Listening in the workplace

While researching for my presentation next week, I came across an interesting article about listening and how it can impact the workplace. If anyone is interested in reading the article the link can be found here: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/listening-can-improve-workplace-performance-13262.html. The first important quality of listening in the workplace is that misunderstandings are reduced, resulting in improvement of overall quality of care. Misunderstandings can potentially impact the workplace significantly depending on the topic that wasn't understood correctly. Also, if employees don't feel like their being heard than it can lead to a decreased sense of worth, builds resentment, and can potentially lead them to seek other job opportunities.  Listening is a basic quality that allows people to know that you are truly grasping the information that is being presented. As a manager, listening is essential to communicating effectively with employees. Employees might have concerns, ideas, or problems that they want to discuss with their managers, which shows how important effective listening truly is. An effective way to improve listening skills is brining an employee in a quiet room in order to reduce the amount of distractions that could potentially impact the conversation. Another important quality of listening is showing an overall caring attitude toward other employees. As mentioned before, listening shows that a manager truly cares about what their employees have to day. Employees will respond better to the manager if this person is showing a caring attitude toward them. This could lead to overall trust between managers and employees to increase and improve quality as well. Listening to other employees when discussing how to accomplish a task can increase the rare at which it is completed. Doing this allows clarity and focus to be maintained while completing the task. The last important quality of listening is that there are less "do overs" or retakes. If an employee was barely listening when giving instructions on how to complete a task, than there is a strong chance there are going to be mistakes, leading to a do over of the task. Fixing mistakes can cost money and take time which can negatively impact the organization financially as well as the overall quality. I thought this article was a good starting point on researching for my next presentation because it shows four broad categories on how listening can positively impact the workplace. Also I think this relates to our class well because most of us want to be future managers and listening is an important aspect of that position.

Reflection on conflict between physicians and administration class

On Monday, my two classmates presented on the topic of conflict between physicians and administration. I thought the class went very smoothly and I was able to take away some key points from the presentation. There actually is an issue between physicians and administration, and the center piece seems to be that the two sides don't truly know what the others do on a day to day basis. Administrators usually focus on the money side of the care and how the departments are running financially. On the other hand, physicians focus on the patients and the overall quality of care delivered by the hospital or different health care setting. This causes an obvious divide between the two because they cant truly respect the skills and hard work that they each bring in order to create a well functioning hospital. I believe one way that this problem can be solved is for physicians and administrators to possibly have lunch in a neutral setting in order for them to discuss the issues that one another are facing and how they can potentially be solved. Work can become stressful at times and competition can spark up, which is why I believe that a neutral setting would really be an efficient way for the two parties to come together to discuss things. Also, I think that these two different parties should have to take some background courses in college in order to get some basic facts about one another. This could cause the conflict to decrease because physicians and administrators because they would each know the role that they play individual as well as together as a team. Another key point that I took away from the presentation revolved around the concept of making checklists during surgery or any other medical procedure. During a Ted talk, the speaker whose name I cant quite remember, said the number of medical errors while using the checklist was significantly lower than when a checklist isn't used. This may seem simple but today's medical world revolves around specialists, who may think that they know how to do everything without taking the appropriate time to make sure everything is going smoothly. Some errors are caused by lack of attention such as poor sanitation. With a checklist, these errors can be reduced because the doctors will take more time to focus on them. Lastly, this Ted talk mentioned the idea of "pit crews" in the health care field. A pit crew is a team that works efficiently to get the race car driver in and out of the pit as fast as possible. In the health care field, the concept would work well because the specialists could all work together to get the patient healthy as fast as possible. This would allow health care quality and efficiency to increase immensely in my opinion.

Pre work for performance evaluations

1.)  What characteristics make a good performance evaluation?
    
       In my opinion I think that passion, communication skills, goal oriented, detail focused, adaptable, and creative are characteristics of an individual that would have a good performance evaluation. Passion shows that an individual truly cares about the organization and accomplishing the goals that have been set in order to succeed.  Communication skills show that effective conversations are occurring which lead to less errors because more people are on the same page with what is going on. An individual that is goal oriented will strive to accomplish these tasks, showing managers that this person is willing to go above and beyond. Being detail oriented is a huge part of a successful performance evaluation because it shows that this person isn't flighty or not paying attention but rather can listen to directions. Health care solutions are never written in stone, showing that adaptability is huge because an individual has to learn how to solve problems even when he solution may not be noticeable. Lastly, being creative puts an individual in front of the rest of the team because it shows that he is engaged with the work and wants to find a unique way to solve problems.

2.) What characteristics make a poor performance evaluation?

      In my opinion I think that poor conflict management skills, lack of drive, poor communication skills, and coming unprepared are characteristics of an individual that will receive a poor performance evaluation. Having poor conflict management skills doesn't look good, and shows managers that when problems arise, these types of individuals shrink and handle it the wrong way. Being lazy, or having no drive, makes an individual stand out in the work force and will most likely draw a lot of negative attention to them. Poor communication skills are a red flag in any organization because problems, ideas, and solutions can not be effectively passed from person to person leading to additional conflicts. Lastly, coming unprepared shows that the individual doesn't care how he looks like to the other people in the work place.

3.) What types of categories do you think should be on a performance evaluation?

      In my opinion the categories should be "Are you meeting the goals?" "Are you coming prepared?" Are you meeting the customers needs?" "How's your overall personality?" and "Are you working well with the team? I think these five categories hit most of the bigger qualities of running a successful organization. If an individual is exceeding in these categories, than he is most likely doing very well in his profession.

