One year on: Assessing the impact of workplace well-being initiatives

The article Bringing workplace well-being to life through collective responsibility described the beginnings of a pharmacy department’s journey to embedding well-being into its departmental practices.

Implementation

Good management and leadership practices lead to better performance, including better retention, creating a positive work environment and meeting business objectives. Given the importance of effective management to workplace well-being and productivity, it was decided that training managers and empowering leaders should be the initial focus of the project’s implementation. This took the form of a series of workshops looking at knowledge, skills and behaviours, such as how to have meaningful management conversations.

The Chartered Management Institute reports that 82% of managers who enter management positions have not had any formal management and leadership training – that they are “accidental managers”. To address this, our workshops were complemented by the development of a training checklist, designed to support managers to identify and address any skills or knowledge gaps through their personal development plans and to be shared with aspiring managers for their development.

A role descriptor for department Wellbeing Champions was also being developed using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle and staff feedback. Leaning into the principle of collective responsibility, these champions would be responsible in part for leading on the delivery of the department’s operational well-being plan.

Impact on staff experience and workforce metrics

Workforce

To help staff contextualise their experience of their working conditions, two key performance indicators (KPIs) describing headcount were reported each month.

The vacancy rate, or establishment gap, is the percentage difference between the total funded establishment for each month compared to the total whole time equivalent of staff in post. 

In the 12 months preceding the well-being plan, the establishment gap was 6.2%. While it was hoped the impact of the plan would be to improve recruitment and retention, instead this percentage increased to 11.1% over the following 12 months. This could be attributed to the additional investment received by the department for middle grade posts which have been traditionally challenging for the department to recruit to. 

The reverse was observed for the department’s sickness absence rate, where it met the Scottish Government’s national target for NHS boards of 4% or less, by falling from 6.5% to 4%.

Communication

Stay conversations are one-to-one retention conversations. Guidance issued to the department recommended that line managers should have them with each of their team members at least every six months. However, only six out of a potential 128 (4.7%) stay conversations were recorded during the first 12 months of the well-being plan. This is an area for improvement which will be explored through the regular peer check-ins which have subsequently been scheduled for the department line managers. 

More impressive progress was made against the organisational KPI for completing annual appraisals. Eight months into the plan’s implementation, the 80% target for the KPI had been achieved and maintained. 

Appreciation

According to a white paper by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, camaraderie and teamwork is one of five fundamental human needs which must be met to improve joy in work. For this reason, instances of peer-to-peer recognition, appreciation or gratitude via the employee engagement platform was included as a KPI in the department’s operational well-being plan.

The monthly count of these instances were recorded as declining; however, it is possible that staff were sending praise via one of the other promoted methods (GREAT-ix, Microsoft Teams or awesome postcards), for which data collection was not possible.

Temperature checks

Also hosted on the employee engagement platform were pulse surveys to check staff experience. The surveys were not sent frequently in order to avoid questionnaire fatigue. However, even with a reduced frequency of monitoring, the response rate was noted to have dropped off from 36.5% in April 2024 to 11.3% in April 2025. Due to this infrequency, too few data points were collected to identify shifts, trends or runs in the data.

Conclusion

Recruitment challenges, the roll out of stay conversations and empowering staff to own the change (collective responsibility) are areas identified for continuous improvement. Of note, ongoing and future PDSA cycles will also focus on the four pillars of professional practice and how these lend themselves to the development of leadership at all levels and the continued visioning of meaningful work.

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.