by Cheryl Honeycutt and Carrie Bauman
The last two years of crawling through a pandemic has been serious work. The healthcare industry has dealt with all kinds of unknowns. Healthcare workers got more exhausted, overworked, and underpaid, all at the same time. This professional state of affairs went on and on without abatement. On the personal side, many of us lost loved ones, and many of those who were saved had to deal with long Covid symptoms. Although we are a bit worse for the wear and tear, we all evolved in order to survive – and so did our patients.
During this time, our patient population changed dramatically too. During nearly two years of waiting, isolation, and fear, they have become more frustrated, more scared, more demanding, more self-absorbed – and some of them have become down right mean! As leaders in the healthcare industry, we must consider ways to help our patients and our staff process everything that has happened, so we can all return to a good place.
When used appropriately, humor in the workplace provides many benefits. It can reduce stress, ignite creative thinking, humanize us, build trust, develop a sense of team, and enhance interpersonal communication - and it can also increase morale. Obviously, these benefits lift the entire organization. When employees are happy, when they trust one another, and when the team has stronger relationships with one another, productivity is enhanced, and collaboration makes us all happier. We perform better.
Humor can make leaders more approachable. There are many different ways to create humor in the workplace, but as most things, it starts with leadership. Sharing mistakes, failures, or a few funny stories can demonstrate that leaders are just as human as the next person. Stories create valuable opportunities to communicate information. They can break down walls and give us a platform to pass along what has been learned over time, rapidly creating shared knowledge for the team. Telling stories and using humor to convey information can also make us better leaders by creating an opening for employees to share back. Humor is a relatively safe way for us to be vulnerable and build trust. It also results in connections between colleague, patients, and others the more we see each other as human beings.
How do You Create Opportunities to Inject Humor?
I like to create humor in the workplace by starting meetings off with a fun activity or ice breaker. This allows us to get to know something new about the people on the team and enhance our professional bond to a more personal level. Games are great for this as well, and it can be surprising to learn just how competitive the most unassuming people can become.
About Cheryl Honeycutt
Cheryl Honeycutt is a dynamic Office Manager/General Manager with over 25 years of successful leadership in respective healthcare and retail entities. She is an exceptional communicator with a creative approach, unsurpassed problem-solving abilities, and an acute customer-needs assessment aptitude. She has consistently earned top ranks in managerial performance in every position by establishing revenues, profits, and market share to new heights.
Edited by Carrie Bauman, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at WhiteSpace Health.
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