Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

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A civil and healthy work environment offers personnel and other stakeholders the opportunity to be heard and respected, and acknowledges their contributions. Creating a healthy work environment requires that proactive steps be undertaken to maximize the health and well-being of the personnel and other stakeholders, enabling them to optimize performance while achieving good workplace outcomes. In addition, a civil and healthy work environment enhances human resource management activities, particularly regarding recruitment and retention thus improving the organization’s financial performance (Mabona et al., 2022). This makes it imperative for any organization to create and maintain a healthy work environment. This paper explores the relationship between civility and having a healthy work environment. Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

Issue of incivility

Incivility in the workplace presents as any behavior that deviates from and violates the established workplace norms of mutual respect. Incivility may have an ambiguous intent of causing harm. Characteristically, incivility occurs as a lack of regard for others, and may be perceived as rude and discourteous in behavior. Examples of incivility in the workplace are unfairness, rudeness, disruptive behavior, and subtle harassment (Shoorideh et al., 2021).

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Any unpleasant behavior can be considered incivility. The occurrence of workplace incivility creates a ‘toxic’ work environment that undermines cohesion and collaboration in teams, erodes trust, and damages the reputation of an organization. Any person subjected to incivility in the form of rude, disrespectful or aggressive behavior is like to have decreased productivity, increased stress and reduced job satisfaction, translating into high absenteeism and turnover rates. Incivility stands out because behavior is considered more meaningful than processes. There is an expectation that respectful work behaviors would support the organization in achieving the targeted performance outcomes. Civility engenders respect as a prerequisite for retaining valuable personnel, sustaining operations, and avoiding deviant behavior (Kanitha & Naik, 2021).  Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

Importance of incivility to nursing

Nursing practice occurs in a high-pressure and stressful environment. This environment can present opportunities for incivility that presents as abusive behavior, including violence, aggression, bullying, tyranny, discrimination, harassment, and feuding. In addition, they can present as aggressive, dismissive, and rude communication, which occurs as condescending language and voice intonation, skipping greetings, social exclusion, gossip, unavailability, impatient questions, dismissive gestures, and belittling comments. The occurrence of any of these behaviors would harm nurse performance, both clinical and psychological performance. It impacts clinical performance through cognitive impairment from psychological impacts resulting in reduced patient satisfaction and quality of care, patient mortality, threats to patient safety, medical errors, and adverse events. The psychological impacts include strained relationships in the workplace, impeded information transfer, obstructed collaboration, impaired communication, stress, frustration, and lack of communication (Lewis, 2023). Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

Incivility in nursing presents significant concerns. An individual subjected to workplace incivility is likely to punish the offended, and possibly even punish the organization, whether intentionally or unintentionally while not considering the action as revenge. Still, most targets of workplace incivility are likely to bury or hide their feelings. Some of the costs of workplace incivility include nurses taking out their frustrations on patients, resigning from the job, reduced commitment and loyalty to the organization, declining performance, lost work from avoiding the offender, lost work from worrying about the incivility incident, reduced work quality, reduced time spent at work, and intentional reduction in work effort. In addition, workplace incivility would cause nurses’ creativity to suffer, performance and team spirit to deteriorate, and patients to turn away to other facilities. Besides that, workplace incivility incidences may require management that could be expensive while taking attention and effort away from other productive activities, not to mention the time spent dealing with the aftermath and mending relationships between personnel. Financial costs could also be incurred when consultants and attorneys are engaged, or if there is compensation for harm caused to victim and other stakeholders (Maddox-Daines, 2023). Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

Scenario

This conversation between Mary, a newly hired novice nurse, and her supervisor, illustrates an example of workplace incivility.

Supervisor: Have you been to the emergency department to get this patient’s file?

Mary: No, I haven’t been there to get the report. There have been a lot of tasks with other patients, such as changing a catheter, feeding, and administering medication. Can you maybe get someone to pick up the file from the emergency room, I still have a lot to do and may not have enough time to go for the file?

