Motivational Plan for the Nursing Staff Within a Hospital

Motivational Plan for the Nursing Staff within a Hospital

Andrew James Stubblefield

HCM 502 – Organizational Behavior Human Resources in Healthcare

Colorado State University

Dr. Trellany Thomas-Evans

June 17, 2017

Motivational Plan for the Nursing Staff within a Hospital

Working within the walls of healthcare is never a simple task for a person. Any person who has worked in healthcare has taken a giant leap and given up many things to be able to lend a hand to those in need. Maintaining happiness and drive for any given job within healthcare isn’t simple, it takes multiple factors to keep employees motivated and working. There’s more than just the money, it takes challenges, advancements, and recognition to keep employees within a single organization. However, each person has their own needs and desires that must be met and as a manager, figuring out each employee needs and desires isn’t a simple task. This isn’t something that an organization can throw money at and call it good. Multiple psychologists have studied what makes an employee tick and how an organization or leadership can maintain an employee long-term. There isn’t an easy answer but as a manager to make a plan that can help one navigate the current and help reach out to all employees to make sure their needs are met, might be possible.

Establishing a High Motivation Staff Plan

There are many ways to motivate staff and to keep them happy, however, each staff member has their own needs and desires to be met. There is no cookie cutter method that keeps every staff member happy constantly, even pay raises will fade. Psychologists from different eras have offered insight into what makes a worker happy and content. None of them can find a clear-cut solution but there are ideas and methods that seems very similar in the end. Attempting to utilize these ideas to plan or step by step process can be helpful in keeping staff’s moral up.

Starting a motivational plan needs to begin from the HR (human resources) department because through them, all employees are hired, and they can see a trend in applications to why a person left their last position. It is commonly stated that people leave past jobs due to bad boss, not leaders, instead of the job itself (Kummamuru & Murthy, 2014).  After speaking with the human resource department, a good outline should be made based on employee feedback, as it relates to the job at the time. However, employee feedback is always changing because in medicine, the job itself is everchanging. This is due to the uncertainty of the healthcare laws in the country, the supply and demand of a person’s job (some jobs are more needed then others, depending on the season), and the change of the market (stocks. Investments) as it pertains to healthcare (Odoardi, 2015).

After interviewing those employees that are directly underneath a certain manager, the next step would be to sit down with other managers that work within the same or very similar realm that one does and compare ideas. Other managers have probably attempted to place into effect plans prior and some ideas could be crossed off to help get to a better result sooner. The main idea that is tried time and time again is raising the wage of employees. Everyone loves a pay raise but that is only temporary. Money is why most people come to work, to support their lifestyle or family, but there must be more than money to for an employee to reach fulfillment (Maden, 2015). There needs to be recognition for a job well done, even if it is what is stated in the job ad that a person applied for. Being reminded that a person is doing their job and management is noticing, can go a long way in increasing workplace happiness. Even some criticism should be welcome and boost morale, this goes back to seeing that management is noticing the work that employees are doing. This must be done in a very delicate fashion because too much criticism can lead to poor performance and morale being depleted, not just for the one receiving the criticism but the entire staff.

Allowing staff to continue education can also be a useful tool in raising morale around the workplace. When a person is learning, they are expanding to new horizons (even if this learning is about a subject they have been using for years) and getting to test their knowledge and even skills. Since the field of medicine is always growing and changing, the knowledge that one had yesterday, could already be outdated and in need of new training. This is, once again, a very delicate line to walk because of the immense pressure too much education could put on a person’s motivation. If not carefully integrated at certain times, it could lead to frustrate and unhappiness because the sense of self accomplishment will lessen and the work load will continuously pile up on an employee. Management should want staff to continue learning, so they can be prepared if a situation arises but not to the point where they must spend extra time off the clock or away from home, learning and being tested (Rasskazova, Ivanova, & Sheldon, 2016).