Staff must have their basic health and wellness needs met in order to do their best work. A healthy workforce can help your organisation:

• Minimise the cost of absenteeism and LOA
• Reduce stress and burnout-related turnover
• Improve care quality and productivity
• Attract candidates with positive organisational culture

Our top resources to support a culture of staff health and wellbeing:

1. Research Report: Energising the Nursing Workforce — Organisations must overcome two specific hurdles to truly energise staff: prevent burnout and inspire engagement.
   1. Spotlight on Pulssi Practice - Coxa Hospital for Joint Replacement in Finland deployed a tool they call Pulssi (Finnish for “pulse”) to assess staff’s emotional capacity on a more regular basis. Coxa internally developed and designed Pulssi to solicit and analyse real-time feedback on staff’s emotional state on a continuous basis.
2. Research Report: Rebuild the Foundation for a Resilient Workforce — Hospitals and health systems have never been more committed to engagement, retention, and wellness. Yet, nurses around the world are stressed, overworked, and burned out. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, individuals can’t reach their full potential if they are struggling with basic needs. In today’s health care environment, there are unaddressed needs—or “cracks in the foundation”—undermining nurse resilience and leading to burnout. Use the strategies and best practices in this report to repair the four cracks in the foundation of the care environment and build a more resilient nursing workforce.
3. Toolkit: Put an End to Nurse Manager Overload— Nurse managers are finally being recognised for their outsized impact on clinical outcomes and staff performance. But this recognition comes with a high cost; they are so critical to their unit’s performance that nurse managers find themselves overwhelmed by an unrelenting flood of new work. This report outlines the main causes of nurse manager overload and equips executive leaders with five strategies for solving it.
4. Resource: Drive Change ' Without Overloading Managers — On top of an already challenging job with an often unwieldy span of control, today’s managers are also tasked with implementing an overwhelming number of new initiatives. The result is most managers end up overloaded and unable to drive forward organisational change. This report contains four strategies that will help executives increase manager capacity and make change initiatives doable.
   1. Spotlight on Change Calendar — The rapid pace of change can be overwhelming to frontline staff and managers alike—especially when changes impacting workflow seem to be scheduled in silos (without regard to other changes) or are repeatedly presented as one-off initiatives. By strategically spreading activities as evenly as possible across the year and proactively sharing the schedule of planned changes, executives can minimise staff stress and burnout.
5. Research Report: The Data-Driven Prescription for Leader Engagement — If organisations are going to succeed in today's market, they need leaders who are energised and excited by their work. This study offers strategies to solve the top five barriers to manager and director engagement, including how to set guardrails around leaders’ work-life balance.
   1. Spotlight on Practice Evening Email Blackout — The perceived pressure to continually respond to work emails hurts leaders’ work-life balance. An afterhours email blackout that is supported by senior leaders gives all leaders permission to disconnect from work email during certain hours and allows them time to refresh and decompress.
6. Infographic: Understand the Wellness Spectrum — The term "wellness" includes a spectrum of different approaches to employee health. Each approach has different aims and, most importantly, different expected returns. Programs aimed at promoting healthy habits among employees are at one end of the spectrum. These healthy lifestyle initiatives are likely to lead to improved employee engagement and productivity—but they're unlikely to reduce the total cost of care. To do that, you'll need to take a population health approach. Learn the different approaches to wellness and get six steps to apply population health strategies to your employees.— The term "wellness" includes a spectrum of different approaches to employee health. Each approach has different aims and, most importantly, different expected returns. Programs aimed at promoting healthy habits among employees are at one end of the spectrum. These healthy lifestyle initiatives are likely to lead to improved employee engagement and productivity—but they're unlikely to reduce the total cost of care. To do that, you'll need to take a population health approach. Learn the different approaches to wellness and get six steps to apply population health strategies to your employees.
7. Toolkit: The Manager’s Guide to Engaging Staff— Engaged staff don't just enjoy their jobs and their workplace—they're inspired to do their best work, and they're willing to go above and beyond to help their organisation succeed. Not surprisingly, health care organisations with higher levels of staff engagement have higher patient satisfaction scores, better staff retention, and a stronger culture of safety. This toolkit has more than 20 user-friendly tools that will help managers make the most of their opportunities to engage their staff.