Supervisor: It seems that you are unprepared for your current role as a nurse. I suggest that you apply to be rotated to another department with less work as you are overwhelmed by the workload. We do not tolerate laziness in this department, and I suggest that you catch up with what needs to be done if you intend to stay in this department.

(After the conversation with Mary, the supervisor went on to inform other nurses working in the department that Mary was lazy and did not have what is needed in the department.) Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

The conversation between Mary and her supervisor may appear as a candid one in which the supervisor expresses honest opinions. However, it is rude communication that expresses workplace incivility. Mary is likely to feel aggrieved, upset and angry after the conversation. The supervisor’s behavior harms the workplace relationships, and team performance and collaboration. The supervisor should have been respectful in the conversation, and offered helpful advice rather than going all out to criticize Mary. The supervisor should understand that Mary is a novice nurse and may be overwhelmed by the workload. Rather than criticizing Mary and labeling her as lazy, the supervisor should offer support, such as reducing some of the workload (DeNisco, 2023). Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

Strategies

There are three strategies for creating a civil and healthy workplace. First, considering civility at hiring by intentionally assessing new hires for interpersonal skills. This requires the organization to prioritize hiring personnel who embody and value workplace civility. Second, providing civility training that improves empathy, activity listening, conflict resolution and respectful communication. This ensures that the organization develops the right culture and cultivates the right values. Third, having leadership development initiatives that equip leaders with the knowledge, competencies and skills to support and cultivate civil behavior in the workplace (Maddox-Daines, 2023).

Specialty track

The selected specialty track is executive. As an advanced practice nurse taking on the role of an executive, there are two strategies that can be applied to cultivate a healthful work environment. First, acting as a leader in providing coaching for personnel who exhibit uncivil behavior or those struggling to exhibit civil behavior. Coaching helps in exploring the impact of favorable and unfavorable behavior. Second, asking for and providing feedback that explores the reality as is. Feedback may be uncomfortable, but it provides honest performance evaluation that is applied in learning and growing. Feedback should be presented as positive criticism (Huston, 2023). Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

Conclusion

One must accept that a healthy workplace maximizes well-being and health, while enabling the organization to optimize performance. In addition, one must acknowledge that workplace incivility occurs as deviant behavior that compromise workplace health by damaging the organization’s reputation, erodes trust, and undermines team cohesion and collaboration. Workplace incivility is an issue of concern in the healthcare environment as it reduces work effort, time spent at work, and quality of work. The strategies suggested for improving workplace civility are considering civility at hiring, providing civility training, and having leadership development initiatives. For an advanced practice nurse taking on the role of an executive, workplace civility can be improved by providing coaching sessions and leveraging feedback. Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion

References

DeNisco, S. M. (2023). Advanced Practice Nursing: Essential Knowledge for the Profession (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Huston, C. J. (2023). Leadership Roles and Management Function in Nursing Theory and Application (11th ed.). Lippincott.

Kanitha, D., & Naik, P. R. (2021). Experience of Workplace Incivility and Its Impact on Stress and Turnover Intention among the Nurses Working at a Hospital: Cross-Sectional Survey Approach. Iranian journal of nursing and midwifery research, 26(3), 285–287. https://doi.org/10.4103/ijnmr.IJNMR_124_20

Lewis, C. (2023). The impact of interprofessional incivility on medical performance, service, and patient care: a systematic review. Future Healthcare Journal, 10(1), 69-99. https://doi.org/10.7861/fhj.2022-0092

Mabona, J. F., van Rooyen, D., & Ten Ham-Baloyi, W. (2022). Best practice recommendations for healthy work environments for nurses: An integrative literature review. Health SA = SA Gesondheid, 27, 1788. https://doi.org/10.4102/hsag.v27i0.1788

Maddox-Daines, K. (2023). Managing People in the Hybrid Workplace. Taylor & Francis.

Shoorideh, A. F., Moosavi, S., & Balouchi, A. (2021). Incivility toward nurses: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine, 14, 15. https://doi.org/10.18502/jmehm.v14i15.7670 Cultivating Healthful Environments Discussion