Page 7 - BusinessWest March 3, 2021
P. 7

 TBy George O’Brien
hey’re calling it the ‘Zen room.’
That’s an apt name for an area being set aside
at Mercy Medical Center at which employees can decompress and, hopefully, remove some of the stress from their lives, at least for a while.
“We want to offer space that’s extremely tran- quil — it will have massage chairs and soothing color schemes,”
said Deborah Bitsoli, the hospital’s president, noting that it should be ready for use soon. “It will literally be Zen-like; it’s a best practice, and it can actually be brought across different industries.”
This Zen room wasn’t created because of the pandemic, nec- essarily, but rather because of the way it helped crystalize the large amounts of stress people are under even in normal times, and how they need rooms like this. And it is just one example of how the pandemic has brought about change in the workplace and change in society in general.
Other examples include that same hospital offering what
it calls ‘resiliency training’; a local bank interviewing — and strongly considering — a job candidate living in Florida who has no intention of moving here; and employers spending con- siderable time and energy on the questions involving whether employees come back to the office, when, how, and under what circumstances.
“I’ve flip-flopped on this throughout the year, but, yeah, we’re coming back. The social- interaction part of this is lost with people working at home;
you can’t create a corporate culture from a remote location.”
These are some of things we learned during a lengthy virtual roundtable involving six area business leaders: Bitsoli; Mary-Beth Cooper, president of Springfield College; Robert Johnson, presi- dent of Western New England University; Jennifer Rymarski, a partner with the regional law firm Morrison Mahoney; Tom Sen- ecal, president and CEO of PeoplesBank; and Paul Stelzer, presi- dent of Holyoke-based Appleton Corp., a property-management firm that has many elder-care facilities in its portfolio.
This was a Q&A, but also a lively discussion, with the dialogue focused on not only what’s happening today, but what will hap- pen moving forward because of what we’ve experienced, what we’ve learned, and what we’ve changed over the tumultuous and very difficult past 12 months. Here’s a somewhat condensed ver- sion of how it went.
BusinessWest: The phrase we’re hearing over and over and over again is that there is light at the end of the tunnel when it comes this pandemic and all that has come with it. Are you seeing that light, and, well, how much tunnel do we still have to go through? What are you seeing in your business?
Bitsoli: These are challenging and unprecedented times, and at Mercy, we’ve really tried to adapt to a new norm. We have many new processes and structures that, as someone who has dedicated their life to healthcare since the age of 16, I never thought I’d see. We’ve also opened our doors to give vaccines to the public based on the Department of Health criteria; to see tears in people’s eyes as they get a vaccine is something I’ll cher- ish for many, many years.
We’ve balancing the needs of the community and keeping
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