Tune in now to the latest Moments Move Us episode with Rhonda Brandon, SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer at Duke University Health System 🎧
Wambi has been named one of “Best Fit” Mental Health Services & Solutions by ANA\California.
Real-time recognition is the driving force of the Wambi platform. Our holistic solution impacts patients, frontline staff, and every member of your organization.
Our innovative employee recognition solution leverages gamification to positively transform the employee experience. Calculate your ROI, explore data insights, and read more about our success stories.
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Rise & Lead with Rhonda Brandon
Of the many lessons gleaned during the pandemic, one of the most profound is the importance of human connection. Human connection is vital in the promotion of health and wellbeing, not only for patients, but also for those that provide the care. In the context of healthcare, empathy indicates the presence of connection, while loneliness depicts the absence of connection. Over the past year, we’ve seen an uptick of loneliness within healthcare ecosystems. Between social distancing, masking, reduced visitation, and the overall limitations around opportunities to connect, COVID accelerated the feelings of loneliness and lack of connection that already pervaded our modern lifestyles pre-pandemic. The state of isolation precipitated by the pandemic has been the perfect breeding ground for loneliness.
Experts agree the #1 solution for addressing burnout, whether spurred by the lack of connection or high turnover, is to create positive work environments and develop opportunities for clinicians to give and receive meaningful recognition from peers, patients, and their families alike. It is crucial for healthcare leaders to provide a bridge between their team members and patients and families that is mutually beneficial to the wellbeing of both parties. And investing in a recognition system like Wambi, a solution designed specifically with the needs of the healthcare community in mind, is proven to mitigate the experience of loneliness and drive empathy among healthcare organizations. Here are more recommendations to strengthen human connection among staff and lend to better care operations:
It’s not enough to have a recognition program in place. In order to enact lasting, transformational change at your organization, an adoption plan must be shared out organizationally. Leaders can introduce a roadmap for how your recognition system works as early as the onboarding stage, as well as carve time out daily or weekly for veteran staff to devote to 15-minutes of recognizing a colleague. A user who is a nurse leader reads a Wambi every week at team huddles to celebrate the individual and establish a feeling of gratitude among all team members. When you standardize recognition practices org-wide, you are telling your staff that recognition is a priority.
We’ve learned from past healthcare experience panels that targeted intervention programs are needed to mitigate burnout. On top of the social isolation, team members have expressed frustration in not having enough resources to help them handle their emotional needs. Educating team members through formal and expert-led skills trainings will only improve the quality of care at your hospital ecosystem, thereby improving feelings of isolation that tend to surface during volatile times. These well-being trainings, especially ones that develop and nurture emotional intelligence, teach team members coping mechanisms to better handle crisis while giving them a framework for how to be more empathetic.
A powerful way for your team members to improve active listening towards their patients’ stories is by witnessing their leaders displaying the same kind of undivided intention to their concerns.
Discuss the role emotional intelligence plays in shaping experience with patients and among colleagues. Remind your staff to actively listen to their patients, and of its influence on patient health.
Human connections are key to the promotion of health and prevention of illness; conversely, illness can deteriorate those connections. Healthcare professional–patient relationships are key to ensuring the preservation of adequate human interactions. It is important for healthcare professionals to continually develop their ability to foster gratifying human connections because they provide social support for patients during their time of need, and they help prevent work-related stress. By focusing on this basic human need, you can improve the human experience for all.
How do you welcome and integrate new employees into the fabric of your workplace? What can you do to make your onboarding feel meaningful? Human resource experts ERE Media disclosed that 67% of companies do not offer any kind of recognition during onboarding. Ensuring an excellent onboarding experience is key to your employee engagement and retention strategy. When new team members feel immediate connection to your organizational values and their team from day one, they are poised for long-term success.
