Is Your Clinic the Best For Staff As Well As Patients?

What's the Third Law of a Healthy Workplace? Provide acceptable benefits to aid staff in practicing beneficial self-care.

One of the most important aspects of minimizing and coping with compassion fatigue, or “the cost of caring”, is to be sure to care for yourself along the way. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. The type of people drawn to veterinary medicine are typically selfless, in that they see the suffering of animals and they will expend every ounce of their energy on healing the sick and helping those suffering.

Yet if we run out of energy, not taking time to recharge along the way, we are no longer able to sustain this caregiver role. This is why you need to step back and apply self-care methods to recharge your batteries. A good workplace is one that recognizes this need for self-care, and encourages the employees to participate in self-care activities. A practice can go even one step further, and help to provide employees with resources for this self-care. This is turn creates healthier people, and likewise a healthier practice. As recognized by Patricia Smith who created the Eight Laws Governing a Healthy Workplace, this founder of the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project (www.compassionfatigue.org) recognizes that there are steps an organization can take to help foster a healthy workplace. The third law is to provide acceptable benefits to aid staff in practicing beneficial self-care.

When we talk of employee benefits, we’re usually looking at the extra “perks” of the job that can make an employer look like the better place to work. If there is a good benefits “package”, we will be more successful in attracting good people to hire. Yet the benefits we offer will also help to sustain and support those employees whom we’re investing our time and money in keeping. Paying for at least a portion of health insurance for an employee may be the standard for the industry, but on an individual level, we would hope that the employee with health insurance will be able to sustain good health and lose less time to illness and injury. Giving employees the option to purchase their own dental and vision insurance at a group rate is also helping them to practice self-care. Other typical benefits help provide that respite to the team that we mentioned in the first Law, such as paid time off, sick time, and vacation leave. Can we do more?

Absolutely! The practice’s health insurance company could be a wealth of information for teaching your employees how to take care of themselves. Often there are lectures on ergonomics, smoking cessation, feeling fit, losing weight, even advice and nursing hotlines for specific health conditions. Check out your practice’s health insurance provider to see what options are just waiting to be utilized. When it comes to physical self-care, the practice can even get inventive. Maybe there’s an employee area large enough for a piece of exercise equipment. Perhaps there is a gym or fitness center nearby that can offer a discounted rate for a certain number of memberships from the practice. Some businesses even help their employees network to form team exercise time at a gym or walking buddies at lunchtime around the neighborhood. This is a great time to use your employees’ input and ask how the practice can help encourage and support self-care.

Remember that mental health is just as important as physical health, so self-care can involve the surroundings for the employees. Perhaps the employee lounge could be furnished with a CD player or iPod station to support music time. Maybe a gazebo outside on the back lawn could provide a fresh breath of air at lunch breaks. Again, talk to your team members and see what creative ideas they can think of, and the practice can support.

Tending to the emotional health of your employees can go one step further; our profession has been slow to realize that there are Employee Assistance Programs (EAP’s) out there that can help us provide this benefit. Basically, an EAP provides the employee with typically six free counseling sessions for any number of reasons, from financial trouble, to divorce, to problems with kids, to addictions, and more. The EAP is there to be used by the employees, so the employer needs only to make the information accessible (great tip: put the EAP information in the employee bathrooms where they can get it in private, instead of having to walk across the employee break room to look at the bulletin board!). In other words, give everyone the number to this service so they can use it if/when needed in private. Most visits to the EAP are “self-referrals”, where the employee calls up and uses the service unbeknown to the boss.

However, managers and owners in the practice can also use the EAP services to help them manage the team. If there is a particularly difficult conversation coming up, you can get advice from the EAP. If you are concerned about the well-being of an employee, you can make a formal referral where the employee is basically given the opportunity to solve the “personal problems” that are affecting their job performance. Managers and leaders in the practice are often used as sounding boards for an employee’s issues at home, when it spills over into their work. We are not trained to be counselors for our employees, regardless of how much we really want to help. So having the option of an EAP shows that we care about the rest of their life outside of work. If an employee is in danger of losing their job if things don’t change, this formal referral can be a last-ditch opportunity for the employee to get help and turn things around. Now, the EAP sessions are confidential, so the formal referral process looks something like this:

In this way, job performance is the sole focus of the employer; regardless of their personal issues, the employee will be held to the standards the practice expects. Yet when you work through warnings and subsequent termination of an employee, you want to be able to demonstrate that you have given that employee an opportunity to rehabilitate their ways. This may mean you gave the employee adequate time to improve and demonstrate better performance. This also could mean that you gave your employee an option at counseling so that rehabilitation could occur that may save their job, as well as help them as a person deal with life’s crises.

Helping employees practice self-care can take many forms. Even bringing up the topic for conversation can make a difference in the employee’s perspective on how much the practice cares. During staff meetings, go around and have everyone tell the group one special thing they did just for themselves that weekend before…time spent with a hobby, hiking in the woods, visiting family, just relaxing. Demonstrate that you care about your employees both inside and outside of work, and you’ll get the full person showing up for work!

Resource: Healthy Caregiving: A Guide to Recognizing & Managing Compassion Fatigue, Patricia Smith, 2008