You’re moving around about every 13 weeks from city to city, facility to facility, living your best medical traveler life. And with that comes lots of different people from diverse backgrounds and multiple personality types. While meeting new people may be a top perk of a medical traveler career, it can also be a challenge to keep up with the everchanging cycle of coworkers.

How to Work with Different Personality Types in a Healthcare Setting

How to make friends as a medical traveler

One of the best things about a medical career is the amount of opportunities to expand your friend group. There are many perks to a career in medical travel—unique opportunities for professional growth, exposure to a variety of experiences and patients, endless adventure, and enhanced independence, to name a few. Best of all, life as a medical traveler also introduces you to new people at each assignment.

There’s also permanently staffed medical workers. As much as we’re pro-travel, we can admit there are benefits to a career as perm staff. For example, as a full-time medical worker, there’s job security, a steady paycheck, and paid time off. The consistency of a perm job in one facility can help foster long-term professional relationships, as well as lifelong friendships.

While a permanent position nurtures consistent relationship-building, life as a professional medical traveler gives you the opportunity to make friends with a variety of people all over the country. Get connected with colleagues who seem interesting, and before you know it, you’ll find the crew that you vibe with, whether they’re fellow travelers or permanently staffed workers you met while on assignment.

Putting the “work” into “teamwork”

It can be intimidating to insert yourself onto a new team, but at the end of the day, the old cliché is true: there’s no “I” in “team.” The ability to work with a myriad of personality types is like a modern-day superpower—not many people have the power.

While the people you’re surrounded by during an assignment may be different than you personally, it’s helpful to know that you’re all working towards the same goal, and that’s what’s best for the patient. Being on a team that’s aligned towards the same goal makes it more likely that your team will fulfill a positive outcome.

Here’s another overused, yet true, cliché: communication is key. In order to resolve conflict or have productive conversations, you have to be willing to communicate openly with your team, no matter how uncomfy it may feel. Especially in a healthcare setting where the hustle and bustle of patient care is always moving, you have to be quick and clear with your communication because otherwise, it could literally be life or death.

When you constantly work with new and different personalities, there’s extra effort to create a positive work environment. Establishing positivity in the workplace isn’t as hard as it may sound—really, you just have to be genuinely nice to others, recognize them for what they do, and make it a routine. A positive workplace atmosphere adds a new level of determination and motivation to help your medical professional peers and patients you treat, so it's a win-win-win for everyone.

It’s hard to develop cohesive teamwork between coworkers in only 13 weeks, but it’s most definitely doable! Work together with perm staff and senior residents to set the overall mood for teamwork and support among the rest of your medical team and make the most of your travel job.

How Fusion lets us be us

It’s not every day you find a workplace that gives you the complete freedom to be the authentic, weirdo you truly are at heart, but at Fusion, that’s just another day that ends in “y.”

There are a bunch of studies that support diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, and that's one way Fusion lets us be us. When a company collectively overcomes differences and recognizes the unique qualities that each employee brings to the table, that is when true success can be reached—financially, professionally, and personally. 

For example, would you believe us if we told you that highly inclusive companies are more likely to hit their financial target goals by 120 percent? What if we said that 80 percent of Deloitte survey respondents identified inclusion as one of the most important things when choosing a job? Well, believe it, traveler! The importance that diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging play in the workforce are insurmountable, and the professionals agree. 

"We need to do more than diversity and equity and inclusion," said popular HR Influencer and American Author, Brene Brown. "We need to create real belonging in our culture." 

At Fusion, people are what matter the most. With more than 400 internal employees, not counting medical travelers, it can be difficult to maintain our successful culture. That’s why Fusion’s Human Resources team started using the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Assessment to better learn how all corporate Fusion employees can best work together, despite all the different personality types.

The MBTI explores the differences in the ways that each individual prefers to use their perception and judgement.

“Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas,” the theory explained. “Judgement involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. If people differ systematically in what they perceive and in how they reach conclusions, then it is only reasonable for them to differ correspondingly in their interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills.”

The exam assesses the basic preferences of four personal categories:

• Extraversion vs introversion—do you receive your energy from other people or from within?
• Sensing vs intuition—do you look at the big picture or the small, minute details?
• Thinking vs feeling—are you logical in your decision-making or do you follow your heart?
• Judging vs perceiving—are you structured or more go with the flow?

Each Fusion employee takes the test and gets their personal results from Fusion’s very own certified MBTI administer, Vicki Ortmeier, who helps each of us interpret our personality types. Then, each team within the company plans a day with Vicki where they share their Meyers-Briggs personality type with their teammates, and then participate in fun, team-building activities.

"Fusion Medical Staffing is committed to the personal and professional development of our employees," said Vicki Ortmeier, BSN, RN, Fusion's Learning and Content Manager. "THE MBTI is a self-report questionnaire which presents word pairs and short statements to determine inborn preferences in the way employees gain energy, take in information, make decisions, and deal with the outside world. The MBTI is the basis for many Fusion activities throughout the year that focus on maintaining a positive culture and strong teams."

No matter where your career as a medical traveler takes you, be ready to befriend people different than you. When you work with multiple different personality types, remember you’re all working towards the same goal, clear communication saves lives, and positivity is contagious. Travel with a company where you know you matter as an individual—travel with Fusion!