The Hospice ran a special team building day this morning, a joint effort of staff and management to consider various organisational issues. We looked at five areas – Human Resource Management, Volunteers, Finances, Self-Care and Workplace Behaviour. I sat on the Volunteers table and narrowly avoided having to make the group presentation at the end – not sure why it was delegated to me, but convinced one of the managers to do it.
Was good but a little overwhelming – covered a lot of ground in a short space of time. Some very good points raised – among them a “gap review” of various roles in the organisation with a view to modifying or creating new roles. The organisation has undergone a lot of changes and this review would be well overdue. This one came up on the HRM table.
On the Volunteer table we looked at three main issues – recruitment, retention and increasing the volunteer co-ordinator position from a part-time to full-time role. Fairly predictable but a couple of good new ideas came up in our discussions.
The table I should have been on I suppose, was finance. I felt Gayle would have liked me to be there, oh well! They were looking at lobbying for government funding, seeking sponsorship for other areas of the organisation and looking at increasing our private health funding somehow (getting registered as an acute health service provider – gets the higher rates).
The other two tables were also quite interesting – Self-Care, all about dealing with the stress of the job, putting mechanisms in place to deal with that. Workplace behaviour covered confidentiality and ambassadorship.
Was a lot to cover in four hours – apparently all our suggestions will be taken up at a special executive meeting to be hashed out. Hopefully we’ll see some good changes happening.