Surviving Organizational Change: Management Tips for Coping in Times of Workplace Unrest

Contributed by Helen May
(From: Nursing Capsule, December 1999.
Reprinted with permission.)

Across the country, hospitals and healthcare organizations are under siege. Higher cost, lower reimbursement, increasingly strict and complicated regulations and laws, and huge financial deficits are causing hospitals, including UAMS, to have to scramble to find ways to keep our doors open and deliver save care.

These are times when leaders have to make very difficult decisions, and all employees have to find ways to deal with the high anxiety accompanying an uncertain future.

As managers, directors, and front line staff, each of us responds emotionally to times of change based on our own experience dealing with loss or grief.

The Grief Cycle for Personal Change:

• Shock
• Denial, disbelief and self-isolation
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Guilt and Remorse
• Panic
• Depression
• Resignation to the situation
• Acceptance
• Building
• Opportunity: Growth and New Directions

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