In the previous blog, we reviewed consequences of on-the-job (OTJ) stress and defined the various categories of stress management interventions (SMIs) aimed at dealing with stress.  In this blog, we will review research findings on the effectiveness of specific SMIs and describe best practices.  We will also provide some tips to help leaders start to think about what you can do to reduce stress in your organization.

The good news for those of us working in high-stress environments is that SMIs really do work!  In fact, according to the largest reviews done on SMI research, secondary (ameliorative) interventions can reduce specific outcomes of OTJ stress such as anxiety and burnout from 20% to 80%.  In fact, for organizations under stress, secondary level SMIs have the greatest impact on improving organizational functioning.  What about primary and tertiary??

As we learned in Part 1, SMIs at the primary level are proactive while tertiary SMIs are reactive.  For example:  if a primary intervention would be installing earthquake-proof foundations for new skyscrapers in high-risk cities, then a tertiary intervention would involve rebuilding or repairing buildings that were ill-equipped after the earthquake hits.  This metaphor is an example of how the success of SMIs depends on context.   Primary interventions are obviously the best choice because they prepare organizations to handle stress well.  But, if your organization has already been damaged (it didn’t have the fancy earthquake-proof foundation), tertiary interventions would be needed to make employees and teams functional again.

So where does that put secondary interventions?  Right in the middle of the two extremes, and where most organizations actually are.  Because of this, secondary SMIs are the most common and studied stress interventions.  They include a range of specific interventions that help individuals and groups deal with OTJ stress.  The most common are:

• Cognitive-behavioral:  involves training employees on the role of thoughts and emotions in stress-management as well as how to modify thoughts to for better coping
• Relaxation techniques:  involves training employees how to cope with stress through physical and mental relaxation
• Alternative interventions:  include some combination of exercise and employee training on journaling/reflection, and other personal skills (goal-setting and time management)

Of these, cognitive-behavioral interventions are the overall winner.  Compared to all other interventions, these have the strongest impact on the organizational and psychological outcomes of OTJ stress.  Specifically, this intervention have been shown to greatly improve mental health and quality of work-life while reducing employee stress, anxiety, and burnout.  However, it does not improve physical health or reduce absenteeism.

Alternative interventions that included personal skills training are the most effective for specifically reducing employee levels of stress.  This is because training can be developed and targeted towards specific issues, such as time-management.  Exercise programs combined with personal skills training is even better.  When combined, they improve physical and mental health, reduce feelings of stress, and improve the quality of work-life.

Relaxation techniques are middle-road overall, but this approach is very effective effective at reducing anxiety and burnout.  It also has a positive impact on physical health.

Taken together, this brief list of findings should indicate that different secondary SMIs are better at dealing with different OTJ stress outcomes.  For example, exercise is better than cognitive-behavioral training at improving physical health but not anxiety.

Best Practices and Practical Applications:

• Begin with the desired outcome:  Some SMIs are better than others at improving specific stress-related issues.  So, target the specific application of SMIs according to the issues faced by your organization.
• Design interventions to be short:  A 1-4 week cognitive-behavioral training intervention will have a much stronger effect than a 9-12 week one.  A 13+ week cognitive-behavioral intervention might have no positive effect at all!  Research has shown that short and well-targeted interventions are better at reducing stress than longer ones.
• Get ready to train:  The most effective interventions involve training of some sort, whether it’s teaching a group of employees how to breath deep and relax or training a group of senior executives how to manage their time.  If you do not have experts in the area you are seeking training in, find an external consultant with expertise in that area to conduct your trainings.
  
• To improve your organizations resistance to stress: intervene at the primary level.  This means organization-wide change, but it also means less need for other SMIs.
• To ameliorate existing stress, intervene at the individual level:  Giving attention to individuals makes a remarkable difference.  Examples of this include secondary and tertiary interventions such as employee training on relaxation techniques or attending therapy.  SMIs that target the organization as a whole rarely improve individual-level outcomes such as anxiety.
• Never ignore stress!  Now that we know what the negative consequences of stress are, we have no excuse to ignore it when we see it.  Avoid having to intervene at the tertiary level.  If you’re not proactive or at least ameliorative in your approach to stress management, you are indirectly contributing to the adverse health of your employees.

