Self-managing teams in home care

– a road to a more attractive job?

Abstract

These years self-managing teams are being implemented in home care with visions of creating more continuity for the citizens and more attractive workplaces for the employees. In this paper, I examine how self-management of worklists unfolds in practice and how it interweaves with both human and non-human actors. The article is based on multi-sited ethnographic studies, and it takes inspiration from theoretical discussions of organizations as sociomaterial assemblages where concepts of responsibility, norms, affective work, and moral work are put into play. The article shows that the employees are generally happy to work in self-managing teams and find that it gives them more freedom and job satisfaction. The article also shows how the employees in self-managing teams become collectively responsible for making the daily worklists workable. This happens in interwoven practices where large screens make the individual worklists visible and common. In this space, practices are also influenced by current norms in the team and at the same time it requires that the employees do both invisible affective and moral work to create worklists that everyone is satisfied with. Self-managing teams cannot thus be regarded as unequivocally good but come with potential tensions in relation to creating more attractive workplaces.