Now for a bit of a context the cotton anniversary, whichever one that is – can’t be arsed to look it up, resulted in my wife buying me a t-shirt with the word CYNIC across the front. I used to wear it as a badge of pride but now I’m a little embarrassed. Besides I’m more of a skeptic these days…
So when you see people railing against the #BeKind ideals on Twitter with loud cries of it’s “all bollocks” and “how will that fix anything?” I have a modicum of sympathy. After all one person being nice to another isn’t going to fix the strategic issues we all work around day-to-day…
I completely agree that a bit of yoga and a good old sit down to “have a think about things” will not fix the lack of staff, the general attrition of altruism and the slow denigration of health workers by the press and government.
But if the system isn’t likely to change soon (and I doubt it is) then we have to change the way we work within the system. I believe there’s plenty of evidence that retention of staff and general well being is related to not having to work with dickheads.
Stress hormones funnily enough, are related to stress. My shoulders are reasonably broad but I’m still not keen on being shouted at at work, or embarrassed in front of my colleagues, or belittled in front of our patients.
And whilst I’m a massive fan of sarcasm, I now save that for special occasions and only aim it at senior colleagues who I know well and who deserve it. Sarcasm as a means of correcting our junior colleagues’ beliefs is not an option anymore.
There’s evidence too that being civil improves team dynamics and communication. Seeing as communication is the single biggest cause of screw ups and complaints in healthcare it would seem beholden upon us to at least give it a go. Doesn’t seem that hard really…
The Australian military flattened their hierarchies a generation ago – leading to increased safety whilst flying multimillion dollar aircraft in combat situations. The key word there is “generation”. For middle aged soon to be irrelevant practitioners such as myself, the change we need to see is going to come from the generations behind us. It isn’t going to happen overnight and we will continue to see poor behaviour as the message slowly starts to seep in . That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother as it’s not working.
But the hope is that change is upon us. A generational change that I can already see in the civility that “Operate with Respect” engenders from the Royal Australian College of Surgeons.
I know not everyone buys in to it but there are people who voted for Trump and they can’t all be arseholes…
The cost:benefit ratio of not being a dick is firmly in the benefit column after all. There is, as far as I can tell, no downside to being nice to your colleagues, treating them with respect and “taking the high road” when they are not as civilised, so you can feel secretly smug about how awesome you are.
And that will have to do – because again like twitter not everyone will be on the same page as you. Sometimes you’ll be so fed up with dealing with dickheads that you’ll want to howl at the ceiling and poke pins into voodoo dolls and that’s ok. Progress is rarely a smooth process.
So I exhort you to try, even if you disagree, people respond to positivity with positivity. It’s so self evident that it doesn’t need an RCT. Trust me.
Just don’t tell my kids I wrote this post…