#NWiH

A year ago, I wouldn’t have expected to give a lecture on #newworkinhealthcare at university. After all, I’m not a professor! Now, however, I had been working on alternative work models in medicine. Doing that I had attracted the attention of a friend, namely Prof. Jan Ehlers. How did that come about? In the middle of last year, I learned how to network in a really productive way, in the form of a WOL Circle (Working Out Loud). For this circle I was able to recruit the Vice President of Witten-Herdecke University, Prof. Jan Ehlers. This is a cool and smart guy who likes to experiment with progressive formats to try to fill the curriculum for his students with the best content. What WOL is and what it has to do with New Work in Healthcare (#NWiH, #teal) was then the topic of a virtual lecture in front of about 250 participating students. Here you can see the lecture about #newworkinhealthcare and WOL.

I like to communicate with my colleagues regularly and from anywhere. This is why I like slack. If a message pops up in WhatsApp I don’t know what it is at first. When a message in slack pops up I know it’s work. When I see the red dot besides the App Symbol of Slack I know there might be some work to do. If I don’t see it I can relax, no work to do! Besides I can receive direct messages within my slack workspace at PAAU. No need to mix it with my private messenger. By the way I just deinstalled WhatsApp and exchanged it with a folder containing Signal, Telegram and Threema. And I even got my mother to handle more than one messenger.

We now have implemented a weekly meeting with ZOOM. The feedback about it from everybody is good. I already feel great about it. I see colleagues that work remote in their personal surrounding which makes me feel almost like a friend. In those crisp 30 Minutes we do quite well with check-ins and getting things done. There is endless literature about meetings and how it has to be done. All the evidence shows one common thing. Well organized meetings are very important. I do not see any good argument against this weekly. Do you?

The other day a patient of mine came in for a follow-up. She is a very beautiful woman and raised questions about the aesthetic result of her lips consulting my colleague. She had quite high expectations, which is absolutely okay. Using our workspace for team decisions with slack (patient anonymous) he could connect to all the other physicians in the network and ask for suggestions before deciding what is best for the patient. The options that were discussed opened up a much wider range of possible solutions to choose from. A good and simple way to get better results and make team decisions using digital technology that isn’t rocket science.

This is the first little entry about experiences I would like to share with you. They tell stories from the “frontline” of implementing teal structures in the working environment of physicians in Germany.

This blog is about real experiences of my work as physician and facilitator. Literature about #newwork and #teal points out that the CEO or the founder of a company has to understand what #teal is all about before she will give it a try. In medicine people generally have never heard about those new ways of working. Luckily I did not have to persuade the founders I work for to help organize their new company the teal way. It was kind of natural to them! Otherwise I really would not have a clue how to persuade a head physician, that giving up the way he worked for years might be a solution to his leadership problems. Therefore I got lucky. The journey begins.