Improving Practice Culture? Be more VIKING!: Creating your team’s Covenant!
Synopsis
Bullying and incivility in veterinary care affects morale, retention, and ultimately patient outcomes. The problem is we don’t always know how to deal with this behaviour, especially when employees are clinically competent. Therefore, we often do what’s comfortable – we do nothing. As a result, the sector is haemorrhaging really great employees and harming the very patients it vowed to serve. We cannot afford to use silence as a strategy. We need to set behavioural expectations and hold our ourselves accountable for our conduct. The result is a shift from a disrespectful to a professional work culture. Simply, practice culture is expressed in the way that we talk to each other, the way that tasks are assigned and completed, the way that we treat each other. Creating a team ‘covenant’ (a promise, a pledge a bond) or if you will a ‘Viking Code’, helps to keeps us on track and responsible for our attitudes and behaviours.
Learning outcomes
- Defining what our core values are and what they specifically mean to us in our day-to-day interactions
- Holding each other accountable to up-hold, unanimously agreed ‘Rules’ and the confidence to call each other out if not following or behaving as agreed
- Useful scripts to help deal with difficult conversations with colleagues who are being disrespectful, unprofessional, defensive etc