 -Robert Bullock

Consequences of OTJ stress are far-reaching and can impact organizations at every level, from company-wide to individual contributor.  Researchers have identified numerous outcomes, some of which include include:

OTJ Stress can "pile up"

• Reduced productivity
• Increased absenteeism
• Poor quality of work-life
• Reduced customer satisfaction
• Mental and physical health issues (e.g., anxiety, depression, weight gain, hypertension)
• Employee burnout
• Increased hospitalization rates among employees, especially for heart-related issues

So how do you manage OTJ stress in your organization?  Stress management interventions (SMIs).  These are targeted interventions, either directed by internal OD experts or external consultants, which include a broad range of programs that organizations can initiate to reduce OTJ stress.  SMIs can be categorized in three different ways:

• Primary interventions are proactive.  They seek to alter the sources of stress before significant damage can be done.  These interventions happen at the organizational level.  They have the greatest potential to affect stress but typically involve large-scale change
• Examples include:  Culture change; Job redesign; Employee engagement initiatives
• Secondary interventions are ameliorative.  They reduce the severity of stress by modifying individual/group responses to stress.  Of all three categories, this is the most commonly used because providing employees with training on stress management techniques requires less resources and is less expensive than changing the underlying causes, such as organizational environment or culture
• Examples include:  Employee training on stress management, time management, and goal setting; Cognitive-behavioral (active training on changing cognitions and providing coping skills); Journaling; Deep breathing and relaxation techniques
• Tertiary interventions are reactive.  They involve treating and rehabilitating employees that have been negatively impacted by stress.  If nothing is done about stress until this stage, employees could be experiencing negative health conditions as a result of their stress
• Examples include:  Counseling; Occupational therapy; Medical interventions

Interventions done at the primary stage are by far the most effective at protecting employees from the effects of OTJ stress.  However, because they involve large-scale organizational change (e.g., culture change), they are often too costly and time consuming for most organizations.  Also, primary interventions won’t work with organizations that are actively seeing high amounts OTJ stress in their employees (how well would a culture change initiative work if 20% of the workforce was just laid off?).   Therefore, most organizations deal with OTJ stress at the secondary and tertiary levels.

So what kinds of interventions have been proven the most effective?  How effective are they?  What are their specific outcomes?  And what can you start doing now to increase your chance of successfully reducing OTJ stress in your organization?  Read on to Part 2 of “How to Deal with On The Job Stress” to find out.

-Robert Bullock

Imagine you are on a first date.  After a wonderful night of good conversation, fine dining and lots of laughter, your date asks how you felt about the evening.  Even though you normally would be reserved, you feel good about this person so you say exactly how you feel.  When you’re finished, your date turns and walks away without a word.

How would you feel?  Confused?  Hurt?  Betrayed?  You shared your thoughts and the other person just walked away.  You thought they cared about you.

Now imagine your company asks employees to fill out a survey.  If people take time to give their feedback and management does nothing with the information, how would employees feel?  Confused?  Hurt?  Betrayed?

When organizations invite employees to share their opinions and ideas, they send the message that the organization cares what employees think.  They also create the expectation that managers will use the employee feedback to make a “To-Do” list of decisions and/or changes that will then be carried out.  This is important because employee surveys are a powerful tool for engaging employees, driving positive organizational change, and improving productivity.  But remember the lesson from our “first date” story:  If a survey is given to employees and nothing happens as a result, employee engagement, job satisfaction, and satisfaction with leadership will often decrease.  In fact, recent research has shown that there is a strong and direct relationship between (A) taking action from employee surveys (also known as “action planning”) and (B) employee engagement & satisfaction with their bosses.  One study examined the outcomes of three common choices that managers make when given survey results.  They found the following:

• Managers who completed an action plan based on survey results saw a high degree of improvement in employee engagement (based on subsequent survey scores) and a marked improvement in satisfaction with management.
• Managers who created but did not complete action plans based on survey results saw no improvement in employee engagement scores.
• Managers who did not create or complete action plans at all saw a net decrease in employee engagement and satisfaction with management.

The takeaway is this: the next time you get employee survey results for your department, no matter how you feel about the results, the worst thing you can possibly do is nothing.