Tools to support leaders:

1. Infographic: How to be a less stressed leader — Use this infographic to review effective stress management strategies that can help you become a less-stressed leader.
2. Practice: Picklist to Encourage Leader Paid Leave Use — Workforce leaders evaluate their organisation’s paid leave policy to ensure it does not inadvertently discourage leaders from taking time off. The goal is to encourage leaders to take time off when they need it.
3. Practice: Meeting-Free Calendar Blocks — Senior leaders schedule and champion a regular “meeting-free” time. The goal is to ensure leaders have protected time to complete individual work during business hours.
4. Practice: Evening Email Blackout — The perceived pressure to continually respond to work emails hurts leaders’ work-life balance. An afterhours email blackout that is supported by senior leaders gives all leaders permission to disconnect from work email during certain hours and allows them time to refresh and decompress.

Tools to help leaders support frontline staff:

1. Provide in-the-moment emotional support
   1. Expert Insight: Help Clinician's Prioritise Wellbeing by Integrating it into Their Workflow — Clinicians and leaders know the importance of sustaining their own wellness, but they often feel they don’t have time to take a moment for themselves. Put another way, clinicians almost always prioritise patient care over self-care. If we want to encourage clinicians to prioritise their own wellness, they need self-care tools that are quick, accessible, and fit into their workflow. We talked to three organisations that have done this well. Learn how staff are accessing, utilising, and benefiting from a variety of wellness self-management tools.
   2. Practice: Behavioural Health Emergency Response Team — Learn how one organisation created a rapid response team, made up of staff with behavioural health and de-escalation expertise, to manage all escalating patients in acute psychiatric crisis across the organisation. The goal is to provide in-the-moment support to frontline staff who do not have behavioural health clinical expertise.
   3. Practice: Manager-Triggered Psychological First-Aid — Learn how one organisation created a team of trained clinical and non-clinical staff who can provide on-unit, emotional support to frontline staff immediately following a traumatic incident and connect staff with ongoing support when needed. The goal is to ensure frontline staff receive emotional support to help them cope with traumatic incidents effectively.— Learn how one organisation created a team of trained clinical and non-clinical staff who can provide on-unit, emotional support to frontline staff immediately following a traumatic incident and connect staff with ongoing support when needed. The goal is to ensure frontline staff receive emotional support to help them cope with traumatic incidents effectively.
   4. Practice: Embedded Emotional Support Bundle — Create a bundle of emotional support resources that managers and frontline staff can easily activate for a team member in need. The goal is to provide frontline staff with multiple options to help manage work-related stress—even when they don’t ask for help.
   5. Practice: How Advocate Children's 'bounce back kits' improve nurse resilience
2. Proactively manage sources of burnout
   1. Tool: Compassion Fatigue Assessment — Use this tool to help staff recognize the visible and invisible signs of compassion fatigue, investigate the root causes of compassion fatigue, and seek additional help, if necessary.
   2. Practice: Pulssi — Coxa Hospital for Joint Replacement in Finland deployed a tool they call Pulssi (Finnish for “pulse”) to assess staff’s emotional capacity on a more regular basis. Coxa internally developed and designed Pulssi to solicit and analyse real-time feedback on staff’s emotional state on a continuous basis.
   3. Tool: Individual Stress Assessment — This tool helps you identify how you typically cope with stress at work. It helps you become aware of your “default” stress reaction, so you can recognise it and react productively.
   4. Tool: Change Calendar — This tool helps you schedule and space out changes across the year. It will help you avoid unnecessary overlap of projects to make sure you and staff can dedicate the right amount of time and effort to implementing any initiative effectively.
3. Promote positive team culture
   1. Expert Insight: How to identify hotspots of incivility among staff – Learn how one organisation uses this index to help leaders and staff pinpoint hotspots of incivility—which empowers them to address the issues.