The test volume is the obvious problem, but it is not always what breaks morale. What wears people down is the pileup around the volume: longer benches, more repeats, more calls from providers or clients, more QC review, more interruptions, and less time to recover before the next shift starts.
That is the tension in a high-volume testing period. Staff can usually handle hard work for a while. Most lab people already know what busy feels like. But morale drops fast when the work keeps growing and leadership is vague about priorities, absent from the floor, or quietly expects the same people to absorb the hardest load every day.
This is day 13 in the Laboratory Leadership series, and the topic is one every supervisor eventually has to face: how to keep morale up during temporary surge periods. That might be seasonal testing, an outbreak response, backlog recovery after instrument downtime, a client onboarding wave, or a weekend where everything that could hit the lab seems to hit at once.
The answer is not pretending the surge is easy. Staff can see the pending list. They know when the phones will not stop. The better approach is to make the load visible, make priorities clear, put support where it actually helps, and recognize the work in a way that feels specific and credible.
Start the shift with a real surge plan
During normal volume, a lab can often run on routine and muscle memory. During a surge, routine alone is not enough. The start of shift needs a short, practical plan that tells people what matters most today.
That plan does not need to be fancy. It should answer a few direct questions:
- Which assays are the top priority today?
- Where are the turnaround-time risks?
- Which benches are short-staffed or likely to fall behind?
- Are there instrument constraints, maintenance windows, or reagent concerns?
- What is the send-out contingency if in-house testing gets blocked?
- Who is covering escalations from providers, clients, courier issues, or leadership?
When this is not said out loud, people fill in the blanks on their own. One tech may think STAT volume should take everything. Another may be trying to protect routine TAT. Someone else may be stuck troubleshooting an analyzer while still getting pulled into phone calls. That is how a busy day turns into a resentful day.
A surge plan gives the team permission to prioritize. It also gives supervisors a way to say, plainly, what can wait. Non-urgent projects, extra meetings, policy cleanup, training modules, and low-priority admin work may need to be deferred briefly. That is not lowering standards. That is protecting the work that affects patient care and client service right now.
Use short huddles before frustration spreads
Long meetings during a surge are usually a mistake. Nobody has time for a speech when samples are pending. But five to ten minutes can save a lot of wasted motion.
During peak periods, a short huddle twice a day is often enough. Keep it focused on workload, blockers, wins, and staffing adjustments. The point is not to review every detail. The point is to keep the team from working with stale information.
A useful huddle might sound like this:
- Pending samples are highest in chemistry and molecular right now.
- STAT volume is heavier than expected.
- Manual differentials are building after lunch.
- One analyzer is running, but the backup plan is ready if it drifts.
- Accessioning support will rotate for the next two hours.
- Provider calls go through one assigned person until the backlog clears.
That kind of update may seem basic, but basic is exactly what helps when people are tired. It reduces guessing. It also gives staff a chance to name blockers early, before they become end-of-shift disasters.
Make the workload visible
Morale gets worse when the workload feels endless and invisible. A simple board or dashboard can help. It does not have to be a perfect digital tool. It just needs to show the reality of the day in a way people can act on.
Useful items to track include pending samples, STAT volume, tests nearing TAT breach, rerun counts, and bench coverage. If the lab can see that one bench is drowning while another is stable, a supervisor can reassign staff before exhaustion sets in.
This matters because staff often know their own bench is heavy, but they may not see the full department. Without shared visibility, people can start thinking they are the only ones carrying the load. Or the opposite happens: one area is quietly falling behind while everyone assumes it is fine.
A visible workload also helps leadership communicate upstream. If backlog targets are being missed, medical leadership or clients need honest updates. The wrong move is to hide the pressure from everyone outside the department and then push that pressure onto bench staff. That usually leads to rushed work, bad mood, and avoidable conflict.
Move people before they are spent
One of the easiest mistakes during a surge is waiting too long to reassign work. By the time someone says they are exhausted, they may already be making small mistakes or losing patience with coworkers.
Reassign early. Shift staff between benches when competency allows. Rotate accessioning or support tasks. Pause low-value side work when clinically safe. If one person has been on the STAT bench all morning, do not automatically leave them there all afternoon just because they are good at it.
High-stress assignments need rotation. That includes STAT benches, phone-heavy coordination, manual differentials, troubleshooting, and send-out problem solving. Some people handle these roles calmly, so leaders lean on them. I understand why that happens. In the lab, the reliable person often gets more responsibility because everyone trusts them.
But reliability is not an unlimited resource. If the same person absorbs the hardest load every day, morale will crack even if they never complain. Check in privately with steady staff too, not just the loudest or most visibly stressed employees.
Protect breaks like they are part of quality
Breaks are easy to sacrifice during high volume. They also affect the rest of the day more than we like to admit.
Missed breaks create faster burnout, more errors, and worse team mood by the end of the week. A skipped break may feel helpful in the moment, especially when the pending list is ugly. But if it becomes the pattern, people start running on irritation and caffeine. That is not a staffing plan.
