EACTS Members’ Guide to Disruptive Behaviour
This month, EACTS publishes its Members’ Guide to Disruptive Behaviour, a significant and leading step forward in the Association’s goal to ensure all members feel respected and supported within our community. Developed in collaboration with members, staff, and a professional trainer, the guide reflects our shared commitment to maintaining a positive, inclusive, and respectful environment.
EACTS values are ‘Act with integrity’, ‘Be dedicated to progress’, ‘Collaborate and learn together’ and ‘Strive for innovation’, and these guide us in our day-to-day activities, both in the way we achieve our strategic goals and objectives, and the way we interact and collaborate with our people and members.
Through our own research we know that disruptive behaviours have the potential to impact members’ engagement, well-being and productivity.
We recognise that many of our members work in environments involving high levels of pressure and stress and this may affect individuals’ behaviours.
EACTS seeks to mitigate some of these behaviours by raising awareness of their occurrence and the damage they may cause, while also providing tools for our members to better manage disruptive behaviour when it occurs.
Why is disruptive behaviour a problem?
Disruptive behaviours have serious impacts on recipients’ well-being and mental health. They impact the performance and job satisfaction of both recipients and observers, and also impact patient care.
- When our members were surveyed, 80% of respondents said they had either experienced or witnessed disruptive behaviours in the workplace.
- 47% of respondents said disruptive behaviours occurred weekly or more often.
- 29% of respondents said they thought they may have displayed disruptive behaviours themselves.
- 75% of respondents felt that disruptive behaviours either witnessed or experienced, had impacted their job satisfaction.
- 86% of respondents believed disruptive behaviours affected the overall work environment.
- And 65% of respondents believed disruptive behaviours affected patient care quality in the workplace.
Our ‘Professional Behaviour at EACTS’ document establishes how these values inform our work as members, and the expected behaviours of everyone at EACTS. It codifies what good looks like and what we aspire to as an organisation.
Members’ commitment to upholding these values is essential in maintaining a positive and impactful community within EACTS.
EACTS ongoing commitments
As part of our commitment to creating a positive working environment within our organisation, we commit to the following actions:
- Implementation of preventive measures such as awareness campaigns, workshops, or policy reviews to address inappropriate behaviour with the committee and task force chairs.
- Regular review of reporting procedures and intervention strategies to ensure effectiveness (withing the working group on professional behaviour)
- Seek ongoing feedback from members and EACTS employees to continuously improve the handling of such incidents, i.e. through regular surveys
- Learn from incidents to identify trends and inform future prevention efforts
- Include feedback from members attending the EACTS courses and the annual meeting by adding questions to the evaluation of the events.
To read the EACTS Professional Behaviour Guide, please visit our Policies webpage. EACTS looks forward to observing the positive impact of this guide and nurturing a truly professional environment for its members and staff.