Improving Supervisor Confidence in Responding to Distressed Health Care Employees

Background: Professional distress and burnout are increasingly common among health professionals. This trend prompted stakeholders at a large multicenter health care system to survey supervisors for improvement opportunities. The stakeholders learned that workplace leaders lacked tools and direction for appropriately responding to distressed employees. The authors implemented a supervisor training video on providing resources to improve employee mental health.

Methods: Using the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) methodology, the authors conducted key stakeholder interviews to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Next, an e-mail survey was administered to a representative sample of supervisors that asked about degree of confidence in responding appropriately to distressed employees, with the response options "very confident," "somewhat confident," and "not at all confident." After identifying factors contributing to low supervisor confidence, the research team developed and disseminated a six-minute, on-demand video to train supervisors to respond appropriately to employees during a mental health crisis. The same group of supervisors were surveyed using the same survey after exposure to the video, and responses were collected from those who had viewed the video but had not answered the preintervention survey.

Results: The proportion of supervisors who responded "not at all confident" in the survey decreased from 7.1% (15/210) of responses to 0.8% (1/123), while the proportion of supervisors who chose "somewhat confident" increased significantly, from 62.9% (132/210) to 69.1% (85/123) (p = 0.03). Of the 28 supervisors who had not participated in the presurvey and viewed the video, none indicated that they were "not at all confident." The percentage of supervisors who felt distress "sometimes" or more frequently from navigating and supporting employee emotional concerns decreased nonsignificantly from 41.9% (88/210) to 37.4% (46/123) (p = 0.87).

Conclusion: Simple, on-demand supervisor training videos can improve the confidence of supervisors to respond appropriately to distressed employees, which may indirectly contribute to improved employee mental health.