How to prevent stress and burnout in the workplace

Many health and care facilities are trying to implement and enhance the organizational well-being of their workers in order to favor the quality of patient-operator relationships, and decrease the factors of stress and burn-out.

There are several ways in which organizational well-being can be measured and evaluated. Some ways are more “qualitative” and include interviews or focus groups. Other tools are more quantitative, such as the Multidimensional Organizational Health Questionnaire (MOHQ) (Avallone and Paplomatas, 2005). This questionnaire reveals the perception of operators regarding organizational health with respect to the following dimensions:

• Comfort
• Perception of efficiency
• Perception of managers
• Perception of colleagues
• Perception of organizational equity
• Security
• Prevention
• Openness to innovation
• Positive indicators
• Approval
• Perception of conflict
• Stress perception
• Fatigue
• Insulation
• Psychosomatic disorders
• Negative indicators.

“Measuring” the organizational health of care homes (or similar workplaces) is the first step towards the implementation of prevention strategies that enhance the work group and the relationship with the resident, thus improving the quality of care and preventing the onset of stress and burnout.

There are several strategies, which can be adopted; they can be grouped into four categories:

1 – Educational strategies

They include:

• tutoring for new workers
• regular training
• retraining (for instance when a worker comes back to work after a long leave)
• supervision which can be technical (i.e. regarding operational procedure) or psychological (regarding the worker’s feelings toward her/his own job, her/his difficulties, fears, etc.).

2 – Communicative strategies

They include:

• Team building activities, which are meant to strengthen the identity (corporate mission and vision sharing (Do we know the values and goals of the corporate we work for? How do we feel about them? Do we feel a part of it?), the sense of collaboration and motivation (What are we good at doing? What are our difficulties? How can we overcome them?) of the team
• Information sharing (instructions, procedures, etc.)

3 – Organizational strategies

They include:

• Planning of the corporate workforce, (how many workers, with which level and competences, what kind of contracts, i.e. part-time or full-time jobs, etc.)
• HR management (how workers are selected, introduced in the workplace, trained – see also point 1, evaluated, enhanced, etc.)
• Time management (shifts, leaves, etc.)

4 – Work-life balance and corporate welfare strategies:

They include:

• Benefits of various kind;
• time-saving strategies
• cost-saving strategies, etc.

Although it is often the corporate management who decides which of these strategies (if any) to adopt, their success depends on the effort of all staff, especially when we speak of communication in a workplace and within a team.