Wellness/Well-Being Programs to Address Staff Burnout

Arlene,

I fully support Kiron's point.
The best cure for burnout is to establish a culture at work that supports people to emotionally and safely engage with their work.
And this needs leadership from the top.

Thomas

Arlene -

Band-aid programs usually have limited if not no value. You have to go back to the basics of what inspires and engages people.

If there isn't psychological safety, rewards/recognition, a sense of purpose, a chance to grow one's skills and some autonomy over how work gets done, folks will disengage regardless of the wellness programs provided.

Kiron

Our Canadian province is losing physicians and, in some cases, physicians are choosing to reduce their workload (i.e. clients) to deal or avoid burnout. The province is trying to move to a less physician-centric health care delivery model. The idea is to integrate the various health care practitioners into teams.

This is still work in progress and I suspect it may take years before it can truly have an impact on reducing stress and burnouts across all health care practitioners.

From a more general perspective, I find employer-sponsored wellness initiatives can go a long way. One of my employer covered 50% of employee's fitness centre memberships. Another employer, offered its own fitness centre at minimal cost to its employees. I found both initiatives a great motivator to fit wellness in my life.

recreational events: fun day, ice cream truck hours, after work evenings, etc.

Hi Kiron,
I totally agree with you. Bandaids do not work on a short-term or long-term basis. We administer surveys with actionable results to make sure that we take the pulse of the staff at certain points in terms of interests and needs. Yes, psychological safety, meaningful work, and work autonomy are certainly important to make the staff experience better in the organization. What specific activities/steps that you did in your organization to work towards these significant elements? Thank you.

Thank you for the Emotional Intelligence (EQ) component of Wellness. Yes, this is definitely an important part of wellness. In your experience, what was the best way for EQ to be delivered and accepted by your team members in the organization. Do you want to share the activities and steps that you did in the organization post-survey to achieve towards EQ? Thanks.

I would recommend looking at people like Ruth Pearce (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-pearce-projectmotivator/). Ruth has several short classes on LinkedIn Learning that may be of value.

Arlene -

It starts with educating the leadership team on the importance of these ingredients and the baking them into the working agreements which the leadership team lives by. Working with governance/oversight groups to focus on the "what" rather than the "how" can start to provide teams with greater autonomy. And regular, anonymized surveys to take the pulse of the staff for things like safety will be helpful.

Kiron

Cian, thank you so much for the reference/ link. Will definitely take a look at this and your research.