AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Workplace Engagement Around Stewardship and Recyling in a Healthcare Setting

by Caitlin Harrington




Institution: University of Michigan
Department:
Year: 2016
Keywords: recycling; healthcare; employee engagement; environmental stewardship
Posted: 02/05/2017
Record ID: 2132611
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/117634


Abstract

The healthcare industry is second only to the food industry in overall waste production, and there are many opportunities to mitigate the environmental impacts of waste through waste reduction and recycling programs in healthcare. Beaumont Royal Oak is a 1,000-bed hospital in Southeast Michigan that is part of an eight-hospital, non-profit health system called Beaumont Health. Beaumont Royal Oak is unique in that it has a voluntary training program that educates employees on environmental stewardship in the work place. The Green Officer program is administered by a Green Team made up of leaders in the hospital. In addition to running the Green Officer training program, the Green Team also implements other environmental stewardship initiatives at the hospital. While the Green Team had been successful in recruiting 483 employees to undergo the Green Officer certification program at Royal Oak, as of January 2015, they lacked information about whether Green Officer’s attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors differed from non-trained employees. At the same time, data on the hospital’s waste management revealed that the hospital’s recycling rate was lower than other hospitals with dedicated stewardship programs. This master’s project attempted to answer two questions: (1) how do Beaumont Royal Oak staff perceive and engage in environmental stewardship in the work place, and (2) how can Beaumont Royal Oak increase its recycling rate? To help us answer the second question, we used the Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM) framework to give us guidance on how to address recycling in particular. The framework helped us focus on identifying barriers and benefits to recycling and engagement in environmental stewardship. We employed a wide variety of methods, including site visits, a literature review, an online survey, and employee interviews to answer our two questions. Our survey formed the crux of our data collection process and the findings from it provided the foundation for our recommendations. We used Qualtrics software to design our 10-minute, online survey which we distributed to both Green Officers and non-Green officers within the hospital. The goals of this survey instrument were two-fold: one, to gather data about environmental stewardship among employees at Beaumont Royal Oak, and two, to identify reasons why employees were not recycling at Beaumont Royal Oak. The first half of our survey measured whether there were differences between the environmental behavior and attitudes reported by Green Officers and non-Green Officers, while the second half narrowed in on recycling and measured employee knowledge and awareness of recycling procedures, self-reported recycling behaviors, and employee perceptions of barriers to recycling. We conducted our analysis based on a sample of 294 responses, composed of 116 GOs and 178 non- GOs. Based on our analysis, we saw that attitudes towards the hospital’s work in environmental stewardship were positive across all employees suggesting ample support for… Advisors/Committee Members: Wolske, Kimberly (advisor), Zint, Michaela (committee member).