Healing Health Care Workplace Cultures

CHALLENGE

Labor shortages and clinician burnout, amplified in the American health care industry by persistent regulatory and workforce changes, left health care employers uniquely challenged in 2019 to deliver excellent care through highly reliable teams despite heavy turnover and disengagement, team dysfunction, and managers (whether novice or tenured) who struggled to effectively motivate increasingly diverse teams. In addition, the escalating demand for tasks that distract from empathetic patient interactions and diminish coworker collaboration, such as electronic medical record maintenance, palpably threatened the cultural mission. Health care leaders, grappling with these challenges, cried out for enhanced attention to workplace civility in the shadow of #MeTooHealthCare/#MeTooMedicine and scientific associations' increased scrutiny on workplace culture and leadership accountability for nurturing inclusive, nondisruptive, and professional workplace behaviors.

SOLUTION

Because data shows that patient outcomes improve when teams are working well together, and because verdicts in employment litigations continued to climb, insurers and health care executives collaborated to identify the need for—and then to establish—a new grant dedicated to funding enhanced in-person, interactive training focused on workplace civility. The grant's teachings cascaded from leadership down to mid-management and out to the front lines, and highlighted resonant "real world" scenarios that co-workers discussed and debated in each session. Seyfarth was honored to be selected to deliver all of the grant-funded sessions.

RESULTS

Collaborating with training subsidiary Seyfarth At Work, Seyfarth attorneys developed, customized, and delivered the training to hundreds of board members, C-suite executives, and clinical leadership at all of the major medical centers and physician practices in metro Boston. The highly praised trainings serve as the door-opener for ongoing dialogue between physician practices, the academic medical centers and other facilities at which they are granted privileges, the medical schools that educate trainees, and the supporting staffs who help them succeed in delivering world-class patient care. Co-workers, wherever they hail from, now share a common language and set of accountabilities from this grant-funded training that enable them to set the tone for workplace civility, empowering bystanders and upstanding citizens throughout New England's preeminent health care community. Likewise, health care leadership is better equipped to step in and respond when workplace civility concerns threaten to impair patient care and worker well-being.