GABEK®

Everybody strives for well-being; this includes living among highly functioning communities. A mission statement incorporates emotionally loaded ideas about an ideal community into superordinate aims held in common. The development of a mission statement identifies and summarizes these common goals, facilitating their implementation in the organization.

Example: Finding common ground, building community, and developing a mission statement in a hospital

Problem

A hospital is an organization involving many individuals, employees and patients with different concerns. Friction between these differing concerns can generate stress and various related emotional states, which can in turn harm the working atmosphere.

Aims

The project endeavored to explore the sensitivities of employees and patients to improve employee motivation, identification with the hospital, and communication with fellow employees.

Method

All employees were asked three open-ended questions , and patients one question, about their experiences in the hospital, to which they responded anonymously in writing. The results revealed that the highest aim (providing high quality care to patients) depends strongly on positive ethical values, which are causally interrelated to each other . The GABEK project identified co-operation, approval, respect, feeling of solidarity, working atmosphere, less hierarchical thinking, communication and professional dialogue as the fundamental values. These values can be seen as the emotional and cognitive bonds by which employees are connected to a good working community. To further such fundamental values, GABEK identifies the four central aims of the respondents as further education, more information, less work overload, and improvement of administrative tasks.

To realize these aims and values, the respondents proposed 70 concrete measures. Three feedback workshops were organized for the doctors, administration, and nursing staff. Participants in these workshops could reduce the number of measures to those they considered the most effective and realizable. After this, a two-day meeting for chief doctors and managers was organized, and seminars tailored to different professional groups followed.

Benefits

The GABEK project made it possible to optimize strategic goals on all hierarchical levels and formulate a mission statement for the hospital. This led to a series of follow-up projects that continued to improve the working atmosphere in the hospital.