies in their companies. Specifically, the guiding principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis were adapted in a qualitative approach to explore the employees’ experiences. Data was collected from sixteen employees selected from across four of the five international oil and gas companies in Nigeria. The findings show that three core modalities of the organisational culture (Digital Transformation Messaging & Resource Availability; Leadership and Management Styles; and Employee Mindsets & Change Management Inertia) are important considerations for the motivation of employees to develop and use digital competencies. The findings contribute to understanding the dynamics of employee mindsets regarding digital workforce transformation and highlight the relevance of incorporating employee viewpoints in the planning and implementation of change management initiatives required for digital transformation. Theoretically, the contribution from this study is a demonstration of the use of a qualitative interpretive approach to update the digital workforce transformation body of knowledge.