To transform onboarding and orientation from a stressful time into a welcoming experience, leverage an established recognition platform like Wambi. Recognition platforms perfectly complement your onboarding strategy to make new team members feel a sense of belonging from the moment they arrive. Remember, first impressions count and are more important than ever in helping to increase retention in healthcare. Here are three ways having a recognition system in place to welcome team members will strengthen your onboarding experience:
Having an employee recognition solution offers employees a way to stay engaged and connect with colleagues they have yet to be formally introduced to. Wambi’s Client Relationship Director, Zach Falk, shared: “Early in my onboarding agenda, one of the top priorities was logging into our own Wambi site. Now I see why that was so important. It provided me a way to engage with my new teammates and get to know them straight away. The Wambi platform also set the tone, from day one, that a gratitude-centric culture pervaded this organization. Various team members offered me such a warm welcome through the Wambis they sent me, and every time I got that ping on my phone, it reminded me how happy I was about my choice to join this group.” Learn more about how Wambi works here.
Utilize an employee recognition solution to enable new hires to genuinely connect to company ethos. Wambi’s Senior HR Manager, April Rosentreter, expressed her gratitude for having the Wambi employee recognition platform internally for team use: “The Wambi platform has become a crucial component of our internal new hire onboarding experience. I’ve heard from some of our newest team members that it really helps to set the tone for an “attitude of gratitude” and affirms their decision to join our mission-driven company. It shows our core values authentically being lived, felt, and recognized versus a scripted façade. It’s also an inspirational tool for learning about all the amazing progress across departments and even illuminates how the new hire might contribute or provide new perspective. And last but certainly not least, as a remote team, it’s indispensable when welcoming new team members and making introductions.” Having an employee recognition tool as early as onboarding also demonstrates accessible performance metrics from the get-go, which means employees don’t have to wait until quarterly or annual performance reviews to get feedback from managers.
From the first moment a new hire joins your team, you should be working to foster a sense of inclusion and support. At Wambi, cultivating compassion encourages employees to be more patient with leadership and other departments alike, which in turn leads to a healthier and happier workforce. Showing compassion not only has helped build understanding and resilience but is a constant reminder of the importance of Wambi’s work and elevating moments that move us as a community of like-minded individuals. It gets people pumped to contribute and perpetually reminds us why we are all here.
According to Renee Thompson, CEO at the Healthy Workforce Institute, the importance of welcoming new employees cannot be overstated because onboarding is a tremendous opportunity to instill a sense of belonging to foster resilience. We challenge you to treat someone’s first day/first week/first month as a long-awaited special occasion deserving of attention and invite you to note how your workplace morale improves!
Interested in building resilience? Download the Resilience Workbook for more ideas on how to build a more resilient workforce.
If you want to highlight a culture that is built on gratitude, inclusion, and compassion, invest in a recognition solution today. With Wambi, you’ll be giving an Onboarding Strategy roadmap as part of your client onboarding experience. The tool will give you specifics on how to incorporate Wambi into your onboarding strategy. Plus, Wambi is the only healthcare-specific recognition solution that connects patients, peers, and leaders through the power of gratitude to improve the human experience for everyone in your organization. Request a demo with us to get the ball rolling on enhancing your onboarding process.
So many of my conversations lately are with exhausted healthcare leaders who are very concerned about their teams. They worry about their team’s wellbeing, stress levels, and susceptibility to burnout. Retention is a huge issue pretty much everywhere, and recruiting new team members is challenging as well. At the same time, leaders are concerned about patient outcomes and their budgets. They want to know how to help both themselves and their teams get back to a place where everyone feels seen, valued, and engaged – connected to both each other and their purpose. There isn’t an easy solution, but we can leverage three key emotions to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” – Cicero
Gratitude is a great place to start, even when (and especially when) things are tough. For exhausted teams, it also has the huge bonus of being easy to do and intrinsically motivating. Dr. Sara Algoe calls it the “find, remind, and bind” emotion. In gratitude, we find the good in our lives, are reminded that this good exists outside of ourselves, and this binds us to the people who are the source of this goodness. Gratitude makes us more generous, compassionate, and optimistic. And the recipients and witnesses of our gratitude are similarly impacted. Our relationships are strengthened, ensuring we have the support we need in challenging times. Pretty powerful stuff from a simple thank you.
