An NHS trust becomes an award-winner by getting to grips with employees’ concerns
When Nicole Ferguson joined Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh (WWL) NHS Foundation Trust as staff engagement lead, she could have been forgiven for thinking her job would be straightforward. The organisation was known for having an open relationship with its unions and was one of 10 pioneering trusts leading the NHS Listening into Action programme. With chief executive Andrew Foster – former HR director at the Department of Health – championing the process at board level, it seemed safe to assume everything was rosy.
But the NHS national staff survey in 2011 brought some dispiriting news: 55.3 per cent of employee engagement measures were under par, and just 21 per cent were above average. In response to this “wake-up call”, the HR team needed to deliver “a kick up the backside” to the relationship between the trust and its 4,500 staff.
The answer was to delve more deeply into the engagement scores and to understand where problems had arisen at a local level. The process began with a new Staff Engagement Pathway model: every quarter, employees answer questions about working relationships, recognition, resources, perceived fairness and personal development, with each team using their individual scores to identify specific needs and development tools.
“I wanted to establish a measurable framework of engagement, something that we could track and then act on,” Ferguson says. “The trust was very keen to establish its own brand of staff engagement – the ‘WWL way’ – and had a number of initiatives working on an organisational and team level. My role was to pull everything together and make sure the staff had access to an extensive toolkit of engagement methods.”
But understanding where improvements could be made is pointless if nothing changes – and it’s implementation that has seen the plaudits rolling in for WWL. The trust has created a 26-week ‘Pioneer’ training and support programme for teams to design and introduce new measures. The results can be seen on every ward in the form of display boards which help teams measure their daily activities.
“Every day, staff get together to talk about the immediate issues of the day: how they are doing, what’s gone well and wrong the previous day, and what they need to do to address the issues,” says Jon Lenney, director of HR and organisational development. “If you walk through our x-ray department or any of the theatres, you’ll see the boards, in open view of patients, staff and visitors.”
An initiative designed by ‘Staff Side’ union reps – called Staff Involvement Delivers (SID) – sees Foster and other directors hold Q&A events with employees. “Walkabout” sessions put senior staff back on the frontline. It all adds up to a complete culture shift. Above-average scores reached 59 per cent in the 2012 national staff survey, and 69 per cent in 2013. Sickness absence fell from 4.62 per cent to 4.17 per cent in 2013 and the trust saved around £3 million on temporary staffing. The team’s efforts were recognised with the overall prize at the 2014 Healthcare People Management Association Excellence in HRM awards. And other local trusts are benefiting from the WWL toolkit.
More importantly, Ferguson and Lenney have been able to quantify what they always knew – that better staff engagement correlates to optimal organisational performance, which in turn drives better outcomes for patients. The challenge has been to communicate that to trust employees.
“It’s the NHS; people are challenged for time, they face constant pressures, and their priority is always patient care, so the challenge for them is to invest time and effort into this ‘selfish’ notion of staff engagement,” says Ferguson. The team created an animated video to explain why engagement benefits patients, and developed an accredited leadership training programme for those managers to whom “openness and engagement don’t necessarily come naturally,” Lenney says.
Getting unions on board has also been crucial. “Our original staff engagement model was something we developed in partnership with our unions and they were a real key partner in this. In a way, the organisation had left it to them to make staff engagement activities work, and we weren’t putting enough thought and imagination into it from a management perspective,” says Lenney.
“When we decided to take more of a role in 2011, I think Staff Side were a bit suspicious about our intentions. They thought we were trying to undermine their position in relation to the staff.”
Ferguson agrees: “The things we try and do to engage staff are much more authentic when they have that endorsement from Staff Side. It doesn’t appear to employees that this is just a tick-box exercise – they can see that their reps are buying into it and can see the value.”
It seems the remaining danger for WWL may be for teams to be almost too engaged. “I really am starting to see a highly engaged workforce but as the pressure mounts, and employees are giving everything to their role, I think the risk of burnout is ever more present,” says Ferguson. “We’ve got to be really careful that we are equipping staff to deal with both internal and external pressures, and going forward we’ll look at employees’ well-being and how we can manage and support that alongside the engagement initiatives.”
Glass half full?
The vital statistics of employee engagement programmes
64%
Average engagement score for a UK company
35%
Current proportion of engaged employees in the UK
73%
Engagement score that denotes a ‘high performing’ company
53%
Proportion of UK organisations planning to broaden their engagement programmes this year
Sources: Hay Group, CIPD Spring 2014 Employee Outlook, Right Management