Think big and act small:  address workload-related stress and unacceptable behaviour

The ORO healthcare organisation was one of those organisations. In association with the Proper Healthy Work Action Team, it addressed workload-related stress and unacceptable behaviour on the work floor. Its goal was to make vulnerable people happier by first ensuring that its own employees were happy.

Saskia Bakermans, a Knowledge & Treatment Team Manager at ORO, thought that taking part in the project would be a good opportunity to empower her employees, particularly since she could tell that her team was struggling with the many changes implemented in the healthcare industry. The way in which healthcare is financed has changed, teams now steer their own course, and healthcare providers are expected to be more flexible, which has resulted in heavy workloads.

The action team collaborated with ORO’s employees so as to develop and implement practical actions and to determine what was actually effective on the work floor. Prior to the project, Realise performed an analysis, including a quick survey of the employees. The entire project took four to six months, and involved four action team meetings.

Saskia would like to emphasise the importance of the bottom-up approach, where employees proposed solutions to their problems themselves. This gave them a greater say in the matter and resulted in improved cooperation on the team, which eventually resulted in better care and higher client satisfaction rates. Saskia hopes that the success of this initiative will inspire other components of the organisation to act in the same way, thus allowing the entire organisation to benefit from a positive work environment and proper healthcare.

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