Happy Nurses Week!
Nurses Week annually celebrates and honors nurses from all around the United States. Lasting from May 6 to May 12, the week is dedicated to recognizing the invaluable contributions nurses and other hospital staff make to their hospitals and society. The week is an important time to celebrate achievements, recognize hard work, and show staff that their well-being matters too.
By acknowledging dedication, expertise, and compassion, especially during this important week, hospitals take a public stand in support of their staff, fostering a culture of respect and gratitude that runs through every vein of the organization.
Here are five ways a recognition provider like Dash Solutions can help you celebrate:
1. Honor and Celebrate your Nurses
According to Forbes, a staggering 93% of healthcare workers report experiencing stress, 86% face anxiety, 77% feel frustration, 76% suffer from exhaustion and burnout, and 75% feel overwhelmed. Recognizing and appreciating nurses during this week not only boosts their morale but also enhances their productivity and engagement.
Meaningful behaviors for Nurses Week can be celebrated and appreciated in a myriad of ways. Recognition providers should be able to accommodate this demand from hospitals. Contemporary providers can incorporate nurse-to-nurse, manager-to-nurse, or even patient-to-nurse bulk or spot recognitions to facilitate easy recognition for all levels of stakeholders during the special event. This also makes the appreciation transparent, inclusive, and trackable to measure engagement. Beyond custom, industry-specific awards like DAISY awards, BEE awards, and others can be added into the recognition mix and incorporated as meaningful.
This holistic approach empowers employees to celebrate one another’s successes and gives leadership visibility. Whatever the award mix may be, it is important to leverage technology that can accommodate several ways to honor and celebrate your hard-working nurses, driving a culture of appreciation.
2. Show your Appreciation with a Personalized Thank You
Consider this example from an employee regarding monetary manager-to-peer recognition. A self-proclaimed “sneakerhead”, the included message had a personalized message about using the monetary award for their passion, forever tying the sneaker purchase with the personal achievement. This is powerful intrinsic motivation.
This is a specific example from Dash Solutions, but the Society of Human Resource Management recommends the sender “be genuine and from the heart…small gestures like a hype reel or personalized note can have a big impact”. These can be permissioned bulk awards delivered with special or generic thank you card art, or even spot awards delivered in conjunction with a heartfelt thank you message. Absent money in the budget, other examples include relying on the programs templated ecards to drive engagement among peers or even opening this line of communication to external stakeholders.
3. Centralize Recognition
Modern hospitals are largely part of a greater health system or network, so relevant award logic, flexible rewards, and ways to easily remain connected to recognition are key. Interoperability with Microsoft Teams and SMS capabilities help address the needs of a distributed and highly worked employee base, centralizing recognition and reinforcing core values and unique departmental values- no matter the employee home base.
Even though the celebration might be a little different, the information is captured within the solution just the same and creates inclusive celebrations for dispersed hospital systems. This helps give visibility for areas of optimizations, change management, and other improvements.
4. Incorporate Your Core Values
A good recognition provider goes beyond adding your logo to the homepage and updating buttons with your brand colors. While, yes, this helps staff feel at home immediately on login, it is the harmonious alignment between meaningful behaviors and core values which brings the fruits to the recognition labor- like 17% higher productivity, 41% lower absenteeism, and even 12% increase in patient satisfaction scores.
According to Great Place to Work, “a core values recognition program helps employees understand what behaviors and attitudes align with the [hospital’s] mission. When employees are consistently rewarded for demonstrating company values, they are more likely to internalize those behaviors and inspire others.
Simply put, when recognition is aligned to core values, the expectations are clear, the values are concrete, and recognition is not a mystery.
5. Capture Patient and Family Recognition with your Program
Collecting patient and family feedback is an important tool hospitals leverage to boost patient outcomes, increase workplace pride, and feel “inspired to provide the highest standard of care”.
With external recognition capabilities, hospitals can send recognition from patients and families to meaningful stakeholders at the healthcare provider. The information captured is also fed into the recognition program, centralizing all feedback and recognition in one easily accessible place.
Here are 3 ways patient and family recognition can be used to enhance recognition for Nurses Week and beyond:
- Allowing patients and families to express appreciation through written or verbal acknowledgment.
- Implementing hospital-wide recognition programs where patient feedback is shared.
- Creating peer recognition initiatives where nurses celebrate each other’s contributions, for both spot recognition and big events.
Gathering social proof- both the good and the bad- goes a long way towards combating things like >90% burnout, and 18% turnover rate among nurses.
This ultimately leads to positive effects at the healthcare organization like increased patient safety, improved nurse retention, and higher patient satisfaction scores.
Conclusion
The above are only examples of ways to help you celebrate your nurses and other staff this Nurses Week. A good healthcare recognition provider gives you the options and change management to celebrate as you see fit. After 20 years in healthcare recognition, there is no shortage of methods and techniques to leverage to drive the KPIs you find meaningful- like more retention, increased productivity, or reduced burnout. We support you as we work together to design, build, and optimize a caregiver recognition and engagement solution that’s right for your hospital.