Even a great, well-operating team can deal with hiccups in communication, experience burnout, and become plagued with low morale. With healthcare demands growing and staff shortages causing extensive overtime, it’s more important than ever to show your nurses that their leaders and organization care.
Luckily, you can take steps as a nurse leader, supervisor, or even higher-level executive to boost employee morale in your nursing department. Each team is unique with its own set of needs- use these tips as the building blocks to improving motivation and getting your nursing team back on track.
Table of Contents
1. Stay Present
2. Engage Your Nurses and Staff in Decisions
3. Encourage Self Care
4. Make Time For Staff Recognition
5. Cultivate Relationships
6. Provide Clear Objectives
8. Be Available
9. Facilitate a Healthy Work Environment
10. Ask for Feedback
Conclusions
1. Stay Present
Presence in nursing as an action spans far beyond the bedside and how nurses interact with their patients. While nurses are expected to be present and direct their attention to patients’ needs, it’s equally important for nurse leaders to offer a sense of presence to their team.
Leaders can gain an increased understanding and empathy by being present around patients and their teams. This allows you to improve communication and ensure you know how your team is feeling. In return, this increases nurse morale- a mutual benefit.
2. Engage Your Nurses and Staff in Decisions
A collaborative approach that engages your nursing team, leaders, and clinical nurses allow for increased workplace visibility. This meaningful and more focused recognition allows for appreciation, further engagement, and increased momentum.
Include your team in the decision-making process and watch your team’s morale skyrocket.
3. Encourage Self Care
As mandated in the American Nursing Association’s code of ethics, self-care is an integral part of being able to care for others. By recognizing that your team deserves the same level of care that they provide to others, you’re facilitating nurses to improve their personal mental and physical health, allowing for better work productivity and increased motivation.
Self-care for nurses reflects on stress management, bedside care, empathy, compassion, and reaching their goals as both individuals and a team.
4. Make Time For Staff Recognition
Staff recognition can be difficult, as everyone feels recognized in their unique ways. By getting to know your team and understanding their strengths, you can better gauge how to appropriately encourage your staff through employee recognition as a leader.
Seyzo Health is a digital nurse leader rounding tool that allows nurse leaders to track and reward nurses through staff recognition, providing a leaderboard for your team to view the good work that you are already doing.
5. Cultivate Relationships
A relationship-based culture in healthcare is necessary to keep your team running smoothly. The majority of the technical and clinical aspects of nursing involve human relationships and meaningful interactions, putting relationship building at the heart of priorities.
By cultivating healthy relationships, nurse leaders can follow their team’s cues, understand context, hold each other accountable, and work alongside each other with dignity and respect.
6. Provide Clear Objectives
Fuzzy communication can easily be the downfall to the productivity and success of any project. When it comes to caring for patients, providing clear objectives to your team is crucial to everyone involved’s health, safety, and morale.
Make sure that your goals are clear and easy to understand and that any questions are answered quickly. Doing so can set a clear example and expectations moving forward.
7. Keep It Simple
Even though many moving parts in healthcare can make the continuum of care seem complicated, keeping objectives and communication as simple and clear-cut as possible is one way to improve employee morale.
Keeping goals and communication simple gives nurses reasonable expectations and a straightforward path to meeting patients’ needs.
8. Be Available
Studies on the productivity and morale of nurses have found that self-care is an integral part of the process. Nurse leadership is one of the foundational necessities for nurses to practice self-care. Being available to offer support and answer questions for your team is just one way of being more present.
Leading by example is another way of showing your team you are available to them. Enact healthy routines and check in with your coworkers frequently. Let them know that you are there and more than willing to take the time to be there for them. Nurses’ self-care and morale at work begin with a leader who supports them.
9. Facilitate a Healthy Work Environment
Facilitate a healthy work environment to improve employee morale in nursing by removing barriers that inhibit communication, patient care, personal barriers, and education. Ensure that all nurses feel confident in their abilities and provide supplemental support through education and learning where necessary.
One idea is implementing workshops for your team. This could be educational for team building, patient care, relationship building, or even self-care workshops.
10. Ask for Feedback
Lastly, one of the best ways to figure out how to improve morale among your team of nurses is to find answers at the source. Ask your team how your unit can improve- ways they can excel at their job daily. Their feedback directly represents the quality of care with patients and how smoothly things are running internally from a bedside perspective.
Consider nurses’ feedback and figure out ways to improve it. Ask for not only feedback but suggestions on how to fix any problems.
Conclusion
There are many ways that nurse leaders, executives, and those managing nursing units can improve the morale of their employees. This article discussed 10 easy ways to improve staff satisfaction and motivation.
To recap:
1. Stay Present
2. Engage Your Nurses and Staff in Decisions
3. Encourage Self Care
4. Make Time For Staff Recognition
5. Cultivate Relationships
6. Provide Clear Objectives
7. Keep It Simple
8. Be Available
9. Facilitate a Healthy Work Environment
10. Ask for Feedback
Seyzo Health is a healthcare digital nurse rounding tool that allows nurse leaders and healthcare executives to make proactive decisions regarding operations, including staff recognition, improved communication, and customizable nurse leader rounding templates. So you can ask the right questions and have a happy team.
