Running head: CASE STUDY 2: CITY CENTER HOSPITAL CASE STUDY 1 3

Running head: CASE STUDY 2: CITY CENTER HOSPITAL CASE STUDY

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CASE STUDY 2: CITY CENTER HOSPITAL CASE STUDY

Case Study 2: City Center Hospital Case Study
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Organizational morale is an endemic challenge facing many healthcare organizations. Low morale increases employee turnover, leading to underperformance and loss of key talent. Center City Hospital (CCH) is a healthcare organization experiencing unprecedented turnover. Low staff turnover, especially among the nursing staff, arises from various interconnected factors, including physicians’ arrogance toward the nurses and bad blood among staff members. Lack of staff morale has catastrophic consequences, including job turnover, low productivity, and low service quality. Therefore, there is an urgent need for leaders at CCH to address the low morale by embracing team bonding and relationship development.

Organizational Problem

Low staff morale is the primary issue facing CCH (Center City Hospital), a large outpatient surgical center in Kansas. The DON (Director of Nursing), HR manager, and the CEO at CCH wants to address low morale concern at the hospital. Since last year, CCH has strived to develop a patient-centric and profit-oriented culture.

Organizational Design

CCH has full-time staffing operations with the CEO, DON, HRM, risk manager, and finance manager at the helm. In addition, CCH has unit managers working full time at different sections of the surgical center. CCH also outsources the nursing staff and hires nurses on the conditional permanent staff. Physicians at CCH are independent contractors hired on contracts renewable annually.

Preliminary Diagnosis and Planning for an Intervention

Proper planning is the beginning point of successful intervention. According to mathematician Pythagoras, “preliminary planning represents half of the whole (Zovio Inc, 2020a).” This philosophical idiom by Pythagoras applies in developing OD (organizational development) interventions. In other words, effective planning is the keystone to successful change management. Effective planning applies a data-based approach (action research model) to diagnose organizational problems to allow permanent implementation of the problems to solve inherent problems.

Discovery Stage

According to the action research model, discovery is the initial phase of change management. In this phase, leaders at CCH should diagnose the problem and identify its primary drivers. According to diagnosis results by the CEO, HRM, and the DON, the nursing staff morale is at the lowest point in the history of CCH. In addition, there is bad blood between nursing staff, physicians, and departmental managers, threatening the organizational mission.

Gathering information about the issue (low staff morale) is also at the initial stage. Leaders at CCH can gather information about low staff morale using surveys and clients’ feedback (Team Building Company, 2022). Information will help to know the problem’s impact on the organization and its essential stakeholders. At CCH, available information shows many concerns arising from the low staff morale. Without staff morale, for example, CCH risks losing vital human capital (human resources), evidenced by the exit of some physicians from the company. Additionally, the unit managers are struggling to address the enormous stress levels among the nurses. According to unit managers’ analysis, unbecoming physician arrogance is to blame for the rising stress levels within the nursing staff across the company.

Intervention Stage

After gathering the data, the next part is to develop an intervention plan. The proposed intervention is to address the leadership gaps facing CCH. CCH will implement a leadership development program across its major units in the next 12 months (Team Building Company, 2022). During planning, leaders should involve the team (physicians and nursing staff) and clients to create an all-rounded and inclusive vision (Zovio Inc, 2020a). Subsequently, this promotes change acceptance and promote dedication toward adopting organizational changes. In addition, the vision demonstrates the articulation of a planned state after implementing change.

Implementation Stage

Adequate support, assistance, and offering necessary resources will be essential during the implementation stage. Managerial support during change implementation goes beyond leading as an example to others (Zovio Inc, 2020c). Instead, it encompasses providing adequate support to the team members. Change management often consumes and involves the diversion of efforts from other activities. Therefore, an organization may require to mobilize resources (money) to sustain change. In addition, moral support and reassuring the team during change execution are also critical towards realizing change goals or objectives.

