A Trust’s commitment to improving Staff Engagement and Staff Survey scores – Wirral Community Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust
Wirral Community Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust provides community health care services in Wirral and the wider North West of England.
The Foundation Trust employs over 1,900 staff members and operates from over 60 sites across its geographies including Wirral, including St Catherine’s Health Centre and Victoria Central Health Centre. It delivers integrated 0-19 services in Cheshire East, St Helens and Knowsley.
The Trust‘s Vision for Staff Engagement
Wirral Community Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust wanted to improve their staff experience, in particular the overall Staff Engagement Score and the number of people who would recommend the organisation as a place to work in the National Staff Survey, recognising the well-researched links between overall Staff Engagement and better patient experience and outcomes.
Bringing the Vision to Life
The organisation created a bespoke Staff Engagement plan, separate from but linked to their overall People strategy, with 29 specific actions, including actions for Board level leaders, all based on good practice and feedback from staff.
Their actions covered a range of activities, and they recognised the importance of engaging and developing leaders. The Foundation Trust created a Leadership Forum, which was open to anyone who had line management in their remit, up to Band 7. The first one was held in July 2023 with a commitment to having these twice yearly as a full development day focussing on these front-line managers’ development and understanding as leaders.
This included topics like CQC preparedness and staff engagement, as well as exploration around how to be a compassionate leader (referencing the work of Michael West and the King’s Fund) and the importance of kindness (referencing Dr Chris Turner’s work on Civility Saves Lives).
They also created a separate Senior Leadership Forum for those at Band 8A and above, recognising the different influence this group have and their involvement in more strategic issues and in leading change.
The leaders of the Board, Executives as well as Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) committed to being more visible and undertook several visits and walk-arounds over the year, talking to staff about what could make their working lives better. Where issues were raised, they committed to addressing these as soon as possible. Some issues were straightforward and swiftly resolved, other issues would be brought back to relevant groups.
They worked with their communication team to make sure that changes and new initiatives that had been suggested by staff were communicated back through a “You Said, Together We Did” approach. For the launch of the 2023 Staff Survey they created a ‘road map’ poster which promoted various changes that had happened as a result of staff feedback in the year prior to the launch. This included themes such as access to financial wellbeing resources, menopause support, 121 coaching, reasonable adjustments, Executive sponsors for all staff networks and improving the appraisal process including training managers in using a coaching approach.
The Impact of Innovation
Wirral Community Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust saw significant improvement across all but one of the People Promise themes in the Staff Survey 2023 when compared to 2022 (and 2021). They saw significant improvement with their overall Staff Engagement score, from 6.96 to 7.18, and the proportion of respondents who would recommend the organisation as a place to work increased from 56% to 63.9%. They scored the highest in their sector type in the Staff Survey for “quality of appraisals“ and “My immediate manager values my work”.
The Trust also saw an overall improvement in their Staff Survey response rate which improved from 47% in 2022 to 60% in 2023. Additionally, the organisation had a Care Quality Commission inspection from July to September 2023 and were awarded a Good Rating overall with areas of Outstanding, which was a significant improvement from their previous rating.
Key Learnings
You can’t do everything, so decide what will make the biggest impact
What are your people saying is needed the most? Look at your Staff Survey data and triangulate with other sources of information, both qualitative and quantitative.
Focus on overall Staff Engagement as part of your key people performance indicators
As research suggests that is integral to overall performance and patient care
Get active commitment and engagement from all levels of the organisation
This needs commitment from the Board through to frontline. Senior leaders need to commit to role modelling and being visible.
Keeping the Vision Alive
Most actions from the Staff Engagement plan are now embedded in the Trust’s business as usual. A few actions are still ‘work in progress’ and are now part of their People Strategy delivery plan for 2024/2025. They have ambitions to improve their key people performance indicators even further, including their Staff Engagement score.
One of the actions carried forward is in addition to the Executive walk-arounds where they will establish an offer of “themed conversations” where a couple of Executives will engage and seek feedback from staff on certain topics.
Contact Information
For more information about this case study contact:
Emma Ashley
Head of HR – Lead for Engagement and Wellbeing