Here are some quick best practices when it comes to employee surveys and action planning:

1. Action plan from the bottom-up:  Have supervisors share survey findings with their employees in a group setting, where they can discuss the results, get input, ask for ideas and come up with an agreed-upon plan of action for improving weak areas.
2. Ensure Transparency:   Make sure senior leaders, managers, and supervisors get survey results at the SAME time.  This will communicate honesty and transparency to employees.
3. Speed:  Action plans should be carried out within the same quarter that survey results were delivered.  If they take too long employees and managers will lose interest and no lasting change will occur.

-Robert Bullock

A large applied research study sought to examine important organizational outcomes from various psychologically-based workplace interventions. In all, they examined the effects of eleven different types of interventions, defined below:

• Selection and Placement: For the purpose of this research, this simply includes the use of realistic job previews
• Training: Enhancing employee performance through learning
• Appraisal and Feedback: Giving employees more extensive and frequent performance feedback
• Management By Objectives (MBO): Engaging employees to set goals with management, being held accountable for objectives, and participating in the review of their work objectives
• Goal Setting: In this research, goal setting is defined as “the specification of difficult but attainable goals for limited but important aspects of job performance.”  In this instance, it does not require employee involvement
• Financial Compensation: Tying monetary rewards to individual, team, or organizational performance
• Work Redesign: This involves enhancing jobs with specific qualities that are tied with the employee’s specific interests and motivations
• Decision Making Strategies: Programs for enhancing the decision-making skills of leadership within an organization
• Supervisory Methods: This includes programs designed to change the central roles of supervision, to include things such as increased participation for example
• Work Rescheduling: Switching to “flex-time” or rescheduling the work week (e.g., four 10’s)
• Organization Development (OD): Long term and systematic interventions, based on behavioral psychology, that focus on effective change through the management of organizational culture and social/technological dynamics

In this large-scale research, conclusions were drawn using nearly 100 previous studies (and over 37,000 individual measurements of worker productivity!).  Therefore, you can expect that the results here are much more accurate than any individual study; which may just look at one of the above interventions within a single organization. Rather, these researchers looked at a range of interventions across numerous types of organizations to come to the conclusions which will be described below.

Overall effect: Combined, the above interventions led to an increase in employee productivity by 15%! This difference is considered to be a large enough to be visible “to the naked eye.” Or, in other words, the increase in employee productivity is clearly visible through simple observation.

Individual effects: Of course, specific interventions were more effective than others at increasing productivity.  Training, Goal Setting, and Organization Development had the greatest impact on productivity.  These were followed by (in decreasing order):  Decision-Making Strategies, Financial Incentives, Work Redesign, Appraisal and Feedback, Work Rescheduling, Supervisory Methods, and Management By Objectives.  The only intervention not found to have a distinguishable positive effect was the use of Realistic Job Previews (Selection and Placement).  The study found that specific interventions had the ability to have a much greater effect on productivity than the 15% figure stated above.  For example, the top interventions led to productivity increases of around 25%!

Types of performance: In all, 3 measures of employee productivity were used in this study, and each were found to be affected differently by the interventions.  The measures included: output (quantity, quality, and cost-effectiveness), withdrawal (turnover and absenteeism), and disruption (accidents, strikes, or other costly disturbances).  Of these three, interventions had the greatest ability to improve output and the lowest impact on withdrawal.

Combinations of interventions: In many cases, organizations implemented multiple interventions at the same time.  The combined effect of applying multiple interventions was less than the sum of each intervention implemented on its own.  The results suggest that organizations focus on one type of intervention at a time.

Size and type of organization: The study also looked at the kind of organization and the category of employee of which productivity improvements were desired.  Concerning size, small organizations (less than 100 people) benefited the most from interventions.  Concerning type, governmental organizations benefited the most while non-profit and for-profit organizations benefited equally from interventions.

Type of employee: Concerning employees themselves, professional and managerial employees showed the greatest improvements in productivity.  This was followed by: sales, blue-collar, and clerical.

Overall, the study found that some interventions were better in certain circumstances than others.  The findings described above are general in nature, and to describe the rank of each intervention on each type of organization or category of performance would take much more time and energy than you are likely willing to exert.  However, that type of knowledge is out there, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask!  The results of this study are positive- they indicate that a well-chosen workplace intervention can have an extremely significant result on the effectiveness of your workforce!

