If you want to improve outcomes at your organization, then focusing on improving workplace culture through trauma-informed approaches is a great strategy.
Whether your goal is employee wellness, leadership development, or improving your bottom line, fostering a healthy, supportive workplace culture is the means to your end. Organizations across industries are increasingly recognizing the value of adopting trauma-informed approaches (TIAs) to create workplaces that not only thrive, but also empower employees to bring their best selves to work.
What are Trauma-Informed Approaches?
At its core, a trauma-informed approach acknowledges the widespread impact of trauma and actively works to create a safe environment for healing and growth. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with you?” it encourages leaders to consider, “What happened to you?” This shift in perspective allows for deeper understanding, empathy, and healthier team dynamics.
This major perspective shift from a critical deficit-based mindset to a strengths-based approach enables employers to live trauma-informed values, which support them as they understand, recognize, and respond to the impact of trauma on employees.
The principles of TIAs, outlined by SAMHSA, include:
- Safety: Creating environments where people feel physically and emotionally safe.
- Trustworthiness and Transparency: Establishing open communication to foster trust.
- Peer Support: Encouraging collaboration and mutual aid.
- Collaboration and Mutuality: Sharing power and decision-making.
- Empowerment, Voice, and Choice: Promoting autonomy and personal agency.
- Cultural, Historical, and Gender Awareness: Recognizing and responding to the unique needs of individuals and groups.
For us, SAMHSA’s 6 Guiding principles are a section of a 2-hour training module; however, these concepts aren’t learned quickly. They can take years to fully explore and understand, as they are complex, interrelated, and often require deep personal work by each individual on a team.
Why Trauma-Informed Workplaces Matter
Being trauma-informed has immense benefits: for your organizations bottom line and our workforce as whole. Employers that prioritize implementing TIAs see increased retention and engagement, higher productivity, better performance, and reduced absenteeism–all of which are the result of improved employee wellbeing and reduced burnout.
Read the full blog and learn how to start implementing trauma-informed approached in the workplace now! How Trauma-Informed Approaches Can Transform Workplace Culture - Chefalo Consulting
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