Introduction
Good Hope hospital is a healthcare facility located in New York City. It was founded in the year 2000 with an objective of being the leading healthcare services provider, by providing personalized healthcare as well as ensuring that every American has access to affordable healthcare. Since 2000, the hospital has grown to become one of the largest healthcare facilities in the state of New York. The hospital provides both inpatient and outpatient services, with an emergency services unit that is open round the clock. The hospital offers emergency services to other hospitals inside and outside the city of New York.
Since it’s a big hospital funded by the state of New York, the hospital also receives referrals from other smaller hospitals within the state. As a result, it’s imperative to ensure that all the hospitals units are up and running all the time. In the recent months, there has been a high rate of low employee productivity, which had the hospital’s Managing Board worried. A root cause analysis was important to determine the deficiencies and draw a recommendation for higher hospital productivity.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Methods
To conduct the research several approaches were employed:
Observation
Observation was undertaken through working with staff in all the hospital’s departments and regular interactions. In the process, how the employees went about their everyday roles and how they related with each other in the course of their work was documented.
Interviews
The second technique employed was interviews. Questionnaires were prepared and administered to the employees orally. Some of the questions asked were included how the employees found their work, the challenges they faced, and if they were happy working at the hospital.
Questionnaires
Since working in the departments and interviewing the employees was impossible, questionnaires were administered to aid the research.
Findings
Role Conflict
According to Kahn et al (1964) as quoted by Chang and Tang (2010), role conflict occurs when an employee has to perform two tasks of conflicting nature at the same time. During the research, it was found that role disagreement was the most rampant form of conflict within the hospital and especially the EU. Since the Emergency unit is required by Federal law to treat any patient regardless of their ability to pay.
The ER receives a large number of patients including some who do not need the services of the ER.As a result the ER receives the highest number of patients every day. The number of staff assigned to the ER cannot match those of patients who show up every day. As a result, the staff in the ER end up working for long hours in a day. Most of these staff have children to take care of at home, and the long stay in the ER robs them their parenting hours.
Closely related to role conflict, is role ambiguity that occurs when there is lack of clear specification of roles (Cowen & Moorehead, 2011). The research disclosed that most of the machines in the ER have not been replaced in a long time, and are prone to developing technical issues most of the time. There are only two technicians in the whole hospital. Sometimes when these machines develop a technical hitch, the nurses alternate between their duties, and spend a lot of time trying to fix the machine as they await for the technician.
From the findings, this kind of conflict in roles leads to work fatigue among the staff. One particular nurse indicated that the human resource department has ignored their pleas to recruit more people and to reduce the number of hours one spends in their shifts. As a result, they feel overworked. Most of them resort to leaving the organization and looking for alternative places of employment. For the ones who remain, they are tired almost all the time leading to low energy levels and hence poor service in the units they have been assigned.
Communication Problems among Group Members
According to Hammer (2005), communication involves sharing ideas and messages with others in a particular place. Since employees are mostly engrossed in their work, they hardly have time to talk to one another, this becomes a challenge when, as it happens at times, the employees are required to work together. Since they hardly communicate, there is no teamwork among them. As an effect, they have developed the kind of mentality expecting the other person to do something in a situation requiring teamwork.
Lack of Cohesiveness in Groups of Diverse Members
New York City is a Cosmopolitan town with people of diverse cultural backgrounds. The diversity is portrayed in the work place of Good Hope. Diversity in the workplace tends to cause inter personal conflicts (Martin, 2014). These conflicts are because people from different cultural backgrounds behave uniquely owing to different beliefs.
When employees meet, it is difficult for them to start interacting and associating freely, and sometimes conflicts occur due to misunderstandings of each other’s diversity and refusal to accommodate, or tolerate the divergent views. In the course of the research, it was established that employees in the hospital’s staff tend to associate with others whom they share the same cultural backgrounds. As a result, the employees are divided in subgroups based on their cultural backgrounds.
