Different Types of Caring in the Workplace

               At home I have a part-time job as a receptionist at an assisted living facility. After a while I was able to match visitors with specific residents and get a sense of which residents would come by at which times, whether it be for their daily stroll around the lobby or just to say hello to me and grab a piece of candy. I do a lot of observing behind that desk because, well, there’s not much else to do. Aside from the residents and their visitors, though, I think watching the different staff members, specifically housekeepers and nurses, is much more fascinating. While you don’t expect them to skip around singing show tunes every minute of their shift, you do expect a certain level of caring.

                Being a housekeeper or a nurse requires a lot of caring, but it’s a specific kind of caring. It doesn’t necessarily seem to have to be genuine, it just has to be believable.  One of the housekeepers, Andrew, graduated from high school in 2012 with my sister and works there while he goes to the local community college. He’s young, so most of the residents are very fond of him and are always giving him words of wisdom and advice. He calls some of them by their first name, and at times I’ve heard him ask about their personal lives. Once I heard him ask a resident as he passed her in the hallway, “How was your granddaughter’s soccer game? Did she have any goals? I hope that cut on her knee healed before the game!” This, to me, is genuine caring. Is it the most important thing in the world to Andrew? Probably not, but it’s taking that extra step to show that he’s interested, that he cares to a degree, and that he isn’t tuning you out when you speak to him. It’s a respectful kind of care, and above all I think that’s one of the most important kinds of care.

                Comparatively speaking, there is another kind of care I often and unfortunately see at my job, and that’s the ‘believable’ care. The kind of care where you ‘fake it,’ or where you think you do, at least. Sometimes when nurses (and housekeepers, too) do their rounds to each resident’s room, they wear their headphones. Nothing drives elderly people crazier than headphones, because even if they are not on and music is not coming out of them, they still think you have them on full blast and are ignoring them. I once watched a housekeeper make her rounds from one resident’s room to another, wearing her headphones. I could hear her music from my desk about 20ft away, and as she walked into each room she would say, “Hello, how are you today?” She then waited a few seconds, not knowing if the resident had even responded, and would say, “That’s good. Have a good afternoon!” Now, if one were to walk by her, they could think, “Hmm, how nice of her, asking how their day is and wishing them a good afternoon.” However, does she really care? No. It’s an act. It’s the believable care (though I don’t know if anyone would really believe her) or the just-doing-my-job bare minimum care. It meets the general basis for how involved you should or could be when doing your job.

                Caring in this kind of facility is important because if you don’t care, your facility could suffer severely from it. Not caring enough about health and hygiene of the residents, or meeting certain safety requirements, can easily lead to the facility being shut down. Caring is important for the residents themselves, too. Whenever I think of nursing homes or assisted living places gone wrong, I think of the movie Happy Gilmore when Adam Sandler’s characters grandmother goes to a nursing home and the staff is pleasant and helpful when he around, but when he leaves  they are cruel to her and the other residents, too. Things like that (which are all as real as that movie portrays it to be, trust me!) all can be prevented by implementing a certain level of care into your work ethic. A little care goes a long way, as seen in Chapter 9 of Never Let Me Go where the narrator is talking about her missed opportunity with Harry because she assumed too much. She’s now realizing that if she had cared a little more and didn’t blow him off, things with them could have worked out. She didn’t care, and that hurt her in the end. She now makes you, the reader, care by making you feel somewhat sympathetic of her.