>> Good morning, everybody.
Welcome to 10-minute well-being tips for managers.
Appreciate you joining us for 10 minutes and
we'll have a Q&A right afterward.
Last week we introduced the topic of how you, as leaders,
can support healthy and well norms on your team.
This is the second in a series of five episodes that will
culminate in a process
for you to help build these well-being norms on your team.
Today, we're going to focus on setting boundaries and
while I'm going to probably share 10 or 12 different ideas,
they're not all going to resonate with you.
I'll do my best to fluctuate the examples I give you
to respect that there are different shifts on this call,
there are different types of workers represented on this call,
but you may have to use your imagination a little
bit to help it apply to your team.
Now, many feel guilty about the idea or the idea
of setting a boundary because it
feels like we might be shutting people out,
and some people when they hear someone else has
a boundary they may feel like that person is being defensive.
However, we want to appreciate that
people with boundaries are better able to
serve others and Brene Brown touches on this idea in this book.
Those who set boundaries are more compassionate of others,
and they're more likely to view others with positive intent.
They're more likely to give other people the benefit of the doubt.
In other words, these are the people you want to hang out with.
You want to hang out with people who
set boundaries because they're
better able to take care of themselves and that,
in turn, helps them be better able to take care of others.
Boundaries go well beyond being nice to ourselves,
as well as being nice to others.
We need our rest,
we need to limit our stress levels.
Work-related stress and lack of
sleep contributes to our risk of cancer,
heart disease, diabetes,
and a whole host of other medical problems.
Now, sleep and lower stress levels are not only important to you,
but they're important to Johns Hopkins Medicine
and to our patients.
We are well-rested and less stressed,
we're more likely to be sharp, focused,
we'll have less accidents,
we will collaborate better,
essentially we'll be nicer people to be around.
Our perception of work prior to the pandemic was really skewed,
and one of the statistics in this book related that
more than half of Americans had gone
to work sick at least one time.
Hopefully, that number went down.
Now, if you like reading the newspaper to get bad news,
then you'll want to read this book because there are plenty of
other alarming statistics about how
the workplace can negatively impact our health.
Much of it is around boundaries.
We all arrive at work in our own state of mind.
Now some of us might start in
a great mood because tomorrow we start
vacation and others may start the day and not such a great mood.
Maybe they got stuck behind an accident,
they got a ticket that day,
or maybe their mornings are generally
stressful because of all the things that are happening at home.
You're going to want to think about how your teams are starting
their day in order to start the day on a good note.
Now, for some of you who work on a team that has a shift,
the start time is pretty clear.
For others, the start of the day might have some flexibility,
and you want to take into consideration when
the first meeting is because we
don't want to unduly
risk stressing someone out at the beginning of the day.
Not the best way to start.
For those of you who are on clinical teams,
think about your huddles or
think about your patient hand-off process.
Is there a way to bring a little well-being into those exchanges?
Doesn't have to take long.
A quick gratitude exercise or
a quick appreciation exercise might be
a good way to help with your mental health boundaries.
Now, if you know where the phrase you've got mail comes from,
please type it into the chat box,
I can't see it now,
so that's good because I don't want to get distracted anyway.
It's also a test as to how old our group is.
A common complaint of
those employees who have
email as part of their responsibility is that
they receive emails after hours
and this is especially concerning when those emails
come from our boss because when we
receive those emails outside of the normal work hours,
there is an implication that we should be
responding or that we should be working as well.
It's really hard to separate our work from
our life outside of work when we're
receiving emails past a certain norm.
Our friendly book Dying for a Paycheck show that 81 percent
of employees received or checked emails on the weekend,
55 percent said they logged in after
11 PM and obviously this is not a problem if you work night shift,
but it is if you work day shift and
59 percent said that they looked at email while on vacation.
This is a big problem.
There's a few norms that you and your team could discuss,
like not emailing after certain hours.
If you're trying to create a norm of taking a lunch break,
or maybe that norm should extend into not sending
emails between those hours or those minutes,
I should say that you take lunch.
If you're on a clinical team,
you may think about we've talked about breaks before Section 8,
but think about whether or not there's an opportunity for
some cross coverage so people on clinical teams can look at
their work email during the workday and not at home.
Now a bonus question before we move to the next slide,
if you have seen the movie,
You've Got Mail,
tell me the names of the two stars,
one female and one male.
Speaking of episode 8,
why don't we take breaks?
Is it because we feel guilty
because we know that there's more we can do?
Are we too busy?
Are we short-staffed?
We do know that sometimes there are shortages of vacancies,
and we know that that's a challenge, and hopefully,
that's going to become an exception instead of a rule.
There's other things though that really mess with
our minds and interfere
with our giving ourselves permission to take a break.
One of them is reinforcement.
Many of us, if not all of us on
this program today have probably heard the words,
thank you for your hard work,
but how many times have we heard,
thank you for taking a break.
As managers, we can send a good message by
thanking the people on our team to
taking a break not only to the individual,
maybe collectively have other people here that some took a break.
Although it feels challenging to take breaks,
we all know the benefits and if you
don't remember them go to episode 8,
the recordings are on the Office of Well-being website,
and here are our friends at
Suburban Hospital taking a dancing break.
Listen, I know it can be challenging,
but there are teams out there who are doing this,
such as the Make You at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
They schedule breaks and they post them on the board so
everybody can see it and so there's
an expectation to take your break.
If your team is regularly taking breaks would
love to hear in the chat box how you're doing that,
how you're encouraging it,
or you can wait till our Q&A and you can take
yourself off the mood and you can share it out loud.
Just a commercial to make sure you put your dancing breaks into
the healthyathopkins@jhmi.edu and we
can post those on our social media challenges.
Now, listen, we can't all take breaks,
I have to tell you some people don't want to dance in public.
I took a break to use the men's room down the hall today.
I went to the far men's room and I did a little plugged in,
I did a little, what is it? Air jam?
Whatever it was, it could have been potentially embarrassing,
but I did it anyways because it really
got my head out of a bad funk.
Ending the workday.
For those who are on a shift, hopefully,
you're ending the roughly the same time but really
there's still a way you could end together on
a positive note so that you bring home
a positive mood and not bring home a negative mood.
If you're on a clinical team,
that might be as simple as having
the whiteboard set up so at the end of the shift,
you can write down one thing that went well that that shift.
If you're on an administrative team,
make sure that you agree
on what the last meeting of the day is going to be.
It may not work for everybody to
have a team meeting at five o'clock.
Finally, we need not just physical boundaries,
we also need psychological boundaries.
Consider norms, including things like
no behavior that contributes to a toxic work environment.
More unfortunate news,
30 percent of the employees who work
during the week also put time in on the weekend,
and that's not because they're getting paid overtime,
and 1/3 of American employees do not
use all of their vacation days.
Now, most of us feel like there's way too much to do.
We are busy so much that we will never
complete our work so why are we killing ourselves trying?
We need to learn not only how to enjoy our work,
but also not to allow it to harm us and our coworkers.
Think about some of the skills we've
talked about before, gratitude,
appreciation, mindfulness, and think about how you can bring
that into your days so you can have that
as a mental health boundary.
Finally, our tips.
I think I'm over time,
so I'm a little bit nervous because
I'm running late that doesn't happen usually.
Listen, we have three more weeks in this series,
so don't necessarily run and start this year with your team,
but start to formulate some ideas and for yourself,
you might have a red line.
I know I have my own red lines for what I will
not compromise on my boundaries.
There's our commercial for our other resources
and time for questions and answers.