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Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust is a busy acute hospital providing the full range of services normally expected in a district general hospital. It is the only secondary care provider in the local health economy. The Trust directly employs over 3000 staff many of which are local to Walsall. Total income for 2009/10 was just over £166 million. The hospital has recently undergone a £170 million redevelopment project, completed in summer 2010 and providing modern, first class healthcare facilities.

In 2009 the Trust Board and Executive team described their ambition as ensuring that their services to patients should be every bit as modern and efficient as their new building and facilities.

Selecting invigor8 as a working partner, the Trust embarked on a comprehensive employee engagement campaign. After an initial analysis followed by several months of development and testing, the engagement approach was launched in the summer of 2009 under the banner ‘Our Manor: better together’.

Our Manor: better together is a vehicle designed to engage teams everywhere at the Manor, facilitated by line managers, on topics that are critical to the success of the organisation and help them connect with those topics by exploring ‘what do they mean to us?’

A Development Group of managers and staff from different parts of the hospital helped design the engagement framework and tested the materials for the staff engagement sessions. The group refined and tuned the materials and messages to ensure that it reflected the organisation’s culture and resonated with staff.

Between July and September 2009, 16 Leader Workshops were held to equip nearly 150 managers with the materials, knowledge and skills to run the engagement sessions with their teams and produce action plans, known as Team Commitments, with their teams.

The engagement programme has been evaluated through the monitoring of these Team Commitments and a Leaders away day was held in November to review progress and celebrate success. From an organisational perspective, success criteria were established through the tracking of key indicators within the national staff survey.

Achievements

The programme has been designed so that managers have a role in leading the engagement approach. This is expected to happen on a regular basis – it is seen not as an additional activity but a fundamental part of a leader’s role within the organisation. Every session ends with an action plan and a team commitment to being better - the focus is on what the team can do, not what it can’t. Each session also starts with a review of the team commitment from the previous session to ensure that engagement gets translated into action and achievement. All of the sessions have been designed to deliver results at a team level that will contribute to achieving corporate goals.

Right from the start of the implementation of Our Manor: better together, teams began to identify and make improvements that they could influence. Many of these improvements were relatively low-scale in terms of cost but they invariably made a difference to the effectiveness of the organisation, to patients or to the ways teams and departments worked together.

When developing Our Manor: better together, the Trust also identified and tracked a number of key findings within the baseline 2008 staff survey which were considered to represent measurable success criteria for the engagement approach. All of those survey findings have shown improvements reflected in the 2009 survey and illustrated in the following table:

Our Manor: better together compliments other OD initiatives within the Trust. It was recognised that the perceived culture of the organisation would not change without the skills and behaviours of highly effective leaders and managers - they have a real impact on the motivation and general well being felt by staff. As a result of the investment made in their training as engagement leaders and in their practical experience of engaging their teams over the last year, the Trust’s managers have been able to develop additional skills and confidence. Their role in engagement has, therefore, also produced a benefit in management development!

Reflections

The achievements highlighted above demonstrate why the first phase of Our Manor: better together has contributed so significantly to the success of the Trust over the last 18 months.

Phase 2 of the engagement process at the Manor has now begun – the message is: “it’s not the end, it’s the end of the beginning of genuine, sustained engagement at the Manor”.

Sue James, Chief Executive of the Trust, has stated:

We have made significant progress as an organisation over the last year. We can’t say that it’s ALL down to Our Manor: better together because our progress has been achieved on so many different fronts. What we can say, though, is that it has helped us align all of our different priorities and projects in a much more effective way, helping staff see how they all fit together and where they make a difference. One thing we do know is that the challenges we face will continue to stretch our capability in the years to come. That’s why it’s so important to maintain, and even intensify, our focus on Our Manor: better together in the year ahead.

Sarah Smith, Director of Performance, says:

“Right from the start invigor8 offered us valuable insights about what it would take for us to build a stronger sense of engagement in our people. They have helped us develop a much stronger sense of purpose and clarity as a management team. We have already incorporated their recommendations into the way we conduct our business planning process and the way we communicate it to our people”.

The Trust’s Human Resources Director, Sue Wakeman, adds:

“We knew that we needed to improve the way we engaged our people but we could not have produced these achievements so quickly on our own. The way invigor8 has worked with us is a model of good partnership. They have helped us to develop our own engagement approach rather than present us with an off-the-shelf solution. The end result is an approach that is genuinely ‘owned’ by us and is genuinely sustainable over the challenging years ahead”.