How to get that feeling of success and fulfillment that comes from doing work that matters.
Call centers typically breed burnout—but KP’s teams are finding ways to be the exception to the rule.
At 8 a.m. every workday, an alarm sounds at the Member Services Call Center in Denver. Instantly, Olivia Johnson and her entire unit-based team of customer service representatives to leap out of their seats.
And dance.
The dance break tradition started when one of Johnson’s co-workers set a regular medication alarm that plays music.
“He started dancing when his alarm went off, then another person started dancing with him. Now it’s all of us dancing every morning,” says Johnson, a member of SEIU Local 105. “Afterwards we clap and tell each other it’s going to be a good day.”
Shaking their groove thing, having regular potlucks and sharing information that might make work easier for others are ways Johnson’s team combats potential stress at work. Constant stress can result in faster breathing and an increased heart rate, which the American Heart Association says can lead to physical pain, depression and unhealthy behaviors to compensate.
The members of Johnson’s UBT also alternate work assignments, so that representatives aren’t doing the same thing every week. One week, half of the team fields the calls from Kaiser Permanente members, while the other half answers questions from all of Colorado’s customer service representatives via SameTime chat. The next week, they switch. The variety helps keep the demands of the job manageable.
Terrence J. Cooper, who manages the Maple Lawn Call Center in Fulton, Maryland, says one reason working in a call center can be stressful is, simply, the nature of the work.
“We take complaints here,” says Cooper, who has been at Kaiser Permanente since 2006. “Complaints alone can be stressful.”
Cooper, who manages 20 people, tries to keep his team upbeat by injecting humor into his UBT’s daily huddles and team meetings. The team also host potlucks and does team-building activities outside of work, such as bowling.
“This allows us to catch up as a team,” Cooper says. “We talk about the weekend or the kids. It gives everyone an opportunity to take their minds off that last call.”
Cooper also serves as the local co-lead for the Kaiser Permanente wellness program “Live Well, Be Well” and tries to promote a healthy work environment to reduce stress. Frequently, fitness video games, board games or music are available in the break room to help folks “de-stress,” he says. “We try to lighten the mood.”
There’s a serious side to adding fun and festivities to the job: A study in the 2006 Ivey Business Journal Online found that workers who feel empowered and engaged—one of the outcomes of the light-hearted endeavors—are more productive and have fewer safety incidents.
Another key element to reducing stress is giving people the ability to make more decisions at work, says Deashimikia Williams, a customer service representative in Maryland and member of OPEIU Local 2. Williams also serves as her UBT’s union co-lead and is a member of the national call center “Super UBT,” whose membership crosses regional boundaries.
Williams says empowering workers and improving their work processes can have a positive impact on stress at work. Making customer service representatives, CSRs, aware of what they can do to resolve a member’s issue also reduces frustration, says Williams, whose role on the Super UBT includes exploring different improvements.
“We look at the issues CSRs and managers experience on the floor. If we streamline a process, it may not be as stressful,” Williams says. “If we can let them know what can be done by each department and who can help resolve a member’s problem, it reduces frustration.”
If you feel like your hair's on fire, there’s hope. Even though stress and health care work seem to go hand in hand, this issue of Hank has tips and tools individuals, leaders and teams can use to fix that.
How a pharmacy unit-based team turned itself around and reduced stress by improving communication, increasing involvement and building camaraderie.
Fairy Mills, a pharmacy technician and member of UFCW Local 555, has worked for Kaiser Permanente for 29 years. Not long ago, however, there were days she left the Mt. Scott Pharmacy ready to cry, exhausted. Wait times were up and service scores had plummeted. She thought about retiring but decided to tough it out—and was voted in as the union co-lead for the department’s unit-based team.
About the same time, Linh Chau arrived as the new supervisor. He wasn’t sure what he’d stepped into. “It was the perfect storm,” he says. “The team was stressed out, members were unhappy, membership was up, and in the midst of it all, we were implementing a new software system.”
Pharmacies in the Northwest region were in a tough spot a year or so ago—and that was especially true for the Mt. Scott Pharmacy. Part of the Sunnyside campus, it’s the second busiest pharmacy in the region, seeing an average of 500 patients a day and filling nearly 1,000 prescriptions.
Although other regions had already made the transition to ePIMS, a software system that syncs up with KP HealthConnect®, the migration process hadn’t been easy.
“We had to reenergize the team,” Chau says.
Chau and Mills’ first strategy was to give staff members confidence that things would improve. The two co-leads began rounding, checking in with UBT members regularly and making sure everyone had a chance to offer suggestions for improvement— giving them the power to shape how things are done, one of the key elements for beating back burnout.
Working with outdated processes and procedures is sure to cause stress. Getting team members involved in performance improvement will help turn things around.
Henrietta emphasizes how individuals and teams and leaders can tackle burnout.
The chances are good you are a person who deals—directly or indirectly—with life and death every day. You might be an EVS worker who keeps patient rooms germ-free to reduce the odds of infection, or an ER nurse helping a baby with a high fever. If you are not on the clinical front lines, you likely support this honorable work from behind the scenes.
We put others first. We give everything to give the best care to our patients. But far too frequently, we don’t leave anything in reserve. We neglect to take care of ourselves. This imbalance undermines the admirable ethic of our modern health care system.
One survey showed 60 percent of health care providers are burned out. In this issue of Hank, we provide practical tips and tools that individuals, leaders and teams can use to reduce workplace stress.
But more than that, we challenge the notion that the responsibility for preventing burnout lies solely with one of these groups. Let’s call it the “yes, and” approach. Yes, individuals need to eat better, exercise more and cultivate a positive outlook to reduce their own stress. And, leaders need to ensure safe staffing levels and create a solution-oriented workplace culture.
Our Labor Management Partnership gives us a third “yes, and”: Yes, individuals and leaders matter. And, our unit-based teams can fix inefficient processes that cause unnecessary stress and interpersonal conflict.
Every day, Kaiser Permanente’s 3,500 UBTs use performance improvement tools that make our work go more smoothly. Moreover, those tools and the foundation of trust and openness fostered by partnership give everyone a voice in making improvements.
And that also reduces our stress.