Workplace Environment Assessment

This assignment is both a discussion post of 1-2 paragraphs with 3 APA citations that is due July 12th, 2022  and a paper of 4-6 pages (that is associated/continuation of the discussion post) that is due July 29th, 2022.

For the discussion post, I am providing a PDF file of the Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory that I completed, showing a score of 57 which is “barley healthy”. The instructions for the discussion post asked to reflect on the finding of this, and describe a situation where I experienced incivility in the workplace. I will describe a situation that you can use, and rewrite it however you find it necessary and I will also include the formal instructions given for this assignment.

In my workplace I have noticed, especially in the past 2 years since COVID, that morale is quite low and there is always a lot of tension. This stems from overworked nurses, managers that have lose site of how this effects nursing and patient safety and no sympathy for nurses. There is a high nurse turn over, there is constantly very high patient to nurse ratios that put patients and nurses at risk.  Management ignores nurse complaints and their response is usually “either do the job or quit”. It is overall a very unhealthy work environment. People feel unappreciated and disillusioned by their career choice. I am not surprised that the score was low, and more surprised that it was not lower.

An example of uncivil workplace is recently, a co-worker, who works in the ER with me, had 5 patients in her care, this is extremely high patient load in the ER. One of her patients was being worked up for an MI and another patient with a high fever, needed medications quickly. She asked me if I could help her, because I only had 3 patients, and I took her patient with a fever. About 20 minutes later, I had 2 more patients added to my roster, and now I ended up with 5 patients. I sent a message to my manager that I needed help with my patients. When I brought this up to my manager, her response was “You should have not taken this patient from her, you should have told me…but now I can’t do much about it, you will have to manage”. I explained that I had taken the patient because I was trying to help and at the time despite knowing I was already at the recommended patient load of 2-3 patients per nurse. One of the new patients I was given overheard this conversation, that the manager chose to have with me outside their room, and when I returned to the patients room, the patient said “I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to be a burden to anyone”, I quickly told the patient that they were not a burden and it was not about them at all. However, at this point I was embarrassed, I felt bad for the patients I was caring for and my manager never resolved the issue. This type of situations continues to happen.

 

This situation happens often, and the only reason I do not quit or continue to help is because I feel that my co-workers needs me and I need them. My co-workers depend on me and I depend on them.

I hope this is an example you can use, and you can rewrite it however is the most appropriate and correct. Here is the instructions for this discussion post:

How healthy is your workplace?

You may think your current organization operates seamlessly, or you may feel it has many issues. You may experience or even observe things that give you pause. Yet, much as you wouldn’t try to determine the health of a patient through mere observation, you should not attempt to gauge the health of your work environment based on observation and opinion. Often, there are issues you perceive as problems that others do not; similarly, issues may run much deeper than leadership recognizes.

There are many factors and measures that may impact organizational health. Among these is civility. While an organization can institute policies designed to promote such things as civility, how can it be sure these are managed effectively? In this Discussion, you will examine the use of tools in measuring workplace civility.

To Prepare:

  • Review the Resources and examine the Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory, found on page 20 of Clark (2015).
  • Review and complete the Work Environment Assessment Template in the Resources.

Post a brief description of the results of your Work Environment Assessment. Based on the results, how civil is your workplace? Explain why your workplace is or is not civil. Then, describe a situation where you have experienced incivility in the workplace. How was this addressed? Be specific and provide examples.