The budget-conscious employer created its own ‘dating service’ to boost mentoring and career progression
The health sector has faced its fair share of political and funding turmoil in recent years, and even an organisation of Guy’s and St Thomas’s stature has felt the pressure, admits Ann Macintyre, director of workforce at the NHS Foundation Trust. But with 13,650 staff spread across 36 central London sites, and an annual turnover of £1.3 billion, Guy’s and St Thomas’ has a reputation to uphold, as well as stringent quality and efficiency targets to meet.
While the HR team may recognise that the answer to providing world-class care lies in empowering and upskilling the talent to deliver it, convincing a workforce that is not known for its inward-looking tendencies is easier said than done.
“NHS staff find it hard to look after themselves because their main role is to help others,” says Hannah Reed, coaching and mentoring project manager at the Trust. “But the fact that many employees were already accessing coaches and mentors outside the organisation before I arrived shows they are eager to develop.”
Reed was recruited in 2013 with the brief to implement an organisation-wide professional development strategy, and launch a coaching and mentoring (C&M) programme across the Trust.
“We were missing an opportunity around developing our own teams and having peer networks as part of ongoing progression,” Macintyre says. “The C&M programme blends nicely with our wider education and training strategy, especially when it comes to leadership development.”
With limited budget to recruit external coaching specialists, the C&M scheme relies completely on staff volunteers inside the organisation. All employees are invited to register their interest in becoming either a coach or mentor, or providing careers advice, via a website specifically designed for the programme. “When you register, you can select where you work, the hours you work, what kind of help you are looking for and what role you would like your coach or mentor to have. I then try to find someone who can meet those needs,” Reed says.
Since its launch, around 130 staff have signed up to become a mentor, and 105 have chosen to provide coaching support. By October 2015, 350 individuals had committed to meet with their ‘match’ for one hour every month, for six months, which Reed says is an epic achievement for such a busy workforce, which last year had more than two million patient contacts.
The process of connecting a candidate to a coach or mentor is not quite as simple as ‘swipe right for yes, left for no’, but sifting through the pool of volunteers is something that Reed not only does personally, but also enjoys. “It’s really fun to do these little social experiments and guess who would work well with who, a bit like a dating website,” she says.
An initial face-to-face meeting helps to determine whether the ‘match’ is compatible, and Reed isn’t averse to changing the pairings if either coach or mentee isn’t feeling comfortable. “This is a one-on-one service, and if you don’t feel like you can be open and honest with your match, it won’t work.”
Reed promises to match volunteers “again and again until we get it right”. Her record so far is re-matching a junior doctor four times – a rate she’s hoping not to beat as more and more volunteers from different areas of the organisation sign up to the scheme.
“People join the programme because they are thinking about their next step,” she says. “Being part of this network helps them to navigate and succeed in the organisation a bit quicker than they would have done otherwise.”
After requests from the volunteers for greater recognition and to give the programme more rigour, Reed and her team developed an accreditation system based on the skills and experience achieved by working as a coach or mentor. The volunteers work towards five levels of qualification, and gain CPD and accredited coaching hours along the way.
“It would be easy for me to say the programme is one of the reasons that we rate third in the country in terms of staff satisfaction [according to the latest NHS staff survey], but it is almost impossible to determine the direct correlation,” says Macintyre. “I’d like to think this is just part of an offering that makes people here feel supported and able to develop.”
Coaching and mentoring skills are at the heart of many of the existing courses on offer at the Trust, Reed says, and it is often this branch of training that piques the interest of staff. Even so, it has been necessary to educate them first on what coaching and mentoring actually involve.
When it comes to deciding who is best suited for which role, Guy’s and St Thomas’ has its own definition: “A coach believes that the person they are supporting has all the knowledge and experience in them, and it is just a case of using techniques to bring it out,” says Reed. “A mentor is usually someone more experienced in their field of work, and can offer help and support depending on that field.”
Two years in, Reed has adapted the scheme to address some of the challenges mentors and coaches were facing, including finding time to meet with their match, and a lack of resources to make the most of the time allocated. The programme is now ‘protected’ under the study leave policy, and each coach or mentor’s commitment to the programme is measured in their annual appraisal.
“One of the biggest challenges has been demonstrating the benefits in terms of hard facts and numbers,” says Reed. In May 2014, she invited London South Bank University to conduct an official evaluation of the programme. It recognised that the career development opportunities could have a direct impact on increasing staff retention and morale. “I have learned to be specific and upfront about what we are offering staff,” says Reed. “Yes, you are doing us and your colleagues a favour by volunteering, but look at what you can get in return.”
As well as regular CPD supervision events and an organisation-wide weekly newsletter to recognise the volunteers, and attract new candidates to the programme, Reed updates her email signature every quarter with the volunteers’ satisfaction rates. “After six months, staff complete an exit survey on the programme, and the latest figures suggest that 95 per cent of employees who accessed a trust coach or mentor would recommend it to others, which I am immensely proud of,” says Reed. “We just have to work on the remaining 5 per cent.”
Mentoring in numbers
- Three-quarters of organisations currently offer coaching or mentoring
- 32 per cent of organisations rely on line managers to deliver coaching
- In 2011, 20 per cent of organisations were turning to external coaches to deliver programmes
Source: CIPD Learning and Development survey, 2015