Ensuring wellbeing and productivity in a healthcare workforce

Today more than ever, healthcare staff are under pressure to deliver. Senior leaders are likewise under pressure to support the wellbeing of staff, without increasing operational costs and while improving institutional performance.

Questions on the minds of leaders today

This is what we hear daily, from clients in positions of leadership who are personally invested in their staff:

  • What resources or processes do we need to put in place to maintain the mental health of staff?
  • What is the right cadence of check-ins with staff to best spot risks but not overload managers?
  • What is the best way to maintain productivity but also look after staff wellbeing virtually, especially when we still have some staff working remotely?
  • How can we help prevent burnout, and maintain staff productivity?
  • How do we manage stresses that arise in responses to transitioning back to normal and times of change?

Levell is an easy way to resolve these gaps in management intelligence among a healthcare workforce, providing leaders with the data they need on how staff is feeling in work, the underlying drivers and root cause, and frontline workers’ ideas.

Senior leaders who use Levell have the information they need to know where to invest for staff wellbeing and performance, on a daily basis, with real data, and in real-time.

How Levell works

At its heart, Levell is a productivity app, supporting self-awareness and action for personal wellbeing by staff.

Accessible on desktop or via mobile phone, Levell lets staff set a personalized time to check in on the physical mental emotional states (levels of mood, energy, motivation, and stress/zen) that impact their health and performance day today. Alongside their check-in, staff can also add ‘blockers’ feedback, helping senior leaders spot the root causes of dips and problem themes. Staff can also contribute ideas for change so that leaders also get frontline solutions.

All staff who use Levell can also see their own data, enabling them to track personal trends and see how they are doing in the app. Team or project leaders can set up dashboards for teams; and senior management can set up a dashboard to view the trends, spot dips, and identify key themes across the organization. All information is anonymous and aggregate, so staff can feel comfortable sharing.

Through daily use of Levell, staff increase self-awareness perceived control and ability to influence their work. This reduces the risk of work-related stress (a critical contributor to health and performance) while providing senior leaders with the information they need to improve operational efficiency and better engage staff at the same time.

Occupational health research supporting Levell’s approach

Decades of occupational health research demonstrate that changes in daily physical mental and emotional states impact performance and health. Levels of job strain impact task performance on the job, increased fatigue causes increased error rates, energy and emotions impact one’s motivation for work, and higher stress levels undermine creativity.

The same body of research also shows that increasing workforce control, training self-management skills (including, for example, taking sufficient and efficient recovery time), and enabling participative processes of organizational change, are effective methods of redressing early signs of burnout and increasing engagement.

Levell’s application leverages these robust bodies of research, combining a daily self-reflection process that trains staff to self-observe and reacts, while increasing employee voice (through blockers and ideas feedback), and providing organizations with the tools needed to enable staff participation in organizational changes. Indeed, simply by being a space for staff to share how they feel as well as what they feel can change, Levell is a positive intervention for both wellbeing and performance, in and of itself.

Benefits for a healthcare workforce

Healthcare work is high pressure, emotionally draining work. In a clinical environment, whether in person, on the phone, or online, staff have to be on. Sessions are short, tensions are high, and patient outcomes depend on being able to make a quick assessment and provide the right direction often in as little as 15 minutes.

In early trials in healthcare work, staff felt that having a prompt to take that daily time to reflect, even for less than two minutes per day, was a welcome moment to take time out for oneself, helped them become more emotionally aware; and also to realize why they were feeling the way they did, to enable them to begin to make changes.

The methodology that Levell uses in the app is similar to an investigative approach that one might use with a patient to understand what is going on, or the type of support that one might get by working with a professional coach applying methods of Socratic questioning. By building these methods into the app, Levell enables anyone to access these techniques in a way that is much more efficient and scalable than before.

Why Levell for leaders in healthcare?

At Levell, we know that in a healthcare environment, every day is critical. People are the core of healthcare work, but quality work requires people to be in their best state. Levell is a leader in providing wellbeing data and management intelligence.

While there are many engagement and feedback tools, or the option to run annual surveys, Levell is perfect for senior leaders who place value on empowering staff and building self-awareness in work, alongside gaining a pulse on how staff are feeling in work, involving staff in contributing ideas for change, and capturing feedback data daily.

We are already working with innovative companies such as Babylon Health, to help prevent burnout and support the management of the wellbeing and productivity of their clinical workforce.

By providing tools for practicing self-reflection work, and ensuring that there is a direct line of communication between management and staff, providers who choose Levell are putting themselves on the front foot when it comes to retaining staff and ensuring organizational sustainability.

Key reasons why leaders adopt Levell for their workforce:

  • Become more aware, of how staff are doing day to day;
  • Take a quick pulse;
  • Gain frontline worker feedback;
  • Provide staff with a voice;
  • Gain staff buy-in for change;
  • Help prevent burnout in work; and
  • Get powerful, new operational insight that lets organizations know exactly where to focus resources, making a leader’s life much easier.

Levell provides a unique and effective way for health care providers to address workforce management, support, and operational efficiency needs all in one.

A bit about us

Levell’s team is passionate about achieving both high performance and wellbeing in work. We use Levell ourselves to help us reflect on how we feel, and what to do to be healthy and be productive during the week, while also sourcing ideas to improve, and monitoring the common themes that are blocking our growth as an organization.

Our headquarters are in London, UK.

References

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Schaufeli, W. B., & Bakker, A.B. (2004). Job demands, job resources, and their relationship with burnout and engagement: a multi-sample study. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25, 293–315. doi:10.1002/job.248.

Wilski, M., Chmielewski, B., & Tomczak, M. (2015). Work locus of control and burnout in Polish physiotherapists: The mediating effect of coping styles. International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health, 28(5), 875-89. doi:10.13075/ijomeh.1896.00287.

Madeleine Evans

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