-Robert Bullock

www.scontrino-powell.com

A recent study examined the utility of selection procedures for most white-collar jobs in the federal government.  This study is set apart from standard utility analyses (where the value of a selection system is determined by estimations from statistical equations) by the fact that the researchers measured the outcomes of different selection procedures in an empirical manner, meaning that control groups were used.  The purpose of this research was to determine the actual value of selecting a new cohort of employees using measures of cognitive ability versus selecting employees using evaluations of education and experience.

The researchers found that the employees that were selected using cognitive ability measures had a 9.7% increase in output over the traditionally selected employees.  In other words, employees that were hired using measures of cognitive ability were 9.7% more productive on average than those that were hired using evaluations of education and experience alone.  Also, this increase in employee output, or productivity, led to a 9% decrease in new hiring (this figure should be close to the above figure because if your workforce is almost 10% more productive, then only 90% as many employees would need to be hired in comparison).  For the federal government, this 9% decrease led to a payroll savings of $272 million dollars for each year the new cohort of employees remained in their jobs.  This savings comes from not having to hire more employees to get the same amount of work completed.  This research shows the incredible value of using cognitive ability, as well as how that value translates to business-related outcomes such as ROI.

Overall, using cognitive ability (the same results, if not better, would be found using a combination of cognitive ability and other valid measures such as structured interviews) as a tool for employee selection leads to the following benefits:

• More work can be done by less people (reduced payroll costs)
• Less new hires are needed (reduced new-hire costs like training, selection, and recruitment)
• Improved performance and productivity with existing workforce (reduction of “poor performers”)

-Robert Bullock

Over the past couple of decades, personality has taken a larger role in applied research and employee selection.  This optimism is mostly due to the creation of a unified model of personality- the Big Five (or Five Factor Model).  The Big Five model is an empirical and comprehensive model of personality.  It consists of five broad dimensions (each containing a few sub-dimensions) that captures almost the entire range of human personality:

• Openness to Experience: appreciation for art, adventure, ideas, and variety
• Conscientiousness: need for achievement, self-discipline, and planned behavior
• Extraversion:  energy, positive emotions, and the tendency to seek out social stimulation
• Agreeableness:  the tendency to be cooperative and compassionate
• Neuroticism (or Emotional Stability):  Neuroticism is the tendency to easily experience anger, anxiety, and other negative emotions, while Emotional Stability is the opposite (note- the first letters of the Big-Five spell out the handy acronyms “OCEAN” or “CANOE”… take your pick!)

One of the larger-scale research projects done in this topic investigated the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions and job performance in a modern setting and across a variety of occupations.  They found strong evidence to support the use of personality in employee selection in the following job categories:

Sales:  Conscientiousness is the best predictor of future performance, followed by extraversion and emotional stability.

Customer Service:  Again, conscientiousness is the best predictor.  Emotional stability, extraversion, and openness to experience have low but significant predictive power as well.  This unusual mix indicates a complex pattern of personality for jobs that involve complex/demanding interpersonal interactions.

Managerial:  Conscientiousness is the best predictor of performance for managers.  It is followed by extraversion and emotional stability, both of which have lower but significant abilities to predict performance.

Skilled and Semi-Skilled:  Conscientiousness was once again the strongest predictor.  This is followed by agreeableness, which is lower but significant.  The other three (openness, extraversion, and emotional stability) were not significantly related to performance.

In terms of performance, conscientiousness is above and beyond the strongest predictor across all job types.  This makes sense because conscientious individuals are more driven, have a higher need for job achievement and are more detail oriented.  The second strongest overall predictor is emotional stability.  However, looking at the differences between job categories also tells us something.  For jobs with a stronger interpersonal component (such as sales, customer service, and managerial), emotional stability and extraversion were relatively desirable for predicting performance.  This was not the case for skilled and semi-skilled workers.  The important things to take away from this research are:

• Personality does in fact predict performance, although only at a moderate level (it is because of this that most psychologists recommend using personality tests as a supplement to other selection tools such as structured interviews and reference checks)
• Conscientiousness in particular is the strongest predictor of performance out of the Big Five
• Different combinations of personality traits are needed for jobs that have unique demands, such as customer service and managerial work (note- even different skill sets and personality traits are needed even as one moves up from supervisor to mid-level to executive leader)

-Robert Bullock

We all know that effective leadership is crucial for a thriving organization- so much so that it feels like a cliché just writing it.  Leadership effectiveness has been a key area of research in the field of industrial-organizational psychology for decades, and our blog has explored the topic many times (see here).  We’ve seen charismatic leadership, Rushmorean leadership, servant leadership, transformational leadership, etc…  All these names sound great, but wouldn’t it be nice to look at some actual concrete behaviors?  The purpose of today’s blog is to do just that, by exploring an important early leadership behavior that leads to positive organizational outcomes- supervisor support.

