Kindness and DHEC
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Kindness and the Department of Health and Environmental Control
DHEC has several programs and teams in their agency which help serve the community.
Being in the Public Health 3.0 Era, the agency strives to break outside the walls of the health
departments to provide services. With DHEC's vision as "Health people living in healthy
communities'' (
About Us | SCDHEC
, n.d.), they strive to show kindness in all their Core Values.
DHEC encourages their employees to share innovative ideas, promote psychological safety
during meetings and training, and strive to provide the best service they can to their clients and
community partners. People often think kindness is simply treating a person the way you want to
be treated, but there is a deep meaning, a Biblical meaning, which some people do not
understand. Kindness is striving to do actions for others without expecting anything in return,
meaning providing services without wanting to be recognized, taking the time to understand
others, and treating everyone equally no matter how different they may seem. For DHEC, this
means on the employee level as well as on the customer/client level.
DHEC strongly believes in a culture of kindness within the Agency. When employees
start, they go through multiple training sessions on behaving appropriately in the workplace.
Eric, the lead of the Finance Team, has been with the Agency for six years. He supervises four
employees Bob, Charlie, Eli, and Sasha. Sasha, a new addition to the team, is hoping to make a
career within the Agency. Eric has made it a point to let Sasha know that DHEC takes behavior
very seriously, and that team members are expected to work together. In her first 2 months on the
job, Eric presents his team with a huge project. This project is highly dependent on funding and
making sure the Agency does not go over budget. Eric holds a team meeting to discuss the
project and assign tasks to each of his employees.
Background of DHEC