These workplace resilience sessions are offered to help team members develop the knowledge and skills for navigating today’s dynamic academic medical center environment. These workshops can be delivered virtually or in-person at meetings, team retreats, or other events. Most presentations can be scheduled for 60 or 90 minutes, or as an educational series. Select presentations can be adapted to accommodate a shorter timeframe.
We can also offer tailored presentations to meet the needs of your team. As we seek to balance the various requests for support from individuals and departments, we ask that you provide us ample lead time to ensure staff availability for your request. Contact the Michigan Medicine Office of Counseling and Workplace Resilience at (734) 763-5409 or email [email protected] to inquire about session topics, formats, and scheduling.
PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH FOUNDATIONS
Office of Counseling and Workplace Resilience (OCWR) Overview of Services
This presentation will highlight the wide range of supportive services that OCWR provides to our academic medical center community, emphasizing information about available resources for individual staff, faculty, and leaders, as well as teams, units, and departments across the organization. The topic areas will include OCWR’s philosophy of care, team backgrounds and education, along with information about counseling, referral services, and urgent and after-hours support. Additionally, workplace resilience services, such as leader consultations, impactful event debriefing, COMPASS Peer Support, and educational and outreach presentations, will be shared. The length of this presentation can be adapted to meet time constraints within a team’s workflow, recognizing that the depth and breadth of information will be determined by the timeframe and specific needs of the audience. (15 - 60 minutes)
Fostering Mental Health Awareness in the Workplace
Discussing mental health can be challenging, particularly in the workplace. This session offers valuable insights into mental health and the specific stressors associated with working in an academic medical center. Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on their personal approaches to addressing mental health issues, recognize signs of distress in themselves and colleagues, and learn strategies for engaging in supportive conversations about mental and emotional well-being. (60 minutes)
Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) Suicide Awareness Training
QPR is an evidence-based training initiative designed to teach individuals to recognize and refer colleagues at risk of emotional crisis or suicide. This training provides valuable knowledge and skills for understanding risk and protective factors, recognizing early warning signs for emotional crisis, and helping colleagues connect to available resources. Discussion and role plays are essential components of this training. (90 minutes)
CREATING PSYCHOLOGICALLY SAFE COMMUNITIES
The Emotional Intelligence Toolbox
Emotions carry important information about our well-being, our needs, and our values, yet it can often be difficult to accept the full range of emotional experiences. This workshop will support participants in cultivating a compassionate and curious approach to their inner emotional life while increasing practical skills in self-awareness, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness, including communication with others. (60 minutes)
Building Bridges: Strategies for Effective Interpersonal Relationships
Working in a high-demand academic medical center environment can impact stress levels and relationships. In this session, participants will discuss sources of strain and overwhelm in teams and learn strategies to move from conflict and mistrust to effective, satisfying, and collaborative communication with colleagues. This educational offering will help to increase skills in (1) understanding self and others, (2) improving interpersonal interactions, (3) learning ways to re-build trust, and (4) leveraging core values to find common ground. (60 minutes)
The Neuroscience of Stress, Emotions, and Resilience
In a high-stakes academic medical center environment, the brain’s response to stress is critical in complex decision-making, emotion regulation, team dynamics, and patient care. This interactive presentation explores the neuroscience behind the nervous system’s stress response, emotion activation, and the impact of chronic stress within a multi-faceted workforce. Participants will gain insight into how their brain and nervous system process stress, how to harness neuroplasticity for personal resilience, and practical strategies to regulate emotions and optimize well-being. By understanding the science behind one’s own stress reactions, participants can cultivate greater self-awareness, enhance team dynamics, and provide compassionate, high-quality care to patients. (60 minutes)
Self-Compassion in Action
Through a lens of neuroscience and emotion regulation, Self-Compassion in Action is a restorative and interactive workshop, tailored for anyone navigating the demands of working in an academic medical center. Drawing from Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities and other evidence-based practices, this session highlights how self-compassion isn’t just a personal practice – it’s a professional strength. Attendees will learn how tending to their own nervous systems can foster resilience, reduce stress, and support more compassionate, sustainable care for self and others. (60 minutes)
EXPANDING WELL-BEING SKILLS AND PERSPECTIVES
Well-Being and Support in Times of Stress and Uncertainty
Working in an academic medical center environment and living in today’s hectic world can be stressful. This session shares practical, research-based principles and practices for recognizing and responding to the impacts of stress and burnout. Complete with participant discussion alongside didactic information sharing, participants will learn strategies from neuroscience and self-compassion for coping with stress and loss, building resilience, and caring for their well-being in the midst of acute and ongoing stressors. (60 minutes)
