As an HR Director, how do you best build connections for healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic?
A year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic and the world is seeing progress in some respects and backsliding in others. Pandemic fatigue is a reality for many and ongoing high levels of anxiety and stress are leading to burnout — especially when it comes to healthcare professionals.
With the pandemic dragging on and a resurgence of COVID cases due to the Delta variant, healthcare workers around the globe are overworked, stressed, and exhausted. As an HR Director in the healthcare industry, what can you do to help your employees?
For the wellbeing of your staff — and the patients they are entrusted to care for — building connections for healthcare professionals should be one of your priorities. If your employees are going to provide quality care amidst today’s many challenges, it’s critical they be connected to and communicate well with one another.
How to Build Connections for Healthcare Professionals as an HR Director
Acknowledge Burnout & Increase Mental Health Resources
Ignoring the elephant in the room will make building connections for healthcare professionals an uphill battle. Your staff is likely struggling with burnout. If an employee isn’t struggling with it now, they may be soon. And employees who are burnt out cannot connect to or communicate well with one another. Acknowledge burnout to yourself and to them.
Then, your next step must be increasing mental health resources however possible. No one knows how long this pandemic will continue, so those in the healthcare industry must be honest with themselves about what they need to be the caregivers the world so desperately requires.
Some ideas include offering unlimited telephonic counseling and creating a convenient mental health space on campus. For instance, “The Lavender Room” at the Ellis Hospital in New York provides healthcare workers a place of tranquility and silence set away from patient care.
Improve Communication With Workshops & Intentional Design
Effective communication is an essential ingredient of success. The challenge most organizations face is not understanding the complexities of effective communication. Poor communication increases conflict and loss of productivity, which in a healthcare setting can literally be the difference between life or death.
Effective communication is a skill that many people simply need to learn. True Colors International will customize our Communication Workshop to best meet your organization’s needs. We will provide you with the tools and strategies required to dissolve communication barriers and improve collaboration amongst your healthcare professionals.
Additionally, if your organization is undergoing any building renovations or new construction, encourage that it be designed to best enable communication. With some intention, healthcare settings can be specifically designed to improve collaboration and as a result improve patient care. At a time when healthcare organizations are rethinking their campuses due to hybrid work and the growing use of video visits, you may have the perfect opportunity to influence positive workspace changes for your staff.
Make Teamwork a Focal Point of Your Organization
A Regis College article on building an effective team in a healthcare setting explains a shift in thinking for the healthcare industry:
“The medical community has come to understand the collaboration required among [physicians and advanced practitioners] to improve patient outcomes, especially in the contemporary healthcare setting where service demand is on a steep rise. To fulfill this objective, healthcare leaders focus on fostering teamwork in the workplace to reduce medical errors and improve patient outcomes.”
More than ever healthcare requires collaboration and making teamwork a focal point is one way of building connections for healthcare professionals. True Colors’ Team Building Workshop can help further improve your staff member’s communication skills, teach them how to effectively
work with different personality types, and increase levels of trust and engagement within your team.
Building Connections for Healthcare Professionals is a Way to Support One Another in the Field
Only those working in the field of healthcare truly understand the weight this pandemic is forcing medical professionals to carry. Improved connections and collaborations are a way to better shoulder the heavy burden: Together. This pandemic will in time pass, do what you can to help your staff get through the challenges that each new day presents.
