Is your team resilient? Five Upstream tips to guide your resiliency strategy.

Disruption in Real-Time

Leaders in all organizations have been forced to react swiftly to external forces that have no regard for a static mindset and an “it’s always been done this way” attitude. For some, this is a welcome opportunity to innovate on the fly. For others, it’s a daily struggle to fight inevitable change and to desperately cling to the old ways as a means for finding stability in a dynamically changing world. Meanwhile, employees are grappling with their own personal and professional uncertainties associated with such profound disruption.

Unintended Consequences

Since March 2020, healthcare workers have been asked to go above and beyond their normal responsibilities with no end in sight. Those on the frontline of caring for patients with Covid-19 have compared the situation to that of being a war medic. They’re having to adapt to working without critical PPE (personal protective equipment), they’re having to suppress their own fears of getting sick and protecting their own families, they’re having to make decisions of who should be prioritized for a ventilator when demand surges beyond resource availability and they’re having to see patients die without access to a loved one. The tools and resources being created ad hoc are a necessary means to weather this storm. However, they will have unintentional consequences that could exacerbate the resilience problem long-term. 

And frontline workers are just one example of a stakeholder type. There are many other stakeholders across healthcare and adjacent industries that are being impacted as well; from those in the supply chain under extreme demand pressures, to scientists scrambling for a cure, to leaders who are trying desperately to maintain healthy and motivated workforces.

Categorical Contributors to Burnout

Based on our experience at Upstream, we prioritized the top 3 categorical contributors to stress and burnout that your organization is responding to (intentionally or unintentionally) at this very moment: 

Intense Emotional Events 

The death of a patient is an obvious example of an event that has a tremendous emotional toll on providers. In the midst of a pandemic, that intense emotional event could be experienced numerous times per day, intensifying the typical stress on a provider by orders of magnitude.    

Time Based Pressures

Frontline workers are under extraordinary time-based pressures right now -  from being overburdened by patient-load and compensating for staffing shortages; to managing increased length and frequency of shifts; to struggling with internal processes that have not been optimized.  

Cumulative Effects of Ongoing Stressors

It’s important to also consider a broader time horizon when understanding stress and burnout. Although it may seem like it happens all at once, there are ongoing stressors that build up over days, weeks and even careers. Understand that this point in time will be a key moment along that journey

So, what can your organization do about it?

Upstream’s recommendation, in the midst of this chaos, is to run parallel paths in your effort to support internal team members and end beneficiaries. The first path is purely reactionary, providing support and resources in real-time for those forced to adapt to the rapidly changing world around them. It’s likely that the vast majority of organizations are on this singular path currently. 

But the second path is just as critical, yet staggeringly overlooked. The second path is a considered, human-centered approach to understanding needs, desires, motivations and influences in the context of a changing world. It’s the second path that gives us a longitudinal perspective on the contributors to burnout and arms us with the insight needed to design appropriate tools and strategies to support behavioral resilience across multiple time horizons and stakeholder groups. 

Here are five key questions to answer in developing your own human-centered resilience strategy:

1. What are your organization’s biggest contributors to stress and burnout?

   By engaging team members across functional roles and hierarchy, you will identify contributors across a myriad of areas - processes, situations / events, environments, culture, team dynamics, metrics - all of which are unique and specific to your organization.

2. How are different stakeholders across your organization affected by those top contributors?

   You will find that the contributors will be ranked differently according to stakeholder roles / functions within your organization. For example, those on the frontline will be affected by situations / events involving patients while those in procurement will be more affected by process or metrics.

3. Who should you invite to the solutioning process?

   There’s not a one size fits all solution to solving for resiliency. The best way to solve this challenge is to invite those who are most affected to the table. You’ll find that inviting stakeholders into the solutioning process is not only efficient, it’s also therapeutic and demonstrates that the organization is serious about solving the issue. Since resiliency is a sensitive topic, this process will also provide guidance on what is appropriate for the organization to provide in terms of solutions and reveal the boundaries where the organization should not overstep its role.

4. What type of solutions should you explore?

   There are many studied levers to improve resiliency, however Agency, Coping Ability, and Partnering will likely be a few to consider for maximizing impact. Which levers you apply should ultimately be determined by the underlying causes of stress and the unique needs of stakeholders.

5. What solutions should you prioritize in the near term?

   There’s no doubt that a lot of ideas will be generated around what the organization should do but they don’t all have to be done immediately. Having a mechanism for prioritizing ideas based on impact and feasibility will help you to identify what is essential to address now and what can be put on your roadmap over a longer time horizon, keeping your team resilient through times of extreme stress and able to thrive afterward.

Taking time to work through these key questions will help your organization avoid losses in productivity and reduce errors as a result of employee burnout. Prioritizing these questions now will keep your team members resilient and will save you from even more significant challenges down the road.

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Contact Upstream to help you answer these key questions and develop a custom resilience strategy for your organization.