Supervisors may need to protect breaks on purpose. That can mean sending someone to cover a bench for ten minutes, staggering lunches more tightly, or having a lead watch the phone while the person doing coordination steps away. It may feel inconvenient. It is still cheaper than a week of worn-out staff, avoidable repeats, and rising conflict.
Break protection also sends a message. It tells staff leadership sees them as people, not just hands at a bench.
Put a leader on the floor where the problems are
During a rush, one leader should be visibly on the floor. Not hovering. Not asking for constant updates. Actually helping remove barriers.
That may mean answering calls, unblocking supplies, approving overtime, solving LIS or instrument issues, or helping with non-licensed tasks when appropriate. It may mean tracking down label stock, fixing a printer problem, checking courier timing, pushing an IT ticket, or making sure reagent prep is not becoming the hidden delay of the day.
These little friction points can hurt morale more than the raw volume itself. A busy bench is hard. A busy bench with a printer that jams every ten labels is maddening. An analyzer maintenance window at the wrong time can undo a whole morning. A missing supply that everyone assumed was stocked can turn into twenty minutes of frustration and finger-pointing.
Good surge leadership is often very practical. Find the thing slowing people down and fix it fast.
Define success honestly
Surge weeks need a realistic definition of success. If leadership acts like perfection is still expected under impossible conditions, staff will either feel set up to fail or start hiding problems.
A better definition is something like this: safe work, accurate results, smart prioritization, and steady communication. That is different from saying every test will be done as fast as a normal-volume day. It is more honest, and it keeps the focus on quality instead of panic.
Leaders should also share the reason behind the surge when possible. Is it an outbreak? Seasonal demand? Hospital census changes? A new client? Analyzer downtime recovery? Reagent delivery delays? Context reduces frustration because people can connect the extra effort to a real cause.
The time horizon matters too. Today only feels different from this weekend. A two-week push feels different from an undefined mess. Until reagent delivery arrives is at least a finish line. Uncertainty drains morale faster than hard work with an endpoint.
Use fairness as a morale tool
Fairness is not just a nice leadership value. During a surge, it becomes operational.
Overtime, weekend burden, difficult benches, and last-minute asks should be distributed as evenly and transparently as possible. Not perfectly, because labs are not perfect systems. Competency, licensure, staffing mix, and patient needs all matter. But people can usually tell whether leadership is trying to be fair.
When overtime is needed, ask clearly and explain why. Avoid treating heroics as the default operating model. A person who stays late once may feel proud to help. A person who is always expected to stay late may start feeling punished for being dependable.
Fairness also includes psychological safety. Staff need to be able to say a workload is unsafe, an analyzer is drifting, or a handoff is failing without being treated as negative. In high-volume periods, those comments are not complaints to brush off. They are early warnings.
Watch for burnout signals before they become bigger problems: increased irritability, withdrawn behavior, shortcuts, repeated minor errors, conflict between benches, callouts, or unusually quiet high performers. The quiet ones are easy to miss. Do not miss them.
Recognition should be specific and useful
Generic praise gets thin fast. Specific recognition lands better because it tells the person leadership actually saw the work.
Thank the exact person and the exact action. Covering a late bench. Catching a QC issue early. Helping clear a backlog. Taking the phone for an hour so someone else could stay focused. Fixing a send-out problem before it became a client complaint.
Recognition does not have to be dramatic. Public thanks in huddle can help. A quick direct message can help. A coffee or snack run can help. Letting someone leave on time after a hard stretch can mean more than another thank-you email. First choice on a future schedule request can also be a practical way to show appreciation.
The key is credibility. If staff are drowning and leadership only brings donuts while leaving every operational problem untouched, people notice. Small morale boosters work best when tied to operational relief: extra runner support, meal coverage, temporary admin help, adjusted cutoffs, or canceled low-value meetings.
End the day before tomorrow starts badly
At the end of each peak day, take three minutes for a debrief. Not a long meeting. Just enough to ask:
- What was hardest today?
- What helped?
- What needs fixing tomorrow?
- Who needs support before the next shift?
This keeps problems from rolling into the next day untouched. It also lets staff see that feedback leads to action. Even one fix, like moving phone coverage earlier or checking reagent levels before shift change, can make tomorrow feel less chaotic.
After the surge passes, do a short retrospective. Look at volume numbers, TAT performance, error trends, staffing lessons, supply problems, and one or two process fixes before the next spike. Do not try to fix everything at once. Pick the changes most likely to reduce friction the next time volume rises.
Leadership tone matters through all of this. Calm, visible, and honest leaders stabilize teams better than overly cheerful or vague messaging. Staff do not need a pep talk that ignores reality. They need to know the plan, the priorities, the limits, and the support.
People can handle intense periods better when leadership makes the load visible, priorities clear, support tangible, and appreciation specific. Communicate early. Rotate stress. Protect breaks. Remove friction. Recognize specifics. Define the finish line. That is not fancy leadership, but during a surge week, it is the kind people remember.