Longer benches do not usually break morale by themselves. Longer benches plus more repeats, more calls from providers, more QC review, more interruptions, and less recovery time will do it fast.
That is the part laboratory leaders have to take seriously during a surge. Staff can handle a hard week when the work is organized and the purpose is clear. What drains people is feeling like every sample is urgent, every phone call is their problem, every delay is their fault, and nobody above them can see what is happening on the floor.
This is day 13 in the Laboratory Leadership series, and the topic is one that sounds simple until you are living it: how to keep morale up during high-volume testing periods. I am thinking about seasonal testing spikes, outbreak response, backlog recovery, analyzer downtime catch-up, and those client onboarding waves where the volume arrives before the workflow feels ready.
The central tension is this: volume is visible, but morale usually drops because of the things around the volume. Unclear priorities. Hidden staffing gaps. Repeated small frustrations. Vague updates. No clear finish line. A team can be busy and still feel steady. A team can also be only slightly busier than normal and feel defeated if leadership leaves them guessing.
Start the shift with a real surge plan
During a high-volume period, the first few minutes of the shift matter more than usual. People need to know what kind of day they are walking into. Not a speech. Not a long meeting. A practical plan.
A good daily surge plan should name the top-priority assays, the biggest turnaround-time risks, staffing gaps, instrument constraints, send-out contingencies, and who is covering escalations. If the chemistry analyzer has a maintenance window, say it. If microbiology has a pile of pending work from the prior shift, say it. If accessioning is short and that will slow everything downstream, say it.
Without that plan, staff fill in the blanks themselves. Usually that means assuming everything is equally urgent. That is a bad way to run a lab, and it is a rough way to treat people.
Clear priorities protect both patient care and staff energy. If the team knows which assays are most time-sensitive, which clients need close communication, and which work can safely wait, they can make better decisions without feeling like they are guessing every hour.
Use short huddles, not long meetings
Peak periods are not the time for a 30-minute meeting that pulls everyone away from the bench. But silence is not good either. A short huddle, 5 to 10 minutes at most, can keep a team from drifting into confusion.
Twice a day is often enough during a surge. Once near the start of the shift, and once later when the first plan has met reality. The huddle should stay focused on four things:
- Current workload
- Blockers that need leadership help
- Small wins worth naming
- Staffing adjustments for the next few hours
That last part matters. A surge plan should not be frozen in place. If the STAT bench is getting hammered, move help early. If the phone-heavy coordination work is wearing someone down, rotate coverage. If reruns are building, shift someone who can help troubleshoot before the pile gets ugly.
The goal is not to create more talking. The goal is to stop surprises from turning into resentment.
Make the workload visible
One of the fastest ways to frustrate a lab team is to let the workload become invisible. A supervisor may know volume is up. A director may know the client just added testing. But the person stuck between pending specimens, phone calls, QC review, and instrument alarms may feel alone with it.
A simple board or dashboard can help. It does not need to be fancy. It needs to show the work in a way the team can act on.
Useful items include pending samples, STAT volume, tests nearing turnaround-time breach, rerun counts, and bench coverage. If that information is already in the LIS or middleware, great. If not, even a simple whiteboard can help during a temporary surge.
Visible workload does two things. First, it helps leaders move resources before people hit exhaustion. Second, it tells staff, “We see what you are carrying.” That matters more than leaders sometimes realize.
It also makes conversations with medical leadership or clients more honest. If backlog targets are being missed, the answer is not to quietly push more pressure onto bench staff. The answer is to communicate upstream, explain the constraints, and reset expectations where needed.
Move people before they are worn out
A common mistake during surge weeks is waiting too long to reassign work. By the time someone says they are overwhelmed, they may already be past the point where a simple adjustment would have helped.
Reassign early. Shift staff between benches when competency allows it. Rotate accessioning or support tasks. Pause low-value side work when clinically safe. Cancel or defer non-urgent projects, extra meetings, policy cleanup, training modules, and low-priority administrative work for a short period if those tasks are pulling attention from patient testing.
High-stress assignments need special attention. The STAT bench, phone-heavy coordination, manual differentials, troubleshooting, and send-out problem solving can wear on people in different ways. If the same person absorbs the hardest load every day, morale will drop even if that person is capable and quiet.
Quiet high performers are easy to miss. They keep going, they do not complain much, and they often become the default answer to every staffing hole. That is not a compliment if leadership keeps leaning on them without relief.
Protect breaks like they are part of quality
Breaks are easy to treat as optional when the pending list is long. That is understandable, but it is still risky.
Missed breaks create faster burnout, more errors, and worse team mood by the end of the week. People get sharper with each other. Small problems feel bigger. Shortcuts become tempting. Handoffs get sloppy.
Protecting breaks does not mean pretending the work is light. It means leadership plans for the fact that humans do not run well without recovery. During a surge, managers may need to stagger breaks more carefully, cover a bench for a few minutes, or send a runner to handle non-licensed tasks when appropriate.
If breaks are repeatedly impossible, that is not a staff commitment problem. That is an operational signal. It may mean the schedule, volume assumptions, staffing model, or support structure needs adjustment.
Put a leader on the floor
During the rush, one leader should be visibly present on the floor when possible. Not hovering. Helping.
That leader can answer calls, unblock supplies, approve overtime, solve LIS or instrument issues, find label stock, check on reagent prep, deal with courier timing, push IT tickets, or help with non-licensed tasks when appropriate. Sometimes the thing crushing morale is not the number of samples. It is the printer that keeps failing, the analyzer maintenance window that nobody planned around, or the missing supplies that force staff to improvise.