Supervisor support is defined as the extent to which leaders value their employees’ contributions and care about their well-being.  A leader with high supervisor support is one that makes employees feel heard, valued, and cared about.  Although it sounds simple, providing this kind of support is one of the hardest transitions to make when promoted from employee to supervisor.  The move from “process expert” to “motivational leader” is possibly one of the largest steps one can take in his/her working life.  If you are a supervisor or manager, take a minute to reflect on how you handled this hurdle.  Was it easy?

So why is supervisor support so important for effective leadership?  Because it is one of the key behaviors that effective leaders develop as soon as they move from individual contributor to manager.  (In fact, it leads to positive outcomes at all levels of leadership)  In specific terms, organizational research has identified a myriad of positive outcomes associated with high supervisor support, including:

• Increased job satisfaction
• Stronger person-organization fit (degree to which personality/beliefs/values match organizational culture)
• Increased organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB)
• Improved employee perceptions of organizational support
• Improved relationships with employees
• In-role and extra-role performance
• Reduced job tension
• Reduced work-family conflict
• Reduced turnover (a secondary effect)

As you can see, supervisor support is a strong predictor of numerous positive outcomes.  So much so that if you were creating a leader and could choose the behaviors that she/he would embody, this should definitely be in the top five.  What can you start doing right now to be seen as a supportive leader?  Research has identified the following practical applications to improve employee perceptions of supervisor support:

Engage/Involve your employees: involve your employees in task-planning and decision making, ask for their ideas and implement them, hold process-improvement meetings where you facilitate brainstorming sessions to identify creative ways to improve the structure of your work (the list goes on!).  For more ideas, see our Employee Involvement blog here.

Show concern for your employees: it is important for employees to know that you see them as more than a cog in a greater machine.  Take the time to inquire into their lives (ask questions!), look them in the eyes when you talk to them, ask how they feel about their work and listen to what they have to say without interrupting or becoming defensive.  Some of most effective directors and CEOs that I have ever met are on friendly, first-name terms with everybody from the board of directors to the nighttime security guard.  The goal here is to convey that you care about how they feel, so shift the focus towards them whenever you can.

—Robert Bullock

www.scontrino-powell.com

Now that you have an idea of what TeamSTEPPS is, the purpose of this blog is twofold.  First, it will dive deeper into TeamSTEPPS tools and strategies that make it such a powerful method to increase team performance.  Second, research-based outcomes from organizations that have implemented TeamSTEPPS will be described.  Although it has already started in a small degree, many applied psychologists believe that TeamSTEPPS interventions will expand far beyond healthcare and become common in organizations across industries.  Hospitals aren’t the only ones that use teams!

TOOLS AND STRATEGIES: Possibly one of the most impressive things about TeamSTEPPS is its versatility.  Interventions using TeamSTEPPS methodologies can run the gambit from organizational culture change to process improvement to teambuilding.  The program described above is the most rigorous type of intervention and includes analysis, training/development, and changing team processes.  If a less comprehensive approach is required (for example, if a team is experiencing conflict or communication issues), various strategies can be taught quickly and integrated into team processes to target specific areas of improvement.  The tools needed to complete any and all TeamSTEPPS interventions have been validated through years of research and include:

• Training Material: training curriculum designed for adult learners, workbooks, slides, activities, icebreakers, and training evaluations are pre-made and proven to be effective in teaching strategies and principles.
• Teamwork Questionnaires: these measure attitudes towards teamwork and the current state of teamwork in an organization.
• Leadership Briefing: a packaged presentation can be delivered to leadership in an organization to explain why implementing TeamSTEPPS is a good idea.
• Team Performance Observation Tool: an easy to use tool that assesses team performance on various dimensions can be used to measure the impact of TeamSTEPPS interventions on performance.