Where to start:
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama
Like gratitude, compassion makes us feel good, activating the pleasure and reward centers in our brain. It strengthens our relationships and makes us more resilient to stress. Compassionate workplace cultures have been linked to improved collaboration, increased employee engagement, and reduced burnout. When we move to ease another’s suffering, we also heal ourselves. And compassion can spur gratitude and vice versa. These superpower emotions build on each other, creating environments that foster deep connection and a sense of belonging.
“You were designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.” – Zig Ziglar
It may feel odd to throw pride into the mix with gratitude and compassion. After all, it is one of the seven deadly sins. But as Dr. David DeSteno notes in his book, Emotional Success, that negative connotation stems from conflating pride with arrogance. Most of us can feel the difference between these two when we think back on our achievements. Feeling authentic pride in our accomplishments increases our motivation and our ability to persevere against incredible odds. It also encourages us to help others by sharing our expertise, inspiring gratitude in those we’ve helped. In the workplace, we know that praise for work done well is a key driver of engagement. The pride triggered by this recognition helps our team members feel like they are contributing in a meaningful way, connecting them to purpose.
These three emotions of gratitude, compassion, and pride are a powerful combination. As Dr. Barbara Fredrickson notes, they build on each other to create upward spirals of positivity, broadening our view of what is possible. They inspire creativity and innovation. They help us persevere as we solve seemingly impossible challenges, all while feeling seen and connected to others. At Wambi, we see this every day as our clients use our platform to elevate these emotions, enabling their team members to be their best selves. We’re inspired by the results, and we think you will be, too.
For more ideas, check out these great resources:
As our Product Evangelist, Mel brings over 13 years of experience to support the growth and development of Wambi’s sales team as they seek to help healthcare organizations create cultures of appreciation and kindness. She is committed to helping both her team and Wambi’s clients achieve their business objectives while living Wambi’s values of compassion, imagination, gratitude, fearlessness, and joy. Mel’s sales experience spans healthcare, technology, legal, and academic content solutions. She has been a consistent top performer and is most proud of her work fostering innovation, evolution, and team cohesiveness in each role. Mel grew up in West Michigan, where she still lives and enjoys running through the beautiful wooded dunes. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan. When she’s not exercising or spending time with her family, you can find her indulging in her love of learning about anything and everything.
Are you the type of leader who performs well under pressure, is in tune with your teams’ emotions even though they aren’t vocalized, and/or prioritizes self-care to combat burnout? If you answered “yes” to any of the following questions, well then, congratulations! You are exhibiting high levels of emotional intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence (EI), or the Emotional Quotient (EQ), is “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and those of the people around you.” Coined by American psychologist, Daniel Goleman, in his 1995 book, ‘Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ’ emotional literacy is critical to leading a thriving workforce. And unlike IQ which evaluates intelligence through standardized testing, emotional intelligence can be learned and developed by anyone at any time. In fact, improving emotional intelligence should be considered an ongoing company and personal goal, especially for leadership. When examining EQ as a form of social currency, consider this: 80-90% of the competencies that differentiate top performers from low performers are in the domain of emotional intelligence.
Leaders with low emotional intelligence are typically resistant to change, demanding, confrontational, critical, and passive. A leader with low emotional intelligence leader can contribute to poor internal alignment and a decrease in staff engagement and productivity, whereas leaders with high emotional intelligence are usually the leaders that nobody wants to leave. High EQ leaders are distinguishable by their enthusiasm, patience, consistency, decisiveness, and warmth. A study by Initiative One found that workers are 400% less likely to leave a job if they have a manager with high EQ. For organizations suffering from retention problems, nurturing emotional intelligence among leaders can be a turning point when addressing turnover.
Want to see how much turnover is costing your organization? Calculate your turnover costs with the ROI calculator.
There are two types of EQ competencies:
Great leaders display both of these! Personal competence leads to more emotional resilience and social competence helps leaders cultivate individual, team, and organizational success without compromising their own well-being in the process.
Emotional intelligence is rooted first and foremost in our own emotional self-awareness.It’s acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses, naming our emotions, and still possessing a strong sense of self-worth. Those with strong self-awareness can provide valuable coaching and mentorship for others, as well as manage conflicts diplomatically.
