Have you ever received or completed a performance evaluation that had no meaning or input regarding how you or your employee was actually performing? In the last ten years, organizational functions that are responsible for performance management and employee evaluations have taken a step back and re-evaluated their approaches to this process.
Are you a charge nurse? A Recruitment Manager? A laboratory head? Or do you know someone who is?
These are the leaders who are in the middle management. They are not CEO’s and directors. They are not staff either. But they stand somewhere in between these extreme levels in the hierarchy. While it’s true that being in the position carries with itself some prestige, honor and a pay grade higher than those of the staff, lives of middle managers aren’t at all that easy.
When there is talk about hierarchy in the healthcare setting, it is more than just the structure of an organization. Hierarchy is often highly associated with ego, power, status and even money. A lot of health care workers complain about a one-sided flow of communication, with a focus on following orders and protocols, and less on finding solutions as a team
When you think of the word health care, what comes to mind? I bet that there will be myriad answers. Why? Because the health care as an industry is expansive. Health care has always been a complex inter-weaving of providers, patients, consumers, regulations, and job-related functions from organizational shareholders within a company to employees completing direct task related job responsibilities.
Whether you view them as a melting pot or a smorgasbord, your workforce, your competition, and your customer base are all becoming more diverse by the minute. How do you cook up a team and a kind of service that will appeal to everyone at the table and still be ahead in the race towards becoming a high-reliability organization?
Internal communication.
It is the web that holds everything in an organization together. Sending and receiving meaningful messages is integral to an organization as air is vital to human survival. It is the bottom line of all systems, processes, and workflows. It is the common connection that keeps people working together. Here's a symptom checker for your internal communication system to see where your organization stands.
There cannot be positive change unless a group of dedicated people act accordingly and work strongly towards a single vision. If we are to make one thing as a common denominator that would highly benefit transformation efforts, I would have to say look into the advantages of collaboration tools. What qualities should you be looking for in a collaboration tool?
The power of employee recognition in achieving organizational excellence is universally recognized in many types of organizations. Recognition drives productivity and reinforces and rewards positive behaviors and outcomes. The primary purpose of employee recognition is to foster engagement and to see tasks and accomplishments that garnered credit repeatedly done over time. It creates a clear picture of the right culture that leads to the attainment of goals. Having recognition programs is not enough. There are ways on how to properly recognize employees.
Most of us in the workforce have been in a situation where bullying has taken place. We either stood as a witness, as a confidante or have been the victim ourselves. Bullying is very much apparent in the workplace with a whopping national prevalence of 72% of the workers being in the know-how that bullying happens. The wreckage it brings doesn’t end in the workplace. The target, physically and psychologically tormented, brings his ordeal home with him.
As adults, we may have marveled at how young children fight each other one minute and then become the best of friends the next as if nothing ever happened. In our relationships at home and at work, we wonder if we can take forgiveness in this simplest form like children do, and carry on with our tasks with the same unwavering enthusiasm as we have before the conflict. Is there a place for forgiveness at work?
Employee engagement is a much-celebrated word in HR today. Many studies attest to its power to transform an organization and achieve goals. At the other end of the workforce pole, is disengagement. What are the causes and effects of disengagement? Are healthcare organizations prepared to pay the hefty price of failing to engage employees?
The Theranos saga is a story of an organization that went through a period of unprecedented success for more than ten years only to experience a very sharp decline in less than a year. The sudden turn of events led to the closure of most of its firms. While the internet feasted on its intriguing story, many organizations looked into why the downfall happened and extracted valuable lessons that could help prevent similar incidences in the future.
The healthcare delivery system must have a more strategic communication system designed to give immediate feedback. In most organizations, efforts are already in place or are underway to improve communication and collaboration through the use of the latest technology available. But the question is, are they specifically meeting nurses’ needs?
As a leader in healthcare transformation for many years, I often wonder why the healthcare industry lags behind the aviation industry or the car manufacturing companies when it comes to strategies to becoming high-reliability organizations. These industries’ drive to perfection and peak efficiency while maintaining safety is recognized worldwide by all other industries. They do it so well, it makes me think what prevents us from becoming so, and what processes do we need to be like them.
