A good workplace environment contributes to successful health quality outcomes and performances. Patient satisfaction, work efficiency, patient safety, and effectiveness of care are some outcomes that rely on the conduciveness of the workplace environment. Interactions among healthcare professionals are a major contributory factor in ensuring these outcomes are effectively achieved. Therefore, workplace civility can be used to assess a health organization to meet quality standards and ensure that nurses achieve professional and ethical standards.
My organization is a health institution that offers both preventive and curative health services. The organization employs nurses and other healthcare professionals of various cadres and experiences that interact together to facilitate a health system. Using the Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory, I conducted a workplace environment assessment for my health organization. This paper aims to describe the outcomes of this assessment, propose theories and concepts to improve organization outcomes based on this assessment, review current literature, and recommend evidence-based improvement strategies.
Results of the Work Environment Assessment
The Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory is a tool that contains a 20-question assessment using rated Linkert scale options for assessment of the health of the workplace environment. The higher the scores, the healthier the work environment. The highest possible score is 100, while the least possible score is 20. The overall score of the Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory for my organization was 69. This was rated as a ‘barely healthy’ work environment. The poorly scored items were about communication with employees, employee engagement, employee retention, an opportunity for career and professional advancement, workload distribution, employee health and wellness, and employee mentorship.
Outstanding Outcomes About the Results
Among the highly rated outcomes of this assessment were trust, respect, collegiality, appreciation of achievements, teamwork, collaboration, availability of resources for professional growth, and compensation. Two outcomes that surprised me were employees’ confidence in recommending the organization to family and relatives despite the low ratings in the health of the workplace environment and employees reporting a high level of trust and respect between the formal leadership and teams. These results were surprising because they portray some level of intrapersonal conflict among the employees themselves about their views of the organization.
There have indeed been few conflicts within the organization, and the few that have occurred have been solved amicably and effectively. However, some employees still believe that there are bare healthy civility practices within the organization’s workplace environment. The scores regarding employee wellness and self-care confirmed my preassessment expectations. The organization lacks well-laid-down strategies to manage employee stress. This was also evident in the workload stress scores, low employee satisfaction, and low employee engagement outcomes from this assessment.
Significance of the Assessment Results
These results showed that the organizational workplace environment health regarding civility is still barely healthy. According to Clark (2015), a healthy work environment requires shared organizational goals and vision, civility at the individual, team, and organizational levels, leadership, and civility conversations amongst all stakeholders. The results of the assessment showed that my organizational workplace performed better mainly only in items on organizational goals but dismally on other elements thus, the overall result was a ‘bare health.’ Using these results as the basis of assessment of my workplace health, there is evidence of the need to improve workplace civility and health.
Relevant Evidence on a Selected Theoretical Framework
Griffin & Clark (2014) presented a review of oppression theory. This theory relates well to the health of the workplace environment. This is based on oppressed group behaviors described by Freire’s work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in 1971. In this theory, a group of individuals who feel oppressed tends to feel marginalized and show certain behaviors that portray them as controlled by those they perceive to wield power over them.
Concerning nursing practice, this theory explains that nurses who experience workplace incivility lack control over their workplace environment, making them vulnerable to oppressed group behaviors (Griffin & Clark, 2014). Oppressed group behaviors include not speaking up and transferring these negative impacts to others. Therefo
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