LM4W9: Work Environment Assessment Review.
Student Name
Institution
Course Name
Instructor Name
Jan 09, 2021
LM4W9: Work Environment Assessment Review.
The healthcare workplace is among the most stressful environment that demands much attention to details and full delivery of quality service. Patient satisfaction is determined by the degree to which a care professional can manage stress and deliver effectively. Stress management in healthcare is never a single person’s objective, but it requires the collaboration of all staff members and the organization (Clark, 2015; Glembocki et al., 2013). All participants’ interactions determine the level of productivity and job satisfaction, and willingness to do more. In return, healthcare professionals can give quality care while ensuring patient safety and advancing in their careers. However, frequent assessment is always necessary within the organization to identify the aspects that need improvement and the determination of evidence-based interventions. This paper reviews an evidence-based work environment assessment template while analyzing the results and identifying the pre-assessment assumptions. It will also review Clark’s (2015) article that focuses on a conversation that enhances workplace civility, thus relate the information with the assessment data. Finally, the paper will discuss two implementable strategies that from the article that can help improve the assessed organization.
Part 1: Work Environment Assessment
The Work Environment Assessment template was important in understanding the results and making suggestions based on the workplace environment inventory utilization. The inventory is so extensive in examining all aspects with more focus on the involvement of leaders and staff in ensuring that they develop the right working environment and contribute positively to each other’s happiness at the workplace. The template ensures that one identifies existent assumptions and proves that assumptions are always wrong or nonbeneficial. Similarly, the template helps break down the inventory results and gives room for discussion of evidence-based recommendations from well-researched articles.
The core value of the assessment in the template was 74. This indicates that the health of the organization’s work environment is moderate or above average. The score is as a result of having fewer aspects with a score of three or below. With few adjustments, especially on aspects of mentorship programs and teamwork among the employees, the healthy environment will be high, thus leading to increased job satisfaction, productivity, and personal/organizational growth. Despite the excellent score, there is a need for the organization to continuously conduct a quality improvement process that will make sure each aspect score more than four units in each assessment. In healthcare, professionals are not motivated by monetary gain but the nature of their work environment that helps them deliver quality service to patients (Kudo et al., 2010).
Teamwork is always the building block of quality service in healthcare. There is always a degree of dependency with information sharing and collective desire to have each patient restore the normal state of health. I assumed that my organization is built on teamwork due to the free interactions people have. My assumption was proven wrong when I realized that there exist a few collaborations while performing professional duties. The assessment helps identify the cause of this, resulting from the individual reward scheme awarded to top achievers. The organization only motivates individuals and foregoes joint work, and this has created immense intraspecific competition.
Another surprising thing was the lack of mentorship programs in the organization despite the existence of highly skilled professionals and interns. This proved that the organization and individuals do not put maximum consideration on career growth and mastery of skills. This data made me understand that the increased hard work only targeted the reward at a personal level, which is not suitable for the growth of an organization and the satisfaction of patients.
The assessment results suggest that the organization has to emphasize ensuring that staff members appreciate teamwork and take time to learn from others. It should also invest in introducing a mentorship program that will reduce the existent skill differences and promote career growth of the employees. More emphasis should be put on rewarding teams that work together with leaders assigning duties to groups rather than individuals. Despite most of the aspects scoring well in the assessment, very few attained a maximum score value. As such, every aspect should be reviewed and improved. The results also indicate that it’s only through an assessment when one can identify the missing links. Assumptions should be avoided, and more and recent evidence-based interventions should be incorporated with the inclusion of feedback from the employees. Generally speaking, the health and civility of the organization is good but requires further improvement.
Part 2: Literature Review
Clark (2015) indicates that organization leaders and managers have the mandate of ensuring that nurses and other healthcare professionals work in enabling environments that make them feel free to be empowered to communicate freely on issues they encounter, intending to ensure that patient safety and improved quality of service are attained. When this happens, care professionals will also reciprocate by practicing kindness and treating other employees with dignity and respect to contribute to the creation of an ethical environment and civil culture. Clark further states that the type of culture in an organization determines the type of employees recruited, retained, and the stakeholder’s level of satisfaction. The most effective way of reducing cases of incivility is by speaking up in skillful ways. Clark states that mastering effective communication does not happen overnight. There is a need for employees to learn and practice effective communication and utilize it to contribute to the health of the work environment. With intense and deliberate practice with feedback utilization, care providers can become effective communicators. Clark (2015) reports that the essential standards that help in attaining healthy environments include
• shared mission and vision,
• civility among all staff,
• emphasis on all forms of leadership,
• civil conversations among all employees,
• skilled communication and collaborations, and
• effective leadership ( decision making, recruitment of staff, staff recognition, and authentic leadership).
