Encouraging employees to support change and suggest new ways of providing services is one aspect of what Dr. Charles Glisson of the University of Tennessee Children’s Mental Health Research Center calls a “positive organizational culture.”

Organizational/Partnership Functioning and Change Readiness: 24 Assessment Tools offers assessment tools for organizational change in various health settings. These tools can assist in strategizing positive organizational culture to improve employee retention rates, support higher job satisfaction, and  implementation of new treatments, and ultimately improve client satisfaction and treatment outcomes.
 

The following is an adaptation used with permission from Stress and Burnout: A Prevention Handbook for the Alcohol and Other Drugs Workforce, by Natalie Skinner and Anne Roach from National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction (NCETA), Flinders University: Adelaide, Australia.

 

Organizational strategies focus on changing the work environment or condition that cause stress or burnout. Changing aspects of the work environment can be costly in terms of time and resources. It is acknowledged that many AOD organizations face significant resource constraints.

 

However, investing in organizational strategies is likely to produce significant benefits. It has been well established that addressing the source of stress or burnout is likely to have the greatest impact on workers’ wellbeing over the long-term. The factors that impact on stress and burnout are likely to differ between organizations, work units, teams and individuals. In this situation, the workers are the “experts.” An organizational strategy to address stress or burnout will be most successful if it is developed in collaboration with workers.

 

NCETA’s nine key organizational-level strategies and interventions to address stress and burnout are listed below:

Detailed information is available in the Stress and Burnout handbook.

 

Work Positive was originally developed by Health Scotland and the Health and Safety Authority (HSA, Ireland) to help organizations identify the potential causes of stress at work. The information can be applied to the behavioral health field in the United States, for more information go to Work Positive Auditing Organizational Stress [2.10.2f 2].

Is it possible to identify employees that could engage in workplace violence? See the suggestions, intended for correctional administrators on Corrections.com that can also be applied to the behavioral health workplace.