Being a Team Player

I think the ideal form of 'team player' is very important. At my work, the term "team player" is often perverted into a way to criticize and bully colleagues. I do my very best to help out and spend every single minute of my floor time for work. I barely even check my work email and never bring my personal cell phone to the unit. I am finding that I end up staying an extra 30min-hour at work 'helping out' in order to avoid the not being a team player criticism. A few months ago, I was called out for spending too much time with my patients and not enough time helping other nurses with their workload.

Sorry. I know how important team work is...but I cringe at the term, due to my unit's interpretation of it.

I don't work at the bedside but in the OR we have usually 3-4 nurses to each OR. There are some nurses at my work that I dread to be allocated with. They do the bare minimum that they can get away with and are not team players and leave everyone else to run around and do all the work. We all know who they are and they get very little respect from everyone else. I call these particular nurses 'cruisers'. They have very little ambition in their career, they usually roll their eyes when someone else gets promoted or wants to further their education by doing courses etc. In fact, I have generally found their attitude towards nursing to be very negative.

When I work with nurses like this I usually adopt the attitude of 'well if your not going to make the effort to work as a team...then you get left out of every decision making process'. As the team leader in my theatre, I will always put the team players first, they get first lunch, tea breaks etc, the cruisers get last lunch. Maybe this makes me a bully but the cruisers have a tendency to take longer for their lunch breaks and hold up everyone elses lunch. I deliberately arrange for the cruisers to scrub for the long cases etc because at least when they are scrubbed they can't get away with not working.

I consider myself a team player. I never get help when I need it while other nurses on my shift and other shifts lay over their stuff on me every single day. For the longest Ive done it and put up with it but there comes a time when being a team player can get you completely taken advantage of and used and when the time comes that one cannot complete everybody elses work you end up feeling the heat from it...or at least i do at my facility. I get sick of it.....team doesnt mean one person to do everything and i would love to have teamwork at my place b/c most of the nurses dont know what that means. Passing the buck is a daily constant thing. it would help if there was organization also.....seems like things are always in a chaotic out of control overwhelming mess when i get to work and i spend my whole shift cleaning up the mess that 4 to 6 other nurses made for me. Talk about a quick burnout.

I think being a team player includes not calling in "sick" especially on holiday weekends so that the charge nurse has to call and practically harass those of us who happen to have the day off!