Clark (2015) uses his article to demonstrate all aspects of civil conversation and how existent challenges can be handled. The article also recommends the use of the DESC model in structuring civility conversation.
In his article, Clark (2015) demonstrates that communication is always the driving force of civility in every organization. In the assessment, the absence of my organization indicates that people lack practical communication skills; thus, they are deficient in relaying the information of competitiveness that has prevented their ability to work as a team. Similarly, everyone knows very well that they need to have a fully functional mentorship program. However, they ignore communicating this and lack the interest without realizing that this affects their productivity now and in the future. Clark establishes collaboration as an aspect of a healthy environment. However, the assessment indicates that there is no collaboration, which has promoted the score value. Clark (2018) sees the need for employees to learn all challenges and ways to handle each incidence and train employees to master practical communication skills. The reported procedures need to be harnessed by the organization.
The theory of training care professionals on effective communication can be applied in my organization by introducing weekly learning sessions and mentorship programs. These two will allow the transfer of knowledge and enhance the execution of the learned skills. Similarly, employees should focus on feedback delivery after training and execution of the skills. This will help them reduce the degree of errors as well as promote the practice of the learned skills.
Part 3: Evidence-Based Strategies to Create High-Performance Interprofessional Teams.
As suggested by Clark (2018), the use of evidence-based inventory tools is a strategy that helps in the elimination of assumptions and identification of areas that are less covered. The inventory tolls are usually comprehensive and can be used to identify interventions needed to improve the less covered aspects. The inventory should be used regularly in the assessment as part of a quality improvement process. Similarly, the strategy of civil conversation training is good for my organizational work environment improvement. Employees need to learn when to ask questions, ask questions, and be involved when asking relevant questions. The training should include the utilization of professional communication tutors and mentorship programs from other skilled employees.
The organization needs to incorporate the strategy of team building at regular intervals of the year. This enhances the freedom of socialization among employees and, in return, improves communication skills among them. Furthermore, team-building with team activities demonstrates the importance of collaborations, and this can act s the best avenue of demonstrating why the employees should always work together (Moore et al., 2016). Another strategy includes introducing team rewards for best-performing teams with less emphasis on individual performance (Lu et al., 2019). A mandatory mentorship program should also be made with the introduction of webinars, seminars, and conference sponsorships, which gives the ground for employees to network and identify mentors.
LM4W9: Work Environment Assessment Review
References
Clark, C.M. (November, 2015). Conversations to inspire and promote a more civil workplace: Let’s end the silence that surrounds incivility, American Nurse Today, 10(11), 18-23.
Glembocki, M. M., Fitzpatrick, J. J., & Creative HealthCare Management (Minneapolis, Minn.). (2013). Advancing professional nursing practice: Relationship-based care and the ANA standards of professional nursing practice.
Kudo, Y., Kido, S., Shahzad, M. T., Shida, K., Satoh, T., & Aizawa, Y. (2010). Enhancing work motivation for Japanese female nurses in small to medium-sized private hospitals by analyzing job satisfaction. The Tohoku journal of experimental medicine, 220(3), 237–245. https://doi.org/10.1620/tjem.220.237
Lu, H., Zhao, Y., & While, A. (2019). Job satisfaction among hospital nurses: A literature review. International journal of nursing studies, 94, 21–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2019.01.011
Moore, J. M., Everly, M., & Bauer, R. (2016). Multigenerational Challenges: Team-Building for Positive Clinical Workforce Outcomes. Online journal of issues in nursing, 21(2), 3. https://doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol21No02Man03
Question
Part 1: Work Environment Assessment (1-2 pages)
• Review the Work Environment Assessment Template you completed for this Module’s Discussion (LM4W7)
• Describe the results of the Work Environment Assessment you completed on your workplace.
• Identify two things that surprised you about the results and one idea you believed prior to conducting the Assessment that was confirmed.
• Explain what the results of the Assessment suggest about the health and civility of your workplace.
Part 2: Reviewing the Literature (1-2 pages)
• Briefly describe the theory or concept presented in the article(s) you selected.
• Explain how the theory or concept presented in the article(s) relates to the results of your Work Environment Assessment.
• Explain how your organization could apply the theory highlighted in your selected article(s) to improve organizational health and/or create stronger work teams. Be specific and provide examples.
Part 3: Evidence-Based Strategies to Create High-Performance Interprofessional Teams (1–2 pages)
• Recommend at least two strategies, supported in the literature, that can be implemented to address any shortcomings revealed in your Work Environment Assessment.
• Recommend at least two strategies that can be implemented to bolster successful practices revealed in your Work Environment Assessment
LM4W9: Work Environment Assessment Review