Work place intolerance hinders communication and often leads to conflicts between the groups. The conflicts can starts small and culminates into a huge problem. In Good Hope hospital, I realized that the few Mexicans working there have some form of inferiority complex. If one of them is confronted for a mistake, the others react in a negative manner often accusing the management of being biased against them. With this type of mentality, it is hard for them to be productive. Even for the other groups, it is easy for them to accuse one group of receiving special treatment, and this distracts them from work. In extreme cases, conflicts results and performance is adversely affected in such circumstances, leading to low productivity.
Inter group conflicts
Intergroup conflict refers to the disagreements occurring between two different groups of people. In Good Hope hospital, there has been a huge conflict raging between the human resource department and the employees. The HR department has not heeded to the calls of increasing hospital staff. As such, they feel ignored and have already staged a go slow in the past one month. Some of the employees have left the hospital due to this while the remaining ones are exhibiting a general unwillingness to do their work. The fact that the employees from different cultural backgrounds have formed groups based on their cultural affiliations, means that members of a group do not get to interact with others outside their group. The lack of communication between these groups means that they do not understand one another’s culture. In case these groups crush on interests, the few times they get to interact, a conflict is bound to come up. Once such a conflict occurs, the productivity of employees deteriorates, especially if one or more employees from different backgrounds work in the same organization.
Recommendations
To increase employee productivity and reduce employee turn out I recommend the following:
Role Conflict
The problem of role conflict is widely the result of a small work force. It is recommend the management looks for a way to employ more people especially in the technical department. Massive recruitment will ensure more shifts with few work hours and enough people to work during break. The employees will have time to rest and be with their families. It also acts as a motivation and increases their productivity.
Employing more technicians will also ensure that the nurses do only the work that is stipulated in their job description. In addition, the hospital should undertake an inspection to identify machines that are old and replace them. The objectives may not be hard since the management can seek help from the administration of the state of New York
Communication problems
Employing more staff will give employees some free time, and thus they will be able to interact. In addition, the hospital should invest in team building; they can hire a team building coach or go for a team building retreat. Team building will ensure that employees interact more. It will also foster communication across the different culturally diverse groups that the employees at Good Hope have formed.
Alternatively, the company can form small committees involving the employees whenever there is a problem. The committees should take into account cultural diversity in the work place. Forming such groups will require the employees to communicate as they try to solve the problem at hand and will encourage positive communication between them. It will also encourage the employees communicate their views. When employees feel appreciated and involved in the work place, they become motivated and their productivity is high. The management should also adopt an approach of listening to the employees and working on their demands if deemed genuine, as opposed to just ordering them around.
Excessive conflict
When the organization works on its communication between the management and the workers, and amongst the workers, it will solve the problem of excessive conflicts as most problems stem out of poor communication, or the absolute lack of communication.
Process Consultation or Coaching
This is a lot similar to team building, except process consultation is restricted to helping a group solve problems that may occur. Nazzaro and Strazabosco (2009) define it as the process by which member of a group attempt to identify and solve problems with the aid of a coach. This is helpful since it helps solve potential problems that may threaten group productivity.
Conclusion
For an organization to meet its objectives, it highly depends on its work force. Low productivity from the employees end can greatly hinder the achievement of these objectives and lead to losses. As such, the organization should constantly make an effort to ensure that the employees are motivated to ensure high productivity all the time.
In the case of Good Hope, improving communication, employing more staff, and involving staff in decision making process, through formation of committees will help increase productivity. In turn this will ensure that the hospital meet it’s objective of being the leading hospital in New York City by providing personalized health care, as well as providing accessible and affordable healthcare to every American.
References
Cowen, P. S., & Moorhead, S. (2011). Current issues in nursing . St. Louis, Mo: Mosby Elsevier.
Hamer, M. B. (2005). Communication within the workplace (Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Stout.
Martin, G. C. (2014). The effects of cultural diversity in the workplace. Journal of Diversity Management (Online) , 9 (2), 89.
Nazzaro, A. M., & Strazzabosco, J. (2009). Group dynamics and team building. Development , (4).
Tang, Y. T., & Chang, C. H. (2010). Impact of role ambiguity and role conflict on employee creativity. African Journal of Business Management , 4 (6), 869.
