4 Steps Healthcare Organizations Can Take to Promote Employee Wellbeing

The employees’ state concerning their mental and physical health is referred to as employee well-being. Employees have to tackle several tasks, responsibilities, and projects simultaneously in almost every field and sector. It also depends on the working dynamics and environment. Alongside this, the relationship with peers, colleagues, and superiors significantly impacts the well-being of employees. This is a common occurrence in a field as hectic and demanding as the healthcare sector. Often, healthcare workers face immense stress at the workplace, experiencing symptoms of burnout. Most of it stems from the volatile environment of healthcare facilities. Not a single day spans out the same as previous since emergencies and unforeseen events compel healthcare workers to remain on their toes.

Therefore, it is essential to introduce preventive measures to promote the well-being of employees at the workplace. These steps would ensure higher productivity and enhanced morale, making them feel valued. By introducing policies to improve work-life balance, the management can attract more skilled workers and retain the existing employees. So, to develop a healthy hospital environment that caters to the well-being of its workers, organizations can leverage several strategies. Let’s have a look at them.

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  Promotion Of Employee Well-Being Through Personal Development

Personal development is associated with enhanced job performance and satisfaction. Organizations that avoid investing in individual development programs witness bad turnover rates and disengaged workers. Most of these initiatives revolve around ensuring that employees are trained and developed to meet organizational goals, while some focus on upskilling workers.

So, it is vital to offer personal development programs to enhance your workers’ skillset, ensuring they remain satisfied. For instance, you can encourage FNPs to enroll in specialization degrees like an MSN family nurse practitioner degree and accelerate their career advancement prospects. Nurses who upskill themselves are better equipped to handle compassion fatigue and burnout, reducing their chances of workplace stress. It instills a sense of belonging in them and positively affects employee well-being.

• Promotion Of Mental Health Awareness

Positive mental health is of immense importance to tackle challenges effectively. When feeling emotionally and mentally strong, employees perform much better and be more productive. However, just as physical health, mental health also fluctuates daily. Therefore, it is essential to raise awareness regarding mental health issues in the healthcare organization to make employees feel more included and heard. Creating such an environment will enable employees to feel safe and confident. It is essential that a healthcare organization is watchful of and continually improves each individual’s collective mental health. This would allow healthcare professionals to feel supported.

To achieve a workplace environment that acknowledges the importance of mental health, managers must take a step to initiate difficult conversations and lead the way towards creating a more compassionate environment. Training or meditation programs can be introduced to help employees be more comfortable with opening up about their worries and stressors. Enabling employees to be more aware of their mental health and teaching them ways to tackle intrusive thoughts can significantly reduce absenteeism, common among employees struggling with mental health challenges. The employees can also be encouraged to use mobile applications for mindfulness and meditation.

• Reducing Workloads And Promoting Adequate Staffing

Higher workloads and hospital demands such as long working hours and pressurizing tasks can adversely impact employee well-being. Greater workloads are associated with high stress, which is a substantial risk of causing poor health among employees. Increased levels of stress cause high blood pressure, symptoms of depression, and other significant health-related concerns. It is essential to implement adequate staffing measures to efficiently distribute tasks and proper division of labor to counter this. This approach will reduce the workload on each practitioner, and there will be a shared responsibility based on the division of functions and efficient teamwork.

Though increasing the number of employees causes a significant constraint on an organization’s budget, poorly staffed hospital organizations also cause substantial problems, including employee burnout and increased absenteeism. This, in turn, affects productivity and hospital outcome. Research has shown that poor staffing levels lead to dissatisfaction among healthcare professionals and worsen hospital outcomes by increasing mortality rates.

However, if done efficiently, decreasing workloads and improving staffing can significantly affect employee well-being. A targeted approach, such as employing a scribe to take over charting for nurses, can dramatically improve employee satisfaction, reduce workload and enhance employee well-being.

• Collaborative workplace culture

Establishing a collaborative work environment based on mutual respect and friendliness can significantly improve employee morale. A collaborative work culture promotes best practices to be followed, such that every employee’s expertise is utilized. A collaborative work culture focuses on creating trust-filled and supportive ties with colleagues. People who are generally most happy at work have made strong connections with their colleagues and can rely on them professionally and personally. Such a workplace environment limits psychological distress and reduces mental health problems among professionals.

Employers need to develop programs that foster a sense of belonging among their subordinates. This can be done through cheap and inexpensive ways, such as sending emails encouraging and complimenting their work ethic once a week. Additionally, a well-knit hospital structure can be built by frequent informal events, where connections can be built among employees that are not just based on professional grounds. Such events will promote interaction and form social relationships among employees, which will make them feel a sense of belonging at the workplace.

The strategies mentioned above to improve the workplace environment for healthcare professionals will benefit the employees and the organization in its entirety. In the long-term, healthcare organizations that cater to the well-being of their workers are more likely to have employees who care most about their organization and its status. This is an outcome that every management desires. This can be achieved by ensuring that the professional and personal needs of the employees are met. By reducing workload, a promise of career progression and continuous training programs can help in employees’ personal and professional development, resulting in their well-being. To support employee well-being, it is thus necessary to develop a hospital culture that makes healthcare professionals feel safe and more at home. When hospital culture improvement strategies are correctly mapped out and implemented, the system can achieve more excellent employee retention, less burnout, higher productivity, and employee engagement.

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