Creating a culture of organizational thriving and employee well-being is about genuinely respecting health care professionals and devoting time and effort to improve their workplace. Improving organizational health goes far beyond reducing clerical work or optimizing the electronic environment. It involves streamlining and optimizing workflows, creating standard processes, eliminating waste in all forms, redesigning systems, developing leaders, and supporting the mental health and well-being of each employee. VHA is committed to this purpose and has created a taskforce to Reduce Employee Burnout and Optimize Organizational Thriving (REBOOT). In service of this work, there is now an open call for promising practices in the areas of organizational design and employee well-being.

Goals for REBOOT include:

1. Improve work unit processes and/or practices to enhance efficiencies at VA Medical Centers (VAMCs) with demonstration of improved All Employee Survey (AES) scores (Best Places to Work, Psychology Safety, Burn out Symptoms 1, 2,3, Servant Leadership and Engagement indexes) and reduced burnout and fatigue for VHA front line staff
2. Deploy efficient practices in recruitment and retention of VHA employees to ensure workload burdens are minimized
3. Leverage promising practices where leadership creates and supports a culture of well-being, including practices where supervisors and managers have prioritized well-being for those they lead evidenced by improvement in AES supervisor and servant leadership scores or similar metrics, and;
4. Implement practices to support the whole health (mental and physical) and well-being of employees that result in improvement in employee-reported outcomes and/or measures of burnout

Examples of processes and issues that result in inefficiencies and frustration include: 

For questions or to learn more, email vhareboot@va.gov.