The importance of strong leadership as it relates to healthy work environments must not be overlooked. Leaders can serve both as role models and support persons for staff who present questions, and feedback regarding the unit. Leaders can also serve as advocates by sharing their concerns with managerial staff members to implement new policies that address important issues.
After interviewing employees about their leaders, Vidman and Stromberg (2020), found that employees were more concerned about the leader’s impact on change in the workplace rather than the leader’s own personality. The feeling of working in a healthy environment results from having confidence that the leader acts in the best interest of the organization and if the leader is a responsible person “with confidence and ability to manage change through trustful interaction” (para. 22). This shows that employees are more concerned about how the leaders can impact the organization, rather than who they are as people.
According to Kupperschmidt et. al. (2010), “Healthy work environments are healing, empowering environments that have been correlated with employee engagement and organizational commitment. These environments are characterized by a high level of trust between management and employees” (para. 1). By listening to staff nurses’ concerns and needs, leaders can communicate with management and adopt new policies to combat issues in the workplace. In doing so, leaders will gain trust and thus foster a healthy work environment.
My charge nurse from the previous facility at which I worked shared safety concerns with managers and contributed to beneficial changes in the unit. For example, we discussed how the nightshift was so incredibly short staffed meanwhile the day shift had a plethora of nurses. We suggested starting hiring more night-shift travelers because at the time the only travelers they had been hiring were working the day shift. After my charge nurse discussed this with managers, we soon had not only two new night shift travelers, but she actually brought one of the day shift nurses back to nights as well. The manager also implemented an incentive for all nurses to have the opportunity to pick up more night shifts for more pay.
This helped us tremendously because staffing and patient safety improved. Morale in the unit also increased because we felt as though our struggles were actually being heard and addressed. We truly felt the impact of how beneficial leadership can be when managers put the right people in charge. According to Broome and Marshall (2021), leaders must be “grounded in a set of ethics or core values that guide human behaviors and actions” (p. 8). By advocating for fellow nurses, leaders are not only role models, but also vital members of the healthcare team who are relied on by so many.
References
Broome, M., & Marshall, E. S. (2021). Transformational leadership in nursing: From expert clinician to influential leader (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Springer.
Kupperschmidt, B., Kientz, E., Ward, J., Reinholz, B., (Jan. 31, 2010) “A Healthy Work Environment: It Begins With You” OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing Vol. 15, No. 1, Manuscript 3.
Vidman, Å., & Strömberg, A. (2020). Leadership for a healthy work environment – a question about who, what and how. Leadership in health services (Bradford, England), 34(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHS-06-2020-0041
Order this paper