Ok, here's my update on the dreaded mandatory meeting our department had at the hospital last Thursday. First, let me just say those of us remaining still have jobs, haha. The bad news about that is, there are no plans to fill the vacant positons.. in fact, in management's opinion there are no vacant slots.

The meeting ran way over, and lasted at least an hour and a half, mostly because it turned into a gripe session which is kind of what I expected. Even the Chief Operations Officer, Natalie was in attendance. But a lot of the concerns were legitimate. Work load, the pulling of people from their original areas to do others so that a lot of them aren't getting done, or at most not getting done right...

improvements on recognizing a high standard of effort... which I think their answers to that were mostly for show to impress Natalie, especially when one of them said, "I'm always happy to pat someone on the back for a job well done." I was laughing internally at that statement, because in reality its more like "no news is good news"... she's more happy to focus on the negative than the positive.

With the closing of the skilled care unit on 4 North, there were some concerns about the rest of the hospital following suit. In fact, there was a recent item in the local paper (The Examiner) stating the hospital was scheduled to close "soon." Apparently, Natalie doesn't read the paper much, and wondered out loud how such rumors get started. But she assured us IRHC will continue as usual until they open the doors at the new hospital in 2007... time will tell, I'm still not holding my breath.

Teamwork was a key phrase throughout... but at the same time, I'm wondering how they plan to implement teamwork when they pull somebody off the floors to do piddly detail projects when someone else is swamped with dismissals... I guess the only thing there is for us to continue to use our own best judgement... I believe we as workers know better than management what should take priority at any given time. It might sound pompous, but I've never really seen any of them work as hard as any of us do...

Comic relief: at one point it was brought up very tactfully (or as much as possible, haha) ... that on any given day all of us are so busy doing our own little thing, what all needs to be done, and we don't have much of a chance to actually know what the supervisors are dealing with.. "and to be honest, I really don't care." (That statement brought a round of laughter and applause from the entire room.) He continued on, "I'm sure you're just as busy and stressed as the rest of us, but I wouldn't want your job. Her anwer: "Are you sure? "Cause after this meeting, it may be up for grabs, hehe."
In the end, they promised to work on getting the schedules posted in a timely manner, reboot the use of a suggestion box, take into account all our concerns and address them via a bulletin board, as well as verbally, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. Again, time will tell, and I'm not holding my breath.