With high turnover and major competition for competent care professionals, employees are working harder with fewer resources and higher expectations. That can spell stress, breakdown of morale, increased absenteeism, health problems, and decreased quality service delivery and productivity. The healing organization considers the well-being of the employee and care giver important to the healing relationship in contact with the patient.

Benefits: An organization that provides this kind of healthy, balanced, and supportive work environment will attract and keep good employees. It gains a win-win in which its employees will equal the output of their pre-healing organization, and the output of competitors as well. With a reduction in resistance, staff and administration stand to do substantially more. Plus the organization benefits from a reduction in disability, illness, sick leave, injury, addiction, and turnover. Patients will be in the company of health care providers who emanate healthy vibes, work together harmoniously, and deliver superior care.

The Healing Organization goes beyond the Learning Organization to assure the health, as well as, the professional and person growth and development of each employee. Emphasis is on optimizing human capital by providing the support of a psychologically safe work environment, opportunity for life balance, and challenge to grow in professional development, practices, and skills.

Well Begun: Employee Selection is an Essential Step
Critically important to the healing organization is the selection and development of viable human capital. Development begins with individuals who are chosen based on their fit with the organization, work unit, and job functions. Innovation, initiative, and creativity are expected. Employees take initiative, and ultimately become self-managing. Attention to employee support and development results in a level of work performance and productivity that is self-escalating.

Environmental Support and Impact
Employee support goes beyond professional competence and basic wellness practices. Employees are chosen on the basis of their desire to become role models of healthy living. The organization gets a double benefit. They have employees who are less accident prone, more focused and disciplined in their work; and who are also working in and providing a healthy environ-ment for the health care facility.

The organization reaches a level of congruence between its mission and its actual practice by having employees with healthy lifestyle and practices. This provides patients with an enhanced healing environment. Environmental support provides the outside:in impact of the healing organization for both customers - the employee and the patient The next phase, provides the inner stability with which individual employees take initiative to optimize their own work performance.

Invironmental-Impact
By adopting a policy of optimizing employee health, the healing organization can begin with an emphasis on healthy living practices. This inside:out focus goes beyond typical wellness practices to a focus on personal invironment, This means working on stressors, conflicts, energy drains, healthy thinking practices, adopting a healthy attitude of optimism, paying attention to daily intake of food, water, sleep, and images; as well as physical practices such as exercise.

Your job is not to motivate others.
Your job is to help them release the
energy that is already within them.
-- Peter Drucker

Employees are given responsibility for what they do control in their lives. They are chosen on the basis of their willingness and progress to be healthy, to be emotionally healthy, and to model congruence in the health care environment. That requires attention to their personal environment.

Environmental factors of concern include the cultural issues that pervade many organizations and render them inefficient. For example, fear obstructs the free flow of communication, which is the lifeblood of the organization and working relationships. Deming recognized the need to “drive fear from the organization.” The healing organization sets out to face this task of transforming fear to trust directly with its individual employees as well as within the organizational culture and climate.

Distrust makes working in teams, dealing with top-down relationships, and even trust of oneself an energy drain. Management style makes the transition from up-down, to side-by-side, thereby depicting the practice of including employees in decision making. The healing organization recognizes that these issues are brought in from the wider culture, and are not unique or peculiar to individual employees.

Organization Means Interdependence
Taking professional ownership and responsibility for one’s own basic job functions is essential. Yet, employees do not work alone. The interdependence of the organization calls for collaboration between departments and effective collaboration between individuals.

The Transfunctional Organization: A True Paradigm Shift
The healing organization is not just transformational. It is transfunctional – a paradigm shift. By making the employee, and human capital, the center of the organization, the organization can then pursue optimal support. Optimal development of those employees is paramount for themselves and the organization.