Consistent monitoring of the change is critical to identifying improvement areas. In addition, monitoring is instrumental in providing feedback to the implementation team and other relevant stakeholders. Through feedback, the team may know whether the change is moving as per the plans.

Intervention Selection

Team bonding and relationship building are the activities selected for the leadership development programs at CCH. According to the scenario analysis, dysfunctional relationship within the interprofessional teams and between the subordinates and the managers is the root cause of the low staff morale (Team Building Company, 2022). For example, physicians disrespect the nurses. Perhaps, the self-importance feelings among physicians may have led the latter to disrespect the nurses and exhibit arrogant behavior. Therefore, CCH must develop relationship-building and bonding skills among the team members.

Relationship building and team bonding are processes whereby team members become closer and cultivate trust. As a result, this alleviates the bond of blood within the team and promotes loyalty, encouraging the staff to work towards shared goals. One effective way CCH can deepen team bonding and relationship development is through regular sharing experiences (Team Building Company, 2022). Strategically, leaders can develop an environment that allows people to share positive and negative experiences. The fun activities include gaming together and luncheons among interprofessional teams and between the leaders and subordinates. Thus, this will break the boundaries that limit people from developing friendships. In addition, if people work as friends, respect and collaboration will improve, fostering job satisfaction and addressing the low staff morale.

Moreover, social chatting and video conferencing are part of the relationship and bonding initiatives to improve staff morale and limit job dissatisfaction (Team Building Company, 2022). In the next 12 months, the leaders could have weekly video conferencing for social chatting with their teams to nurture the bond and cultivate a relationship. During these socialization events, people can share their life experiences and have fun with each other (Rodeghero et al., 2021). Creatively, chatting should be informal to create a friendly environment that allows people to open up about their interests and experiences. People can also exchange contacts when chatting with each other.

Intervention Evaluation

For various reasons, team bonding and relationship development apply to CCH’s case. One primary reason is that relationship building and team bonding are necessary for interprofessional collaboration (Team Building Company, 2022). Interprofessional collaboration among team members from different groups is critical to delivering patient-centered services in a hospital setting. For example, physicians and nurses must collaborate in areas of specialization because their services are complementary. Through collaboration, health professionals can deliver quality services to patients, allowing CCH to realize its patient-centered mission.

Staff happiness is another reason for adopting the proposal above. Undeniably, team bonding and relationship development allow an organization to meet the social and emotional needs of the people (Genkova, 2021). According to Maslow, people must satisfy their social and emotional needs after meeting safety needs (Genkova, 2021). An effective way to meet these needs is to bring a sense of love or belonging through socialization. As a result, staff turnover and job satisfaction will improve with team bonding and relationship development. Staff growth and development at the CCH are also possible with team bonding and relationship building.

Conclusion

Team bonding and relationship development are the keystones to addressing low staff morale and other organizational issues, including job turnover and discord between the staff members across the CCH. Building exceptional staff morale will help CCH improve job satisfaction, lowering staff turnover, and improve service quality. Therefore, addressing the leadership gaps to enhance staff morale at CCH is a great idea that aligns with CCH’s newfound culture and mission.

References

Genkova, D. (2021). Modeling of the Human Needs: An Economic Interpretation of Maslow’s Theory of Motivation. WSEAS Transactions on Business and Economics, 18, 253-264. https://wseas.com/journals/bae/2021/a525107-1063.pdf

Rodeghero, P., Zimmermann, T., Houck, B., & Ford, D. (2021, May). Please turn your cameras on: Remote onboarding of software developers during a pandemic. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP) (pp. 41-50). IEEE. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.08130.pdf

Team Building Company. (2022). Team Building or Team Bonding? https://www.teambuilding.co.uk/theory/team-building-or-team-bonding.html

Zovio Inc. (2020). Action Research: The Checking Phase

Zovio Inc. (2020)b. Action Research: The Doing Phase

Zovio Inc. (2020)c. Action Research: The Planning Phase