Bringing workplace well-being to life through collective responsibility

Embedding a well-being plan at local level

The “Work Well Strategy: Building a healthier and happier culture for our staff” is the corporate well-being strategy published by a health board as part of its strategic commitment to support staff health, wellbeing, and professional development.

To bring this strategy to life for staff and embed well-being at a local level, one of the health board’s pharmacy departments undertook a quality improvement project with the aim of operationalising the strategy into a local delivery plan. A project manager was recruited for 12 months to lead the project.

This workplace well-being project aimed to deliver the following outcome measures:

1. Create a vision for workplace well-being that holds ownership at all levels.
2. Write an operational plan.
3. Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for tracking the impact of the operational plan once implemented.

Creating a vision for workplace wellbeing that holds ownership at all levels

To achieve this outcome three steps were undertaken.

Gap analysis

A gap analysis was completed to map what was already available in the department to the aspirations of the strategy. The findings were then grouped into the themes of environment, culture and communication, with the latter two being taken forward for further investigation with the team.

Focus groups

To further investigate the theme of communication, staff were invited to take part in focus groups. They were presented with a copy of the department’s meeting structure and asked to describe its robustness for providing effective lines of communication. The observations from these conversations provided key insights into how staff liked to access information, and how they liked to be communicated with.

Staff were then asked to describe the touch points for well-being which occurred throughout the meeting structure. A Red / Amber / Green status was used to capture the consensus opinion. This gave a temperature check of staff experience in the existing business-as-usual model.

The third and final part of the focus group was to ask staff to consider a selection of well-being tools and rank them in order of preference. This proved to be a useful exercise as it challenged assumptions held by the project leads.

To ensure the focus groups were inclusive for all staff, line managers were given advanced notice so the time could be booked off in the rota for staff to attend.

“Culture eats strategy”

To investigate departmental culture, staff opinion about joy in work was captured using questions based on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement “What Matters to You?” conversation guide.

These questions were posted on whiteboards created on digital canvases and promoted through the sharing of QR codes. The questions were:

1. What matters to you in daily work?
2. What helps make a good day?
3. What gets in the way of a good day?
4. Rank the current staff culture as either sunny, cloudy or storming.

Writing an operational plan

The information gathered from the ‘You said, we listened’ exercises in Outcome 1 formed the recommendations which were presented in the operational well-being plan. This one-page document was inclusive of three locally developed work well objectives and a list of deliverables.

Developing KPIs for tracking the impact of the operational plan once implemented

Subjective surrogate indicators of the plan’s effectiveness were created from the dimensions of the Fair Work Framework, taking the form of eight pulse surveys which would continually check the temperature in the department following the plan’s implementation.

These were themed around:

• Fair treatment: Our values are at the centre of all we do
• Reward: Do you feel appreciated for the work you do?
• Staff voice: I would feel able to talk openly with my line manager if I was feeling stressed

More objective measures for evaluating the plan’s effect on workplace well-being were designed into five well-being KPIs:

1. Departmental vacancy rate
2. Percentage of sickness absence
3. Number of completed stay conversations
4. Annual appraisal completion rate
5. Instances of peer-to-peer recognition, appreciation or gratitude via the employee engagement platform.

Conclusion

This was a scoping and planning project which acted to give staff a collective responsibility for improving the well-being of the workplace. The plan was shaped by the staff, for the staff, and best described how they wanted to experience workplace well-being day-to-day in the department. This collective responsibility is important to a department which recognises leadership at all levels, but may make it subject to diffusion of responsibility once the plan is implemented.

The next steps will include implementing the plan and evaluating its effects on workforce challenges.

More information on the evidence-base for workplace well-being is available here.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the UKCPA or its members. We encourage readers to follow links and references to primary research papers and guidance.

Competing interest statement:

The author declares: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.