Four Safe Places Every Healthcare Enterprise Should Establish

A huge part of mental health is having safe places to go, not only in the physical sense but in a softer wellness context. Healthcare enterprises may at times pay lip service to such oases, but given the hectic nature of the industry, persistence can fade and, as in the desert, the oasis may disappear as one gets closer.

While I consider myself a student of emotional intelligence and an occasional practitioner, I am by no means qualified to be a Chief Wellness Officer. But as a professor and researcher, I have become obsessed with how enterprises create safe places to work in an “emotional fortification” respect.

My friends and family are tired of hearing how much I dislike “Hallmark Holidays” in healthcare. But I’m making an exception with Mental Health Week, if only to amplify for seven days what we need to continue to do the other 358 days of the year.

Finally, I know as you read this you will, and should, say “Oh wait, why didn’t he include THIS safe place?” There are clearly dozens to choose from, but hopefully, in the spirit of collaboration, you will add to my admittedly spartan teaser list or reinforce the four I have chosen for this piece.

1. A Safe Place to Fail

Perhaps a “safe place to innovate” would be a more optimistic way of naming it, but the fact is that failure is a critical aspect of creativity and innovation. Healthcare enterprises that instill risk-reward structures find that they not only gain competitive advantages, but they also develop greater satisfaction in their workforce.

We can think back on our careers about the negative effects on morale of being afraid to try something new for the betterment of our department, company, or customers/patients. Many of the most talented managers I’ve worked with will actually build risk-taking into employee’s KPI’s and comp plans to ensure they are not settling for the status quo  .

2. A Safe Place to Be Emotional

Many wellness leaders in healthcare have a sobering mantra: “Hurt people hurt people”!

Healthcare workforce shortages can be directly attributed to employees’ not feeling safe to be emotional. One of the more popular mental health mottos from Olympic athletes has become “It’s OK to not be OK.” Not unlike airline pilots, healthcare workers are terrified that showing emotion or weakness will result in a blemish on their record and an inability to do the high-performance jobs they love. As a result, we see the number of physicians thinking about or actually committing suicide at all-time highs.

This is not to say that senior managers must now do the work of social workers or counselors to deal with emotional employees. But it does mean that healthcare leadership must send a clear signal that there is a clear vision for preventing and treating burnout of any kind to avoid losing the most talented employees.

3. A Safe Place to be Different

While this safe place is most true in every sense as related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, there is a “different kind of different” that is equally important and sometimes gets ignored. Regardless of race or gender orientation, many of the most talented employees simply think and act differently. Before entering healthcare, I spent decades in the media and advertising business where recruiting and retaining talent that marched to a different drummer was critical to competitive advantage. Those in healthcare IT have experienced dev-ops teams, data scientists, and AI coders who, if they weren’t a bit different in the way they think, would not be as good at their job.

That said, having a management team that understands the peculiarities and can inspire employees to be even more different (in a constructive way) is critical to healthcare innovation. I harken back to my “a safe place to fail” section above.

4. A Safe Place to Dissent

 I’ve had the interesting opportunity in my consulting career to do nothing else than to be a contracted skeptic and contrarian. Why would a company pay to have someone do nothing but disagree? The answer is simple. Their own management and employees are too scared to do it.

The Sunday morning talk shows confirm the fact that America is an argumentative society. In fact, there was a seminal book entitled The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen that detailed these tendencies.

However many healthcare enterprises barely tolerate dissent or contrarianism, no less encourage it. In my case, they outsourced it to me!

Yet the healthcare industry thrives on patient satisfaction surveys where the “customers” are encouraged to dissent for the betterment of the enterprise. They also take to heart the calls into helplines and contact centers, because they’re from the outside. Unfortunately, their dissent is retrospective when many frontline workers may be fearful of bringing up the causes in advance.

The solution is to formalize skepticism at the beginning of every key initiative. Bake it into the ideation process and provide incentives for contributing constructive criticism before the proverbial bug needs to be positioned as a feature. If the workforce is too ambivalent to do this in a public forum internally, find a way to anonymize it as it could be the difference between success, failure and financial losses.

As you think back across all these safe places, think about how each of these applies to information technology.

Whether it be failure, emotion, being different, or dissent each of these has a role in digital transformation. Technology could be the cause or the solution for each.

In fact, I would argue that as generative AI takes a more sentient place in the healthcare enterprise, I may be losing my contract jobs as a skeptic to a grumpy algorithm!