Sustainability Practices for 2022

It’s two years into this pandemic, and many of us are looking for ways to sustain our wholeness and our dedication as health care workers. As institutional leaders, you have heard many ideas on how to support the resiliency and well-being of your teams. Some of these ideas have resonated, while others have seemed impractical, irrelevant, or unattainable. 

The Office of Professional Wellbeing (OPW) is recommending that you implement three sustainability practices - concrete steps - that if implemented widely, will support your work force. These recommendations are considered basic, core well-being interventions. They are generally simple to implement and do not cost anything. They are based on newly released guidelines by the National Academy of Medicine and by other national well-being thought leaders. I want to thank my colleagues at USC Keck School of Medicine for generously allowing me to use their content and format to publicize these ideas.* 

Below you can find a summary of our recommendations, and if you'd like more details, please refer to our Sustainability Practices for 2022 document. If you or your team would like to consult with the wellness team for other ideas or for implementation, please contact OPW@salud.unm.edu or Elawrence@salud.unm.edu. 

RECOMMENDATION 1: Healthy E-mail.

Consider how your team can reduce burnout and improve work-life boundaries by reducing overall volume of emails, making email hours of operation explicit, and role modeling through leadership. 

RECOMMENDATION 2: Healthy Meetings.

Consider how your team can reduce burnout and improve morale by increasing the effectiveness of meetings, reducing the overall number of meetings, and preserving meeting-free times for big-picture thinking and flow state. 

RECOMMENDATION 3: Healthy Teams.

Consider how your team can reduce burnout and build trust, camaraderie, and positive feelings by implementing consistent practices of appreciation and belonging – based on everyone’s unique strengths rather than performance, per se. 

*Thanks to Dr. Chantal Young and her colleagues at Keck SOM. Email taskforce: Carmen Carillo, MSHRM, SHRM-CP, Debra Cuellar, MSHRM, SHRM-CP, Kevin Tang, and Lindsey Reeves, OTD, OTR/L, CEAS. Meetings taskforce: Dara Weintraub, MSW, Joyce Perez, and Suzanne Huynh. Appreciation and Recognition taskforce: Jeffrey I. Gold, PhD, Suzanne Huynh, Cortney Montgomery, Lindsey Morrison, and Elizabeth O’Toole.