Nurse Manager Overload

[NurseLatteDNP, MSN, DNP, RN]

I am a member of our new taskforce to lighten the nurse Manager overload and improve their work life balance. I need some examples of things your hospital does for the nursing leadership to help retain them.

Here is some things I have gathered from hospitals around Dallas.

- Making a "reflections day" mandatory and paid day just for 'me time'. Each manager got one weekday off for this purpose per month.

-Blocking one day per week for no meetings

-Flexible schedule/hours

[jrt4]

I am going to follow this post to see what others are doing. My current organization is not supportive of work life balance. Its a shame really.

At a past organization they allowed us to work 4, 10 hour days (lets face it most days were 10 hours anyway) and work from home 1 day per week. This was really convenient because you avoided to commute that day and you could answer emails and take calls from home. I used this as my catch up day but we could do this because we could remotely connect to the network and access our computers. The 2 caveats to this was your assistant nurse manager or another manager had to be covering you that day AND you had to be available to come in to work if you were needed in person. I rarely had to go in unless it was preplanned (IE an important meeting came up on my work from home day) and I even less frequently got called at home. We also had a director that was supportive of us leaving early on Fridays if we had already been working long hours that week. I miss that culture...