Cultivating Joy in Tough Times
When life is hard, how do you find time to rest and reconnect to what matters most? Drawing from positive psychology research, this session teaches strategies for enhancing joy, meaning, and compassion in everyday life, inside and outside of work. Participants will learn about the importance of gratitude, creativity, and social connection to cultivate joy as a skill in multiple domains of life—even in times of stress and difficulty. (60 minutes)
Resilience and Recovery: How to Manage Empathy Fatigue, Secondary Trauma and Moral Distress
The work of caring for others in healthcare is deeply meaningful, and, often, at the same time, deeply painful. The question is: how does one hold onto all the reasons they chose a career of healing AND be well? This session introduces a trauma-informed, resilience-oriented strategy to build skills that enhance resilience and recovery processes after impactful events in the healthcare environment. Participants will learn skills for self-healing and colleague support to address the impacts of empathy fatigue, secondary trauma, and moral distress. (60 minutes for introduction + skills building; 90 minutes for in-depth introduction + optimal skills building)
Understanding Grief and Trauma: Building a Supportive Healthcare Community
This workshop, tailored for healthcare workers, focuses on the intricacies of personal and professional grief and loss. Participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of grief’s core concepts and the science behind grieving, while exploring the intersection of trauma and secondary trauma. The unique challenges of navigating loss in healthcare, an environment where stress injuries can accumulate over time, will also be explored. Participants will learn practical coping strategies to manage the emotional, physical, and spiritual distress associated with grief and trauma. Teams will also discover how they can effectively support one another through reflection and meaningful discussions and explore grief-related resources available at Michigan Medicine. (60 - 120 minutes; length and content can be modified to meet team/unit need)
TEAM AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Well & Wise at Michigan Medicine
Well & Wise at Michigan Medicine, a self-care and peer support initiative based on Stress First Aid for Healthcare Workers, has been developed for those in high-stress occupations and whose daily work relies on team interaction and shared responsibility. It is an evidence-based framework designed to improve recovery from ongoing stress reactions by teaching strategies that help to identify and address early signs of stress and build resilience within oneself and one’s team members. Based on a set of five evidence-based elements, Well & Wise provides practical actions to help connect people to internal and external resources (e.g. coping skills, social support) and teach colleagues how to support one another.
An introduction to the Well & Wise framework can be shared in a 60-minute session. The full Well & Wise implementation requires multiple sessions but can be delivered incrementally in as little as 30 minutes per session.
Facilitator Training for Emotional Support Debriefs
Working in healthcare often involves exposure to difficult and even traumatic interactions and events. This training is a hands-on, trauma-informed workshop designed to empower teams to structure and conduct evidence-informed emotional support discussions of impactful events in order to better promote healing and team cohesion. This training is ideal for those individuals who are in either formal or informal leadership roles within their teams. (2 hours with a strong preference for in-person training)
Leading Self and Others with Wisdom and Compassion Across Michigan Medicine
Whether there is crisis in the world or within a team, compassionate team members and leaders can acknowledge and respond to distress, and promote hope, collaboration, and healing. Participants from across the academic medical center environment will learn principles and practices from the Human-Centered Leadership Mastery Model to elevate their everyday leadership skills during times of crisis and change. This session can be designed for an entire team or specifically for managers and supervisors and is focused on leaders/teams in non-patient facing areas. (60 minutes)
Everyday Leadership in Healthcare Teams: Utilizing Human Centered Leadership to Nurture Resilience (2-Session Series)
Leadership isn’t defined by a title—it’s about how we show up in our roles, whether leading a patient assignment, a healthcare team, or an organization. In this two-session interactive presentation, participants will explore the Human-Centered Leadership (HCL) approach and learn how to apply its core principles—Heartset, Mindset, and Skillset—in healthcare settings. Designed for healthcare professionals at all levels, these sessions will empower participants to lead with compassion and wisdom. Through engaging discussions and practical exercises, attendees will…
- Session #1: cultivate deeper self-awareness to strengthen their leadership presence, develop a mindset committed to self-care using the Self-Care Hierarchy exercise, and build essential self-regulation skills to foster resilience, psychological safety, and well-being within their teams.
- Session #2: cultivate curiosity to strengthen their leadership presence, develop a growth mindset to move beyond a fixed mindset, and build mindfulness skills into their workflow to foster resilience, psychological safety, and well-being within their teams.
This 2-session series offers an opportunity to enhance healthcare leadership impact and create a culture of well-being and resilience. (60 minutes for each session)