Colorado Assisted Living Association (CALA)

Have you ever felt like Oliver Wendell Douglass from the 60’s sitcom Green Acres? The social dynamic of the work place is a tricky playing fi eld full of hidden agendas and unconscious desires to recreate a dysfunctional family environment.

 This is not an article to give you the answers to this situation, but to hopefully start a forum to address employee issues and how to deal with them without legal repercussions.

My background is in psychiatric counseling and I have owned and operated a small assisted living home for the past twelve years. I enjoy working with the elderly, but it is my staff that is the most challenging. I invite readers of the CALA newsletter to email me stories, concerns or whatever else may seem helpful. I will reprint some of submissions in the CALA newsletter with the intention of gaining insight, maintaining a CALA support network and working towards possible solutions for our current problems before they become toxic. It may also help us screen for potentially problematic employees before we hire them.

What are the red flags? The three problem categories I will address in this article are boundaries and roles, ego and conflicts, and conflictual dysfunctional roles.

The smaller facilities can be home like and most people enjoy this pleasant, informal work environment allowing the residents and staff to feel at home. Unfortunately this may reduce the work/home boundaries larger organizations provide, i.e. my role at home and my role at work are the same. The staff may take on a parental role at work creating an overly controlling and protective environment. This can also cause a parent child communication pattern leaving residents responding like children or being annoyed.

Author Eckhart Tolle addresses ego issues in his book A New Earth. I have found his writings about the work place very useful. Some staff members are high maintenance and needing more attention than others. If this attention is not given through special consideration, pro-motion, or status, their need for attention may be sought through negative or passive-aggressive behavior. The end result can be the tail wagging the dog. This often creates conflict as the co-workers see themselves as pawns in this power seeking manipulative behavior.

Lastly, there are the classic dysfunctional roles of the rescuer, persecutor and victim. The employer as the persecutor has an employee who continuously feeds their need to rescue their coworkers convincing them they are victims of the employer. It is like having an in-house union representative (shop steward). This keeps the work environment in a state of conflict. The rescuer can maintain a great sense of control and power, and often does. All of the above categories are not mutually exclusive; they often happen all together. The end result is a crazy making environment for the employer and the employees. This can be the main cause of a high turn over rate.

Rarely will we be able to end conflicts, but we can learn to manage them and possibly create tools to reduce hiring more dysfunctional employees.

The above scenarios are not isolated to the smaller homes; all organizations can have these problems. If we can share our issues and insights in an open forum, we may all benefit.

 – by Chris Butler, Timberline Lodge Assisted Living Residence