Creating Healthy Work Environments is a Sigma event designed specifically to help leaders in both academic and clinical settings develop, implement, and maintain strategies to improve work environments. At this year’s event, the recipients of the Academic Healthy Work Environment Award and the Clinical Healthy Work Environment Award are serving as plenary speakers to share strategies and policies their institutions have implemented to contribute to a supportive and productive workplace.
Read an excerpt from each recipient’s award application below. We hope you’ll be inspired by their achievements!
Frontier Nursing University
Recipient of Sigma's Academic Healthy Work Environment Award
Frontier Nursing University (FNU) is a private, nonprofit, nonresidential graduate school of nursing offering community-based, distance education programs leading to the Doctor of Nursing Practice degree, the Master of Science in Nursing degree, and/or post-graduate certificates in advanced practice nursing specialties. FNU is committed to fostering a healthy work environment for students, faculty, and staff by focusing on physical factors, psychosocial factors, and involvement in the community to promote excellence in faculty and student outcomes.
FNU’s healthy work environment development relies on data-driven, evidence-based decision-making to create programs, policies, and systems that support all employees equally. For example, FNU has strongly advocated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for over a decade. DEI goals and initiatives are staples of FNU’s annual strategic plans. DEI is part of our organization’s environment, shared governance, and policies. Progress has been made throughout the FNU community, including faculty, staff, students, admissions, curriculum, and educational programs. Several DEI-focused committees, a President’s DEI Task Force, and two DEI Fellowship programs have been launched in the past few years. Each initiative has clearly defined purpose statements and measurable goals to ensure DEI is present in every facet of the university, including its personnel, culture, policies, curriculum, and leadership.
We are proud to be a university that is cultivating a diverse, inclusive, supportive, and safe work environment for its faculty and staff. This culture then naturally extends to the students who are at the core of our mission, providing them with a welcoming and nurturing environment in which to learn and grow.
UVA Health Women’s and Children’s Hospital
Recipient of Sigma's Clinical Healthy Work Environment Award
The UVA Health Women’s and Children’s Hospital (WCH) of the University of Virginia implementation of the Wisdom and Wellbeing Program (WWP) is an innovative strategy for creating and sustaining a work culture that makes a healthy work environment possible. The WCH WWP started in 2018 and is a hospital-wide intraprofessional approach that brings leaders, managers, and workers together to address the physical work environment, psychosocial work environment, health and well-being resources, and the health of the community.
Initially, a Communications and Culture Workgroup was formed to begin the process of understanding the needs, challenges, and joys of the WCH team members with the goal of initiating actions that would affect positive culture change. Starting with listening sessions, the workgroup held 12 in-person sessions and gathered over 500 statements and then followed up with communication and culture survey. Recognizing that culture change comes from a thousand nudges versus one big push, the Communication and Culture Committee implemented a range of strategies in 2019, like:
- Monthly Matters newsletter based on core values
- Empowerment email address for identifying challenges and solutions
- Environmental “Joy” activities that stimulated creativity and fun; team board decorations, gratitude boards, appreciation bouquets, candy and food
- Established and disseminated WCH norms of mission and values that supported the goal of being a place where you would recommend your friends to come to work and where you would want your family members to receive care
The initial strategies produced generally positive outcomes among team members regarding team cohesion, strengthened unit and hospital identity, and collegiality. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that additional strategies were needed at a hospital level scale that could address physical and psychosocial safety needs, integration of resources, and support team members who demonstrated stress injuries related to trauma, loss, moral distress, and exhaustion.
The WCH integrated the UVA Medical Center Wisdom and Wellbeing Program (WWP) to provide structure, sustainability, and increased scale of activity. The WWP uses four models that include wisdom practices, stress continuum, stress injury, and stress first aid to promote peer support and leader skills through assessment, prevention, and interventions. The stress continuum (Ready, Reacting, Injured, Ill) is used to structure resources, training, and assessments. The WWP prevention arm includes introductory training for all team members, development of unit peer support champions, and managers. Currently, over 75% of the clinical units have at least one trained champion or leader. The WWP added resources and strategies related to wisdom practices, stress response mitigation, discrimination and bias response, addressing system-level stressors, conflict communication, crisis intervention, and resources for team members and their families. The Communications and Culture Workgroup was restructured as a steering committee with focused sub-committees for sustainability. Unit and team assessment strategies were expanded to include peer champion or manager team-focused dialogs and the Wisdom and Wellbeing Quick Check as a stress thermometer. Additional measures include staffing data, ongoing quality and safety reviews, and two annual organizational engagement surveys.
Congratulations to both award recipients! Though nominations are currently closed, they will reopen in June for the 2025 Creating Healthy Work Environments event.