In mid-2020, I was asked to come up with some ideas on how to make our employees feel happier and more appreciated as they struggled to combat pandemic fatigue. I came up with the idea of posting images and captions to the update page of our electronic medical record system (known as EPIC). This started out easy as I had lots of photos of signs that the public had posted on the lawns of our hospitals. I also posted photos of people working on the frontlines fighting COVID-19 as well as anyone else who was contributing donations from the community. But posting slideshows every week will result in you running out of images. And to top it off, the IT department said I could only post one photo per day as the said the slider “might be” slowing down the server.
Running out of content, I fell back on the old adage that photos of pets and babies was always popular. After many years on the job, I’d gathered many photos of therapy dogs, patient pets, pets at heart walks, etc. I posted the caption, “If you would like your pet posted, here, email it to…”. So I posted these and immediately it was a success. People started emailing me photos of their pets. I worked with our Learning and Development Department to set up a Sharepoint submission form where people could submit their name, employee ID number and photos of their pets. Soon we had over 1000 submissions and were growing at a steady rate.
Usually I just post a collage or a single image on EPIC Pets. But occasionally, I have more time and I create more in-depth designs as I’m usually inspired by the funny and touching photos people send to me. Here are some examples.