4.) Personal experiences with performance evaluations?

     Every year in April I get a performance evaluation for the year from Hannaford's super market. This is a very basic form of a performance evaluation but some of the categories were showing up on time, looking professional, customer satisfaction, team work, amount of work, and overall rating. I've been at Hannaford's for four years and have received four different performance evaluations and it has really showed me how much managers do watch their employees performances.

Class Interpretation

This Monday, my partner and I ran our first class together and I thought it came out to be pretty successful. We began the class by splitting into groups that fit similar personalities and discussed the MBTI results that our family member and friend gave to us. Splitting into groups with similar personalities allowed us to compare and contrast how we think of one another compared to what our friends and families do. After we discussed our results with people of similar personalities, we split up into groups with individuals that had opposite personalities from one another. As mentioned before, we also discussed our results that our friends and families gave to us and compared it to the results we received from ourselves. Personally, I thought this exercise did a great job of really showing how different people think of you compared to the self image you have of yourself. This also reflects to management because a future manager could perceive you as something completely different than how you see yourself in the organization. Personality becomes a huge part of the health care organization and I realized it the more time I put researching it. A big challenge that came up consistently was revolved around the idea of how to properly critique and communicate with individuals that have low self esteem. We asked the class this question and received a lot of interesting feedback and ideas on how to possibly deal with this problem.  The answer that I thought would work was constantly giving positive feedback when the individual does a task successfully and always being straightforward when communicating. Also, an effective manager should never put an individual with low self esteem in a situation where they know there going to fail which leads to even lower self esteem. Halfway through the presentation we showed a TED talk where the individual discussed how the aggressive givers are the most important part of the overall team. He thought this because these are the type of individuals who will give to others but bring up the topics that many people would feel uncomfortable mentioning. I thought this was pretty interesting because many people hate being in uncomfortable positions but sometimes this can lead to a positive change in the individual. After the video, we discussed many of the qualities of the MBTI and how there implemented into the health care field. One of the questions discussed was, "Which quality in the MBTI would be the most important in the health care field?" I answered by saying I believe openness is the most important because the health care field has answers that aren't written in black and white, and having effective communication skills is important in solving these problems. There were also other questions mentioned but they weren't as interesting as the one mentioned before. Once we concluded the presentation, we had to figure out what topic we wanted to present for the second part of the class labeled "two." We came up with the topic of listening which I overall think will be very interesting to research.

Personality and the class im directing

Next Monday my partner and I are directing our class in a topic based around personality in the workplace. As we are almost done with the power point and class activities, I realized how much research and information there  actually is revolving personality types in the work place, especially in the health care field. While researching, we found many different group activities that have been conducted in the past but we wanted to come up with something original and unique. I'm not going to give up what activity we came up with until Monday when I reflect on how the class actually went. On the other hand I wanted to discuss the pre work we sent out to the class to arrive with completed and ready to discuss come class time. We sent out two articles, one that my professor sent to us and one that Harvard business review conducted, to really set up the basic building blocks that my classmates need in order to engage effectively in the class discussion. Also, we sent out six different questions/activities that we think would be a unique way to learn about personality as a whole. The first step is having someone close to you, a parent or family member, take the MBTI test for you and see how the results compared to what they came up for themselves. I think that this will yield some pretty interesting results because individuals can perceive themselves completely different than what other people close to them might actually think about them. For example, my parents would definitely view me as even more introverted than the results that I personally took gave to me. Also, they don't see me at school and how I interact with my peers, which could produce some interesting results based on how they THINK I would act in those situations. The second step is very similar to the one mentioned above. Instead of a parent or family member taking the MBTI test for you, we thought that having a close friend complete it would be intriguing as well. After both tests are completed we want our peers to compare the results and see what matches and what doesn't. I think it would be pretty eye opening to see how a friend or parent thinks of you, compared to the actual image you have of yourself. The third step we have is for our classmates to look up their horoscope and see if the traits that the MBTI gave them matches up with the message they were given. I'm a Scorpio and the horoscope I was given today was "You may feel hemmed in by the role models society currently offers. As you struggle to reach your own definition of the truly innovative achiever, other people sometimes criticize your rather liberated attitude. Just because your ideas aren't in sync with theirs in no way invalidates them. If your ideas are too radical, theirs are too conventional. There's room for both viewpoints." This horoscope doesn't match up identically to the traits that the MBTI gave me but some parts of it are true. I tend to have differing opinions on topics compared to other individuals, but as mentioned above, it doesn't mean that I'm wrong, it just means  there's room to argue both sides of the opinion. The fourth step is asking our peers what statements we provided with them match the best with their personality type. The two statements are "I feel like I control my own destiny and what happens to me is my own doing" and "I feel like things happen to me because of fate, luck or a powerful being." Personally, I relate to the first statement the most because I've always believed that good or bad situations are brought to me based on destiny and that they were going to happen anyway. The fifth step is asking what big five trait is most desired in the workplace and why they think this trait is the most important. If I had to answer I would choose openness as the most desired trait in the workplace. I believe this because communication with other co workers is crucial and the health care field isn't written in black and white which means being open to others ideas is crucial in running an effective health care business. Lastly, to have a little fun we found an activity that had us state whether we relate to Flanders, Stewie, House, Or Darth Sidious. I relate to Flanders the most because I'm fairly easy going and tend to go with the flow more than I should sometimes. Overall I believe this pre work will really help the class engage in the topic of personality in the workplace.