Knowledge Exchange

Archived Featured Champions

Dr. Michael Leiter

While research into the concept of ‘civility’ might conjure up images of white-gloved manners in the Deep South of the 1800s, psychology professor Dr. Michael Leiter is proving there’s a very modern link between civility in healthcare settings and improved patient care.

Director of Acadia University’s Centre of Organizational Research and Development (COR&D) and a Canada Research Chair in Occupational Health and Wellbeing, Dr. Leiter is a world-renowned researcher on employee engagement and its flip side, employee burnout.

Dr. Leiter believes a negative work environment is characterized by a culture of incivility that includes snide comments, rudeness, nasty facial expressions, and purposefully ignoring people.

“Even when it doesn’t develop into bullying and harassment, incivility costs healthcare settings lost wages through sick time due to stress, burnout, or simply the desire to avoid unpleasant encounters,” says Professor Leiter. “Ultimately incivility affects patient care.”

By contrast, Leiter and his colleagues have proved that collegial relationships provide an emotionally charged quality of work environment. Unfortunately, despite its importance, positive teamwork often remains elusive in some settings.

Professor Leiter notes that a sense of ‘community’ can be either a source of joy and fulfillment or the primary source of problems at work.

“When positive, community results in supportive relationships, friendship, teamwork, and mentoring. It furthers the health setting’s performance and influences its capacity to recruit and retain skilled employees,” he explains.

COR&D plays a unique role at Acadia as a base for collaborative initiatives with healthcare organizations and other researchers to explore QWL issues using tools like the Areas of Worklife Survey, which measures six elements that impact an employee’s relationship with work: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.

“The ultimate resource for healthcare work is the energetic involvement of talented, capable people,” says Professor Leiter. “The critical challenge for workplace health is designing work environments that inspire that experience. That energetic, involved, and effective approach to worklife defines work engagement and is the polar opposite of the exhaustion, cynicism, and discouragement of job burnout.”

To help COR&D’s partners and clients advance QWL in their settings, Professor Leiter and his team has also developed a distinctive Canadian program known as ‘CREW: Civility, Respect and Engagement in the Workplace’.

The CREW program is based on a series of meetings addressing issues of civility, respect and engagement among people who regularly work together. Professor Leiter starts with a baseline assessment that is shared and discussed with the client organization.

Sub-groups then come up with unique action plans to improve their working relationships based on the results of the baseline assessment and targets identified through their Areas of Worklife Survey profile.

“We assist them in developing their own methods for improving their work environment and capacity for enhancing civility,” says Professor Leiter, who notes that group facilitators are given training and materials to guide their efforts. “We provide a mentoring process that brings together facilitators to assure support and knowledge-sharing.”

As one cohort completes its six-month CREW initiative, it passes the torch to colleagues who are in the beginning stages of the process. Professor Leiter emphasizes the importance of supporting a larger community spanning various hospitals participating in civility initiatives to share knowledge and offer mutual encouragement.

“CREW has a proven track record for resulting in better communication, teamwork, trust, improved atmosphere of mutual respect, and heightened staff engagement,” says Professor Leiter, who collaborates with experts at the University of Western Ontario to conduct systematic research on CREW’s effectiveness.

Professor Leiter is also in close contact with the US Veteran’s Hospital Administration to adapt CREW to a broader audience. “Their work has shown outstanding increases in employee engagement that have had an impact on the bottom line: reduced sick leave, increased employee retention, decreased grievances and complaints,” he remarks.

Lately, Professor Leiter has been working to expand the CREW community beyond the current research program through his consulting wing, Michael Leiter and Associates (www.workengagement.com).

To date he’s received interest not only from hospitals, but also from continuing care settings and office environments that are determined to improved civility in their work environments. In fact he welcomes participation from interested organizations and expects the CREW community will expand much further in the coming years.

Given Professor Leiter’s dedication to employee engagement throughout his career, his support of the Quality Worklife Quality Healthcare Collaborative (QWQHC) is no surprise.

“I was involved on the original accreditation board providing input into the employee worklife questions and I partner with others who’ve provided input into the QWQHC,” he says. “Many of the QWL questions mirror similar work and research I undertake.”

“I’m excited the QWQHC is now available to advance the QWL cause,” says Professor Leiter. “When healthy workplaces are only a lofty ideal, it can be squeezed by the pressing day-to-day demands within healthcare organizations.”

Through his research, Professor Leiter has seen first-hand the importance of tangible symbols of an organization’s QWL thrust, like signing the QWQHC’s Healthy Healthcare Leadership Charter.

“A formal commitment to healthy worklife and the accountability implicit in the QWQHC’s activities keep workplace health high on organizations’ priority lists,” he stresses. Needless to say, for Professor Leiter, converting this commitment into action on a daily basis all supports his core value of civility.

“Civility goes to the heart of quality of worklife, empowering employees to fulfill their potential as members of a community through positive working relationships that are a critical resource for providing excellent healthcare,” he says.

For more information on COR&D or the CREW program, please visit www.workengagement.com or http://cord.acadiau.ca .