Use this word search to provide some variety in your next meeting.
To enhance communication and participation, unit-based teams use processes that are designed to encourage teamwork, ike outcome-oriented meetings and frequent huddles. Teams also regularly analyze data to make sure their improvement efforts are on track. Advanced UBTs employ more sophisticated approaches that include adopting or spreading successful practices and getting input from Kaiser Permanente members and patients.
When UBT members are actively involved with their team, they speak up with their best ideas about how to improve the department. They take advantage of partnership processes like consensus decision-making and interest-based problem solving to make the department a great place to work. They look at how the department is doing on key metrics—like those around service and quality—and use that information to come up with ideas for improvement.
Use this meeting icebreaker as a fun way to get people talking about things they love.
This poster shares the slogan "Free to Speak" and has a checklist for comparison of a whiner vs. problem solver. Share it during your team meetings and help build a culture of speaking up.
Simple (but not easy!) ways managers can encourage their employees to feel safe about speaking up.
The 2015 National Agreement includes a requirement that teams have a communications plan. From the Summer 2015 Hank.
I’m in a UBT, you’re in a UBT, we’re all in a UBT! Hooray! Let’s start our performance improvement project, collect our data and make a PowerPoint presentation to explain our results.
…Whoa. Not so fast. Unit-based teams were launched as part of the 2005 National Agreement, but we all still hear stories about frontline union members, managers and physicians who don’t realize they’re on a UBT. This is a big deal. When people don’t know they’re on a UBT, they’re missing out on an opportunity to take part in improving service and quality for our members and patients.
That’s why negotiators hammering out the 2015 National Agreement added a requirement: In order for a UBT to move up to Level 3, it has to have “a communications structure to reach all members of the department” in place.
Over time, this will help everyone in the department realize they’re part of the UBT—and will lay to rest the myth that “the UBT” is a small group of people who lock themselves in a meeting room, drink coffee and eat doughnuts and solve problems for everyone else. Your team needs you contributing ideas; our members and patients need you.
It’s a common problem: In large departments, a lot of people think the “unit-based team” only includes the employees who go to UBT meetings. Truth is, everyone working in the unit is a UBT member, and the ones going to meetings are their representatives.
Better communication in a department helps everyone get involved in the team’s work and take pride in what’s being accomplished. That leads to better outcomes for our patients.
Here are some tools with tips for getting everyone on your team involved: