Developing a Feedback-Rich Environment in the Healthcare

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Importance of Increasing Feedback in Organizations
Description of the Feedback Setting
The Feedback Initiative
Importance of Increasing Feedback in Hospitals
Types of Feedback Techniques to Use
Making Established Feedback Environment Rich
Establishing Shared Competency Language
Conclusion
References

Introduction

There is a number of various components that may positively or negatively influence the performance of a company. One of them is rather important but often ignored and underestimated developing a robust feedback-rich environment. Such culture welcomes any kind of evaluation and uses it in order to make some changes in the companys structure or work and foster the growth of the organization, teams, and individuals. It is hard to disagree that the healthcare industry is not an exception, and strong feedback is crucial for all organizations in this field. The purpose of this paper is to describe the feedback setting, list and explain the type of techniques that may be used, and suggest a feedback initiative. Besides, the way of establishing shared competency language will be described, and the reasons for increasing feedback being valuable to the healthcare organization will be provided.

Importance of Increasing Feedback in Organizations

A feedback-rich culture is the one in which employees and co-workers do dread receiving their evaluations but thrive from this process and see it as a perfect way of learning that they are useful at their job. Timely and effective feedback is a critical part of a successful performance management program and should be applied in conjunction with setting performance goals. If effective feedback is given to employees on their progress towards their goals or to the managers on the ways they provide a healthy working environment, employee performance will improve, and the organization will prosper. It is necessary for people to learn in a timely manner how they are managing with their work, what is going wrong and needs to be improved, and what is right and has to be continued this way.

Description of the Feedback Setting

The hospital setting is an exceptional environment that has safety and practice standards and protocols that are not usually applicable to other health care delivery areas. The purpose of hospitals is to accommodate a significant number of different emergent, urgent, and routine patient care needs, which are reflected by the clinical expertise of the medical-surgical equipment and the staff. The hospital settings nature is to provide twenty-four-hour care; thereby, the patient and his or her caregivers and family have to face the emotional, psychologic, and physical consequences of hospitalization and illness.

The Feedback Initiative

The feedback initiative may be described as a process of helping to teach medical staff including managers and workers how to provide practical, constructive, and useful feedback so that it positively affects their professional training, performance, and development. The leaders of hospitals may organize some special meetings where they discuss the importance of leaving and receiving feedback (Hardavella et al., 2017). Moreover, medical staff needs to know that it is a safe process that is easy to follow and may be rather beneficial for them.

Importance of Increasing Feedback in Hospitals

Various healthcare organizations and hospitals, in particular, are not an exception and should also implement a feedback-rich environment since it aligns with their goals. It is of vital importance because they provide different services for people, and these services are connected to their health. If something goes wrong between a hospital worker and a patient, for example, a person is not satisfied with the quality of the received medical care, the managers need to know about that. It is evident that the best way to do that is to get feedback from the employee who was involved in the situation. However, there may be circumstances in which the medical worker does not want to tell about what has happened, and that is why there has to be a healthy environment, mutual trust between employees and managers, and secure feedback channels.

Moreover, a hospital may have several issues in its organization, and they are evident only for the employees. Hence, the managers need to get their feedback in order to learn about the problems and take action to solve them. Besides, some medical workers, especially those who are new to the hospital and do not know precisely how to work, need to get timely and quality review on their job. This will help them notice their mistakes, learn how to correct them, and get inspired if their performance is great (Qian et al., 2016). Moreover, feedback may let the leaders of the hospital know about those employees who a worthy of a promotion or need to go on training to increase his or her experience.

Types of Feedback Techniques to Use

There is a number of helpful techniques that may be used for developing a feedback-rich culture in hospitals. For example, there are instant evaluation sessions and after-event reviews; they are necessary for different situations, but both are rather useful. The first method provides instant feedback on a routine basis immediately after the persons given performance. This technique helps medical employees to reflect on their work: their co-worker or leader asks the performers what went well and may be considered successful and what would they do differently if they had a chance of performing again.

As for after-event reviews, they may be considered more structured and formal than instant feedback sessions. This technique has several various approaches, but most of them include addressing the following four critical questions:

What was the expected outcome? This question helps the medical worker to remember what expectations he or she had before the performance.
What was the actual outcome? To answer this question, the person needs to soberly assess the situation and discuss the circumstances of the outcome.
What are the reasons for the differences between the expected outcome and the actual outcome? The purpose of this point is to make the employee analyze those steps that affected the outcome and changed it from the one that was expected.
Based on this experience, what should and should not be done next time? This question helps to draw necessary conclusions in order to escape the same situation in the future.

Making Established Feedback Environment Rich

After establishing a feedback culture, it is necessary to make sure that it is successful and rich, which means that hospital workers are aware of new mechanisms and ready to support them. There are several recommendations for the direction and medics that should be followed to achieve mutual trust and feedback-rich environment. First of all, it is of vital importance to define the challenges before moving forward. Hospital managers need to consult with humanitarian responders, medical workers, and communities to understand what issues are preventing feedback from being listened and addressed to. These problems may include confusing information flows, inadequate data management, non-working technology, poor or non-existent communication channels, and lack of staffing (Drew & Warnes, 2020). Then, the managers should identify which members of medical staff and community it is better to work with on some problems (Drew & Warnes, 2020). Besides, they need to define what activities are already underway and continue building on them while working with established services to ensure the sustainability of the hospital.

Using the employees preferred communication channels may also increase the feedback-rich environment. The hospital managers need to communicate with medical workers through those channels that they trust and are comfortable with. This will establish mutual understanding and let the medics be relaxed and provide the sincerest feedback (Drew & Warnes, 2020). Another crucial step is preparing for sensitive issues, or in other words, ensuring that there are the appropriate channels and necessary resources in order to create a confidential and safe space for reporting and evaluating. There have to be private channels and areas for discussion, and the confidentiality of the shared information has to be provided.

To make improvements in the work of the hospital and the quality of provided services, it is essential to focus on what is needed to be known. This may be achieved by designing the feedback mechanism in a way that helps to collect structured and helpful information that enables the managers to take action and make decisions in a timely manner (Drew & Warnes, 2020). It is recommended to use mobile data collection since it is proven to be time-efficient, enable quick collation, and reduce possible mistakes (Drew & Warnes, 2020). Moreover, it provides standardized data capture, which is based on various structured questionnaires.

Adapting the mechanism to the response changing dynamics is a step vital for the information collection. It is evident that more established channels reduce the risk of the complete loss of getting feedback and engagement with the medical staff if access to one of the channels suddenly fails (Drew & Warnes, 2020). Finally, the medical employees will want to leave more feedback if they notice that their suggestions and comments are listened to and heard. In turn, they will pay more attention to the co-workers and leaders feedback if the made changes and the impossibility of certain actions are proactively explained (Drew & Warnes, 2020). Feedback needs to be bilateral: the managers should get it from the employees and also provide them with it. All of these recommendations will encourage the medical workers and leaders of hospitals to receive and leave feedback and be sure that it is safe, necessary, and helpful.

Establishing Shared Competency Language

While establishing a feedback-rich environment in hospitals, it is of vital importance to pay attention to the development of a shared competency language, which is one of the essential components of a feedback culture. This process involves managers and employees meeting as a group in order to determine shared competencies, which are the demonstrable skills and characteristics that improve and enable the efficiency of a job. Besides, they discuss the methods of helping staff develop their own language and mutual understanding and reach a comfort level with it. There are several ways of establishing a shared competency language within a hospital; they include a performance calibration meeting, talent reviews, and 360-degree feedback. All of them are useful and helpful and may be suitable for various situations.

A performance calibration meeting involves a dialogue between the leaders and managers of a certain medical service line or department. Their purpose is to discuss the ways of rating staff members on performance appraisals (Hardavella et al., 2017). These meetings provide a forum for considering the individual work and success of medical workers and make sure that there are similar standards applied by managers across all employees. Performance calibration meetings are beneficial for the medical leaders because, by getting feedback from their peers, they may rethink and refine their own attitude towards workers and their evaluation. Thereby, the managers have a possibility of viewing and discussing the hospitals performance in new ways and ensuring that all members of medical staff are evaluated on the same criteria.

Talent reviews are periodic meetings of senior leaders to discuss information about employees future potential and past and present performance levels concerning current and emerging organizational needs. They are helpful and beneficial for the success of a hospital because they help to identify who may be a retention risk, who is doing the best work, and who is ready for promotion. 360-degree technique involves soliciting feedback from various workers and providing it to the reviewed person in a way that masks its sources. In other words, it is a system of employees receiving anonymous and confidential feedback from their co-workers; it may be direct reports and evaluation from peers and manager.

Conclusion

To draw a conclusion, one may say that developing a feedback-rich environment is rather necessary for hospitals. Fortunately, there is a great number of techniques, methods, and prompts that may help managers and employees to move in the right direction and achieve mutual understanding and trust. Leaving and receiving feedback may help leaders and workers of hospitals get a clear idea of the work, its mistakes, and advantages.

References

Drew, K., & Warnes, J. (2020). 10 steps to setting up an effective feedback mechanism. The UN Refugee Agency. Web.
Hardavella, G., Aamli-Gaagnat, A., Saad, N., Rousalova, I., & Sreter, K. B. (2017). How to give and receive feedback effectively. Breathe, 13(4), 327333.
Qian, J., Yang, F., & Han, Z. R. (2016). The influencing mechanisms of authentic leadership on feedback-seeking behavior: A cognitive/emotive model. Current Psychology, 35(3,) 478485.

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