Removing friction fast is one of the most practical morale tools a leader has. It tells the team, “You focus on the testing. I will work on the obstacles.”
Leadership tone matters here. Calm, visible, and honest is better than overly cheerful and vague. Staff usually know when things are hard. They do not need false comfort. They need someone steady who can tell the truth and take action.
Define success in a way people can actually reach
During surge weeks, perfection is a cruel standard. Safe work, accurate results, smart prioritization, and steady communication are better targets.
That does not mean lowering quality. It means being honest about what success looks like under pressure. If the lab is recovering from analyzer downtime, onboarding new client volume, or responding to outbreak testing demand, everything may not move at normal speed. Pretending otherwise only pushes anxiety down to the bench.
Give staff a realistic definition of success each day. For example, a supervisor might say, “Today our focus is keeping STAT work moving, protecting QC review, and communicating early on anything at risk for delay.” That is much more useful than “Let’s just get everything done.”
Also be explicit about what can wait. If non-urgent projects, extra meetings, training modules, policy cleanup, or low-priority admin work can be deferred briefly, say so. Staff should not have to guess whether they are failing because they did not complete a side task during a surge.
Use fairness as a morale tool
Fairness will not remove the workload, but it will reduce bitterness. During high-volume periods, people notice who gets asked to stay late, who gets the hard bench, who gets pulled to cover weekends, and who gets spared.
Distribute overtime, weekend burden, difficult benches, and last-minute asks as evenly and transparently as possible. It will never be perfect. Different staff have different competencies, restrictions, and availability. But the process should be clear enough that people do not assume favoritism.
When overtime is needed, ask clearly and explain why. Avoid treating heroics as the default operating model. A person staying late once to help clear a backlog is one thing. Building the whole surge plan around people sacrificing themselves is another.
If leadership keeps calling the same few people because they always say yes, those people may eventually stop saying yes. Or worse, they may keep saying yes while slowly burning out.
Recognition should be specific, not fluffy
Generic praise wears thin during a hard stretch. “Great job, team” is not wrong, but it is not enough by itself.
Recognize exact contributions in real time. Thank the person who covered a late bench. Name the tech who caught a QC issue early. Point out the staff member who helped clear a backlog or calmly handled a messy send-out problem. Specific recognition tells people their effort was actually seen.
Keep it practical and credible. Public thanks in huddle can help. A quick direct message can help. A coffee or snack run can help. So can letting someone leave on time after a hard stretch, or giving first choice on a future schedule request when that is possible.
Small morale boosters work best when they are tied to operational relief. Extra runner support, meal coverage, temporary admin help, adjusted cutoffs, or canceled low-value meetings will usually mean more than a cheerful email that changes nothing.
Give people the reason and the finish line
Uncertainty drains people faster than hard work with an end point. If the surge is due to an outbreak, client growth, seasonal demand, hospital census changes, or analyzer downtime recovery, share that context when possible.
Then translate it into a time horizon. Is this today only? This weekend? A two-week push? Until a reagent delivery arrives? Even if the answer is not perfect, give the best honest estimate and update it when it changes.
People can pace themselves better when they know what they are facing. They can also trust leadership more when the message is plain. If you do not know when the volume will ease, say that too, but pair it with what you are doing today to reduce the load.
Watch for burnout before it gets loud
Burnout does not always announce itself dramatically. Sometimes it looks like increased irritability. Sometimes it looks like withdrawn behavior, repeated minor errors, conflict between benches, callouts, shortcuts, or an unusually quiet high performer who is usually engaged.
Leaders should check in privately with steady staff too, not only the loudest or most visibly stressed employees. A simple private check-in can reveal a failing handoff, an unsafe workload, or an analyzer issue that staff have been trying to absorb quietly.
Psychological safety is not a soft extra during surge periods. 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. Those comments are early warnings. A good leader wants to hear them before they become patient care problems.
End each peak day with a short debrief
A three-minute debrief at the end of a peak day can prevent the same problems from repeating tomorrow. Keep it simple:
- What was hardest today?
- What helped?
- What needs fixing tomorrow?
- Who needs support?
This does not need to become a complaint session or a formal report. It is a pressure release and a planning tool. If the same issue comes up twice, fix it or explain why it cannot be fixed yet.
After the surge, do a short retrospective. Look at volume numbers, turnaround-time performance, error trends, staffing lessons, supply problems, and one or two process fixes before the next spike. Do not try to solve everything. Pick the fixes that will make the next surge less painful and more controlled.
A simple surge checklist for lab leaders
If I had to keep the practical pieces short, I would keep this list close during any high-volume testing period:
- Communicate early about priorities, risks, and staffing gaps.
- Rotate stress so the same people are not absorbing the hardest work every day.
- Protect breaks on purpose, even when the pending list is uncomfortable.
- Remove friction fast, especially supplies, printers, couriers, LIS issues, and analyzer constraints.
- Recognize specific actions in real time.
- Define the finish line, even if it is only the best estimate for now.
People can handle intense periods better when leadership makes the load visible, priorities clear, support tangible, and appreciation specific. That does not make the surge easy. It does make it feel less chaotic and less lonely.
And in a lab, that matters. The work is too important to run on hidden pressure and tired people pretending they are fine. The next surge will come eventually. The question is whether the team enters it with a plan, or just another long list of pending specimens.