TeamSTEPPS strategies are aimed at improving team performance through defining roles and responsibilities, improving communication and collaboration, and establishing a culture of learning. Below is a brief description of a few key strategies that make up the four teachable/learnable skills in TeamSTEPPS:

• Brief:  short sessions before projects or during the formation of teams (i.e., before a patient arrives) that clarify roles and responsibilities, set up expectations for open communication and knowledge sharing, and inform team members of the specific task.
• Debrief: strategy for process improvement that encourages learning by reviewing and documenting the team process at the end of a task.  It includes identifying what worked and what did not work and discussing what was learned and what can be done differently next time.
• Shared Mental Model: strategy that gets team members on the “same page” with other team members.  It shows teams how to create and act on a common understanding of who is responsible for what task and what information/support is needed by each member.   Being on the “same page” encourages collaborative planning, decision-making, and speaking-up.
• Feedback:  provides a framework for encouraging constructive feedback among team members.  Teaches team members about various types of feedback, how to give constructive feedback (timely, respectful, specific, directed, and considerate), and how to accept feedback.

OUTCOMES: Research has shown that TeamSTEPPS interventions are likely to result in the following outcomes:

• Increased Team Performance
• Adaptability
• Improved Problem-Solving
• Team Orientation (improved teamwork and cohesion)
• Mutual Trust
• Improved Communication

TeamSTEPPS represents over 30 years of scientific research into team processes and performance.  It has been applied in hospitals, like Harborview Medical Center, academic institutions like Harvard and Duke, in the military at combat support hospitals, and now in non-medical private and public organizations.  It has revolutionized teamwork in the healthcare environment and saved countless lives and is still continuing to gain momentum in academic, public, and private institutions.

To learn more about TeamSTEPPS, go here.

Look for more informative blogs to come on how to apply particular TeamSTEPPS tools such as briefs, debriefs, and feedback!

–Robert Bullock

The purpose of this blog is to introduce you to a powerful approach that hospitals across the states are using to increase team performance and communication.  This approach, which is almost a way of life for many hospitals, is called TeamSTEPPS.  Although TeamSTEPPS (or Team Strategies to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety) recently began its life in the healthcare industry, I expect that its tools and strategies will become commonplace practices for all types of organizations that rely on teams to accomplish tasks.  Because there is a lot to know about this topic, it will be broken down into two blogs- the first will define TeamSTEPPS and describe its history (which is pretty amazing!), and the second will go into detail on specific TeamSTEPPS tools and strategies as well as the outcomes from their use.  So, sit down, get comfortable, and take some time to learn about something ahead of the curve- an approach and philosophy to teamwork that has the potential to improve organizations from all sectors and industries!

WHAT IS TEAMSTEPPS? TeamSTEPPS is a collection of tools, strategies, and training curriculum focused on establishing high performing teams.  The main areas of focus include:

• Creating high performing teams that effectively use people, resources, and information to achieve desired outcomes
• Increasing team awareness and clarifying roles, responsibilities, and outcomes
• Resolving conflict and improving information-sharing
• Eliminating barriers to quality, performance, and successful outcomes (including patient safety for hospital teams)

The diagram here shows the two-way interactions between team skills and outcomes (Source: TeamSTEPPS Pocket Guide). TeamSTEPPS focuses on the three team-related outcomes (performance, knowledge, and attitudes) through improving four teachable-learnable skills (leadership, communication, situation monitoring, and mutual support).  To achieve the positive outcomes described at the edges of the triangle, a TeamSTEPPS program normally takes the following actions:

• Assess current organizational culture
• Analyze culture, survey results, and other data to create a teamwork improvement action plan
• Design/Implement a proposal to develop team-related competencies among staff
• Integrate TeamSTEPPS into daily practice

HISTORY:  Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) was released by the Department of Defense Patient Safety Program (PSP) in 2006 as a systematic approach to integrate teamwork into practice at medical facilities.  Created as a direct result of the 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report entitled To Err is Human, which concluded that almost 100,000 deaths are caused by medical error every year, TeamSTEPPS is designed to improve team performance, efficiency, communication, and safety in healthcare.  Since its release, TeamSTEPPS has become the national standard of teamwork training in the healthcare industry.  The reason for this success is largely due to the fact that patient safety depends on the collaboration and interaction of teams that have extremely diverse backgrounds and training.   Although it is focused on improving team functioning in hospitals, it is highly applicable to other industries as well because at its core, TeamSTEPPS is really all about improving team processes.

For more information on TeamSTEPPS, go here.

–Robert Bullock