Putting wellbeing first: building an engaged and resilient workforce

By Casimir Germain, Leadership and Organisational Development Lead, NHS Wales Executive

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I have the pleasure of speaking at the Health Service Journal (HSJ) Patient Safety Congress in Manchester after our poster won the ‘protecting and supporting the workforce’ category.

Organisations like ours were invited to submit posters on safety and quality improvement initiatives across ten categories as part of a competition. We won three of the poster categories, which you can read more about on our website. To celebrate, I’m invited to talk through our poster at the event.

‘Well-being First: Building an engaged and resilient workforce’, is focused on the work we’ve done to maintain, and in some cases improve, the wellbeing and engagement of our staff during a period of organisational change.

Organisational change can be daunting

I’ve always had an interest in wellbeing, even in my previous role as a teacher; I love interacting with – and being around – people, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to work on wellbeing and engagement within Improvement Cymru. During this time, we were in the middle of transitioning into the NHS Wales Executive. I recognised the need for positive intervention and set myself a personal goal to support as many colleagues as possible.

Organisational change can be daunting, unsettling and overwhelming for some people, and can really impact on the emotional and mental wellbeing of our workforce.

Looking at the wellbeing programme that was offered to employees, I noticed a gap in people-led, face-to-face support. This finding was presented to the leadership team who supported me to run a series of wellbeing sessions. Being an organisation with improvement methodology at its heart, we also wanted to measure and collect data over time to see if our interventions had an impact.

Seeing the joy in work

Using the Institute for Healthcare and Improvement (IHI)’s Safe, Effective and Reliable Care (SREC) model, we focused on the topics of leadership, psychological safety and broader organisational culture. To begin, we put the idea to our Wellbeing & Engagement group who chose the theme ‘effective communication and collaboration are central to everything we do.’ By empowering colleagues at all levels to champion wellbeing initiatives, as well as organise weekly check-ins, this helped us create an environment where staff are valued and supported to contribute at their best.

We followed IHI’s ‘Joy in Work’ framework, where we ran a monthly staff survey asking the same questions on topics including psychological safety, recognition and resilience.

In addition to the staff group and weekly survey, we ran the following:

• Lunch and learn sessions – these were informal online meetings which were designed to connect people. They had breakout rooms, so staff connected with others from different departments. These centred around topics such as mindfulness, journalling, and reflections.
• Coaching sessions – these were run on a one-on-one basis mainly tackling the issues around management of transition and change.
• Mediated team sessions – I facilitated sessions between teams and their managers, so everyone had a chance to speak in an open and safe forum.
• Bespoke ‘Schwartz rounds’ – these were offered to clinical and frontline staff where employees had the space and time to reflect on their emotional and social wellbeing.
• Cuppa catch ups and randomised online catch ups – these were designed for staff to drop in with a cuppa (both virtually and in person) and speak to people they may not work closely with.

I also had the privilege of onboarding staff to the organisation. This gave me the opportunity to hear directly from employees on why they joined and ways we can use their onboarding experiences to strengthen the organisational culture.

The power of psychological safety

So, what did all this work achieve? The results speak for themselves.

Over eight months, we maintained the majority of our ‘joy in work’ survey scores despite the challenges that come with transition. Some areas of the survey – including being treated with trust and respect and feeling supported in work – saw an overall improvement of 22%. There was also a 15% increase in staff being recognised and thanked which empowers staff to carry out their roles, benefiting the whole organisation.

10% of staff (including clinical teams) attended the people-led sessions and really felt the benefits. We received feedback such as:

“As a result of the session last week, I had the confidence to share with my manager that I was feeling uncertain…I feel much better about it now.”

“Thanks for the sessions which have really supported my growth as a leader…just to take time out and learn together.”

Overall, by adopting a holistic person-centred approach to our ways of working, this has proved the power of psychological safety in driving employee engagement and performance.

We’ve continued meeting as a wellbeing and engagement group and we’re still running the monthly ‘Joy in work’ surveys. Now I’ve gone on secondment to the NHS Wales Executive as Leadership and Organisational Development Lead, I will use these findings to help shape the culture of our newly merged organisation.

I cannot thank our brilliant leadership team enough for seeing the value in allowing me to carry out this work and to everyone in Improvement Cymru who engaged with it.

You can read through the poster here or if you’re attending the event, I’ll be speaking in the Exhibition Hall on Monday 16 September at 2pm. You can find the full programme on the HSJ website.