Workforce Woes? 3 Ways Day Health Can Help You Strengthen Your Organization and Engage Your Workforce
Over the past two years, our clients have come to us with a myriad of workforce challenges, from hiring and recruiting to engagement and retention. While COVID-19 has presented challenges for workforces across the globe, these challenges are particularly pronounced in healthcare, where staff continue to battle the pandemic and see increasing levels of stress and burnout. What can healthcare organizations do to ensure the continued health and success of their workforces?
Day Health Strategies recently attended the 32nd Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference in San Diego to facilitate a panel on our recent work with the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers and Caring Health Center to develop and implement a COVID Vaccine Best Practices Playbook for Health Centers. After this panel, we were interested to learn more about how we can support our clients through this challenging time. The theme for this year’s conference was Shared Value, and participants explored how businesses from all sectors can offer value not only to shareholders and customers, but to employees and communities as well.
In the wake of the “Great Resignation,” we see workers demanding more from their jobs than ever before. Here are three lessons learned that Day Health will infuse into our continued work providing strategic guidance and management consulting services to healthcare organizations around the U.S.
1. Strengthen the Link Between Work and Wellbeing
Now more than ever, we can see (and feel) a clear link between our health and wellbeing in work and in all other aspects of our life. It’s time to capitalize on the seismic shifts in the U.S. workforce throughout the pandemic to make permanent changes to our workplaces.
As conference keynote speaker Dr. Eileen McNeely of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health pointed out, we work for so much more than financial stability. There are non-financial, yet essential, ways in which we benefit from work, including:
Lifelong learning
Community and identity
Meaning and purpose.
Research conducted by Dr. McNeely and her colleagues shows that these benefits promote flourishing at work, which in turn promotes flourishing in life. Dr. McNeely suggests that the moment is now for employers to commit to, and measure, wellbeing at work. Through dedicated efforts to promote these other benefits of working, we can strengthen the positive role work can play in shaping our health and wellbeing.
2. Re-Examine Wellbeing Efforts Systematically
Standard approaches to workplace wellness focus on “wellbeing” in a vacuum, for instance, through lunch hour seminars on mental health or highly-incentivized physical exercise programs employees have to jump through hoops to participate in. These programs may be great – but if your organization’s structure and culture don’t promote wellbeing, these efforts may be in vain.
Presenter Rebecca Johnson from ViDL Solutions, a business training consultancy, emphasized that these efforts can be strengthened by examining an organization’s Hierarchy of Needs before launching another ad hoc campaign.
Rather than responding to employee needs with an incentive program that takes up another hour in the week or places additional strain on workers, Johnson coaches that the Organizational Hierarchy of Needs model above is fundamental to understanding and addressing employee needs at more foundational and structural levels. Instead of a band-aid fix, we should look to address underlying causes of stress and burnout, like cultural norms that inhibit work-life balance or poor communication from leadership.
3. Commit to health equity
The final keynote session hosted by Dr. Eduardo Sanchez of the American Heart Association (AHA) featured AHA’s recent report on how employers can drive health equity in the workplace. The report outlines twenty internal and external strategies for achieving health equity at work, and emphasizes that there is a business case, as well as a moral one, for driving towards health equity at work. Health equity improves the health of individuals, families, and communities beyond the four walls of the office, and increases productivity and reduces costs associated with healthcare and absenteeism.
Understanding and actively striving for health equity is essential in creating a workplace where all can be well. Employers can do this by implementing several strategies outlined in the AHA report, including:
Making evaluation processes fair and equitable across all groups and for all employees
Offering affordable healthcare coverage for all employees
Creating a representative leadership team
Adopting anti-racism principles and policies.
As we work with clients to strengthen their workforces and foster wellbeing for employees, we will draw on these three lessons to inform our approach.
Thank you to all those who made this worthwhile conference possible. We look forward to bringing these important lessons into our own workplace and those of our clients to make our communities healthier every day.