Ways to be a self-aware leader: Model a positive attitude but don’t fall prey to toxic positivity. Your staff wants to see vulnerability in action and nothing is more vulnerable than taking accountability. Don’t be afraid to own up to, and learn from, your mistakes.
Self-management, also known as self-regulation, is about how you control your emotions, inner resources, and abilities. This emotional self-control is key to ensuring that you can maintain your positive outlook with sincerity. It also helps to cultivate adaptability. Those with good self-management are agents of change because they are not fearful of risks or losing control. As a result, you’ll see leaders with strong self-regulation also be great problem solvers and embrace innovative solutions.
Ways to be a balanced leader: Creating healthy boundaries that won’t burn unnecessary energy. Invest in a set of leisurely activities that will help you fill your cup and can be part of your arsenal of internal resources to tap into when chaos erupts.
In the context of emotional intelligence, social skills refer to “the skills needed to handle and influence other people’s emotions effectively.” For leaders, an infallible way to secure trust between staff and yourself is to actively listen and stay engaged. In a time rife with uncertainty, leaders need to be proactive about stressors on the floor that could be impacting the mental wellness of staff. Leaders must make their staff feel seen and supported and listen with intent. The more you condition yourself to see signs of distress, the more that you can handle the problem effectively and timely. Also don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Ways to be a socially-skilled leader: Choose your words wisely. Words have power and can either build, or erode trust. Also, be aware of nonverbal cues from team members that something might be wrong. You can easily monitor withdrawn individuals through the Wambi platform.
Empathy is the ability to understand how others are feeling and reading the environment around you. But empathy also involves the way you respond to others based on their feelings. Being empathetic is having the awareness for other people’s emotions, and taking the extra effort to helping them when their emotions are negative. When you help raise a demoralized staff member’s spirits by taking the time to hear their concerns, or go out of your way to attend to support a grieving family, those moments of empathy can help you leverage social relationships to incite lasting cultural change at your organization.
Ways to be a more empathetic leader: Talk to new people. Listen with intent. Quoting our Director of Partnerships, Nikki Lewallen: “if we want to do incredible work and get incredible results, we must have incredible relationships.” To learn more about the secrets of being an incredible business, click here.
Another emotional intelligence component is internal motivation. Those who have a passion for what they do and are internally rewarded so long as they are aligned to their own goals, can in turn, motivate others to do the same. Motivation goes hand-in-hand with gratitude as those who are motivated are grateful about all their wins. This kind of mentality builds inspirational leaders and is great in boosting team morale and helping teams work together. Those with motivation are always finding ways to do, and be better.
Ways to be a motivational leader: Encourage others to utilize meaningful recognition tools instead of chasing material incentives. Also, be generous with your recognition. Team members find value in being highlighted by corporate leadership, as displayed by Wambi user, Vito Buccellato, President and Chief Hospital Executive at Jersey Shore University Medical Center, who sent 533 recognitions through the Wambi platform. Vito shared, “If we want to create that experience for our patients, we need to do the same for our team members. It’s a win-win to share recognition — the person you recognize feels great and so do you!”
Leaders on a mission to improve their emotional intelligence can do so by surrounding themselves with people who demonstrated high levels of emotional intelligence. Because workplace success is contingent on understanding and connecting meaningfully with others in a way that creates operational synergy, it is highly likely that the more elevated the EQ is among your team, the more organizational wins you’ll have as a collective. According to the HR Source, EQ accounts for 58% of an individual’s performance while IQ only accounts for 20% of their overall efficacy. Identify these attributes in your team members:
Ways to be a better leader: If you see any of these behaviors being displayed at your healthcare organization, spotlight a team member now by sending them a gratitude-filled Wambi through Carepostcard.com.
When we use emotional intelligence to guide our thinking and actions, we can take control of the situation instead of letting the emotions overtake our sensibilities. If this article inspired you to be a more emotionally intelligent leader, we invite you take our Leadership Self-Reflection assessment designed to help you reflect on your recognition style.