Creating an Environment Where People Can Do Their Best Work

Do you love your job? Do your patients love their experience? Do you feel that you are able to do your best work here?

In a perfect world, everyone in healthcare would answer “yes” to all three questions. While universal agreement may be unrealistic, it should still be our aspiration.

When people think about creating a great workplace, they often focus on resources: adequate staffing, sufficient clinic space, operating room access, technology, and financial support. These are essential. They allow us to do our jobs. But they do not necessarily allow us to do our best work.

What transforms a workplace from functional to exceptional?

In a recent Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, Marcus Buckingham discussed themes from his book Design Love In. He challenged organizations to move beyond measuring satisfaction with net promoter scores and instead to examine moments of extreme positive and negative experiences. Those moments reveal what people truly value. His premise is simple but powerful: Sustainable excellence occurs when people feel more like themselves over time. In other words, they flourish.

If we want extraordinary outcomes, we must create extraordinary experiences.

For employees, that means creating environments where people do not feel powerless. They have autonomy. They feel understood. They know their contributions matter. They believe others care about them as people, not simply as producers of work. For patients, it means creating experiences where they feel heard, respected, and empowered to participate in their care.

These ideas align closely with what leadership research consistently tells us. Great leaders build trust, stay connected, and help others shine. They align operations with strategy so that daily work supports organizational goals. They provide timely, well-intentioned feedback. They create opportunities for people to contribute, grow, and take ownership of meaningful work.

At the center of all of this is psychological safety.

Google’s well-known Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the most important characteristic of high-performing teams. Yet healthcare often focuses on psychological safety for trainees while overlooking an equally important truth: Faculty and staff need psychological safety as well. Recent work in surgical education describes a “trickle-down effect” in which faculty who feel unable to admit mistakes, ask for help, or challenge assumptions struggle to create the supportive learning environments they hope to provide for trainees.

Creating psychological safety requires more than encouraging people to speak up. Organizations must reward candor rather than punish it. Leaders must practice what some have called “ostentatious listening,” making it visible that employee concerns are heard, considered, and acted upon. This is the foundation of institutional courage: Creating systems where concerns can be raised without fear of retaliation and where accountability flows in both directions. When institutional courage is absent, institutional betrayal can emerge. Employees become disengaged, wellness declines, productivity suffers, and talented people leave.

Community matters too. Research on belonging consistently shows that people thrive when they feel connected to something larger than themselves. Workplaces should foster relationships, mentorship, teaching, and shared purpose. The bonds that unite us must be stronger than the forces that divide us.

Ultimately, culture can be measured by a simple question: Can people do their best work here?

When the answer is yes, employees flourish, patients benefit, and organizations succeed. The organizations that thrive in the future will not be those that simply extract more productivity from their people. They will be those that create environments where people can bring their best selves to work, do their best work, and leave each day believing that their work and they themselves matter. Creating that environment may be one of the most important responsibilities of leadership and one of the greatest opportunities facing healthcare today.   

—Robin