According to Lowe (2020), the average working individual usually spends more time at work than any other activity. This is particularly so for healthcare workers who take longer shifts at work. Due to this, the workplace is a key setting for enhancing the health and well-being of individuals. The workplace is essential in supporting workers’ health and well-being; therefore, enterprises are responsible for providing a safe and hazard-free working environment (Cooper et al., 2020).
Maintaining a safe environment can help enterprises reduce employee absenteeism due to injuries and other stressors at work and reduce insurance costs due to fewer work-related injuries and ailments. Overall, a safe, healthy workplace fosters employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. My workplace had a score of 84 on the Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory. This means the working environment is moderately healthy. My workplace scored high points in the areas of teamwork, employee training, and opportunities for employee advancement. However, the workplace scored lower points on employee compensation and diversity.
Although the workplace is not very diverse, and I think employees should be paid more for their work, I think there is a high degree of civility. Incivility cases are not common. For example, arguments between workers or between patients and workers are rare. Employees treat their colleagues and patients cordially and respectfully. Employees work in inter-professional teams, which promotes collaboration; this has been essential in promoting civility as different professionals have to coordinate their efforts to reach a common goal, which is to enhance the health outcomes of patients (Efendi et al., 2019).
One of the rare occasions I witnessed was when an experienced nurse verbally abused a nurse undergoing her preceptorship program. The nurse who had been on the day shift was requested to extend her shift to help out with victims of a grisly road accident. The experienced nurse claimed that the younger nurse on preceptorship was lazy and needed to get more active to help out with the situation. Thankfully, the nurse manager was nearby and intervened before the situation got out of hand.
Although the experienced nurse was stressed out after extending her shift, she was wrong in verbally abusing the new nurse who was learning how to do her duties. The nurse manager engaged the perpetrator of the abuse and had her immediately apologize to the new nurse. In addition, she was requested to take a mandatory 2-hour online refresher lesson on how to handle incivility at the workplace. This lesson is available for all nurses on the organization’s website to remind us how to handle themselves in case of disputes and other types of incivility at work.
Reference
Cooper, A. L., Brown, J. A., Rees, C. S., & Leslie, G. D. (2020). Nurse resilience: A concept analysis. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 29(4), 553–575. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12721
Efendi, F., Kurniati, A., Bushy, A., & Gunawan, J. (2019). Concept analysis of nurse retention. Nursing &Amp; Health Sciences, 21(4), 422–427. https://doi.org/10.1111/nhs.12629
Lowe, G. (2020). Creating healthy organizations. In Creating Healthy Organizations. University of Toronto Press.
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