Healing Ecosystem Component 2 – Does Attending to Climate Enhance Well-being?
In our last post, we introduced the second component of a workplace healing ecosystem: climate. As we noted, thinking about what climate means and how to work on it may seem more ambiguous than working on organizational structure, which might then discourage anyone from tackling climate as a means to improve well-being at work. In addition, it’s natural to wonder whether focusing on something as diffuse as climate can have an impact.
An example illustrating the power and impact of working on climate to promote healing and well-being at work comes from a series of initiatives I had the pleasure of working on with multiple colleagues from 2013-2017 at one of my prior employers: University of Colorado. Our relatively large clinical group (50-100 people) decided after a strategic planning retreat to focus largely on climate, in part because making major structural change proved challenging or seemed impossible at the time and, shortly after the retreat, we found ourselves amidst a leadership transition between chiefs of the service line. Notably, we pursued this work without explicit support from senior leaders in our institution and we avoided individually targeted well-being efforts based on feedback from our group at the time that “requiring resilience activities is like blaming the victim.” In other words, in the healing ecosystem model (structure, climate, individuals, and leadership), we only had one viable choice about where to start!
A number of our first steps focused explicitly on the emotional experience of work. We developed a formal mechanism, which we called “Something Awesome”, for any group member to share the experience of positive emotions during daily work (eg, gratitude, amusement, inspiration, and awe while seeing patients or leading meetings) for five minutes at the beginning of monthly group meetings. This marked a major shift, as previously we started those meetings with a review of group workload and financial performance for the prior month (topics that did not always provoke positive emotions). We also created a Collaborative Case Review process, which allowed our members to 1) submit clinical cases that had generated a concern for them or others working in the hospital and 2) engage in a supportive, non-punitive discussion and coaching session among a group peers. And we created Above and Beyond Awards, a mechanism through which members could call out a peer for doing something that positively impacted a colleague at work, write a paragraph about how the nominee created that positive impact, and distribute to the entire group an email naming each award winner and what that person’s nominator had written.
In the end, we eventually did find ways to work on the other three components of the healing ecosystem, but we would not have been able to do this without the credibility, positive momentum, and impact that came from working on climate. And the impact was profound. Despite rapid clinical growth and expansion of the group by nearly two dozen members as we did the work above — a major source of turbulence in many organizations — by focusing on creating a more positive climate, the group was able to impact a wide variety of performance metrics. The division achieved the highest quality and safety performance of all service lines in the hospital over the period above, reduced burnout among group members by 27%, increased measures of psychological safety by 70%, and cut turnover by 50%. In other words, like the primary care group described in our post on structure (insert link to blog post 3 here), by focusing on climate this group was able to make a difference in well-being metrics. In doing so, they shifted their workplace down the spectrum, away from a place of distress and toward a healing ecosystem.
In our next blog post, we’ll turn to the importance and role of individuals – another important lever for cultivating healing ecosystems in our workplaces.