Summary of Recent London Healthcare People Management Academy Events
Applying for Awards
The London branch of the HPMA were treated to a chance to hear stories from previous HPMA award winners and judges on Valentines Day morning at an event kindly hosted by Bevan Brittan LLP.
Deborah Tarrant, one time overall winner of the HPMA Awards and now Director of Workforce at the Royal Marsden made an excellent case for entering the Awards in challenging financial times. At the time, working for a DGH in a poor financial health, with staff struggling with low morale, Deborah’s team demonstrated HR’s contribution to business priorities.
Whilst changing to a Business Partner model, moving HR to the front line and bringing together all transactional work, they brought down absence rates by 20% and improved the appraisal rate from 40% to 80%.
Why did they win?
- Deborah thought one of the reasons for winning was that the Judges recognised what a political, controversial challenge HR faced
- They entered several categories!
- Made a good quality application with clear research evidence, data and anecdotal evidence
- Demonstrated a clear change in the culture
- Demonstrated passion and belief in what they were doing
Deborah’s Top Tips
- Have to want to do it, you can’t be half hearted about it, have to believe you can do it
- Needs leadership and teamwork, some coaxing
- Tell it as it is, don’t underplay data and anecdotes
Sally Storey, now HR Director at Sussex Community NHS Trust, is both a previous winner and a judge of the HPMA Awards. She told great stories of projects that built the esteem of staff across the Trust, especially portering and reception staff as well as a separate award for a leadership programme. She thought her team won because they linked their work to the business need.
As a judge, she is pulled in by how a story is told and mentioned a Trust that became a welcoming employer for LGBT people. They told a compelling story and made the link between their work in HR, public health findings and the contribution to the business.
Sally talked about the need for data and evidence. At Queen Elizabeth, they tracked the outcomes of the project over three years. Use focus groups, 360 feedback, whatever works for your project. Plan ahead for entering an award in a years time.
Jackie Connor, Director of BMJ and an HPMA Awards Judge has seen hundreds of award applications and notices several different styles:
- Bashful approach – where the application is too shy, it doesn’t tell you what the problem is or the scale of it or what has been achieved. You need to boast and grab the readers’ attention in the first paragraph.
- Narcoleptic (sending the reader to sleep) approach - the cut and paste application. The points are obscured by the wriing. These applications need to learn to tell the story of why you invested so much effort in your project. Not all judges are from the NHS so you need to avoid acronyms and need to explain national initiative etc. Alos need to use the active voice ‘we achieved …’ as it is much more convincing than the passive voice. And avoid clichés to make the paper come alive.
- Fluffy bunny approach – this is an attractive, inspiring and enjoyable application but it is vague and lacks data, evidence, costs, is it recurring funding etc Need to tell the whole story.
- Safety in numbers approach – so zeitgeist, that everyone is doing it so this application is up against huge competition. You need something unique.
On the positive side, winning applications:
- are not always big projects or from big teams
- they are always someone’s cherished baby
- are sometimes a speedy fix, tiny projects that identified and fixed a problem
- can be transferred learning i.e., someone else spent the money and time and we transformed it to our situation don’t have to
Thank you to all the speakers for an inspiring, uplifting morning.
HR and the Bottom Line
George Blair and Sandy Meadows ran a session for the HPMA/Academy on Wednesday 12 January, very kindly hosted by Beachcroft LLP.
Are you confident that your Trust can achieve the largest ever productivity increases that are expected of it? Have you found that QIPP has only gone so far, but not far enough? If so, this programme is for you. It shows the great opportunities to improve productivity through zero based planning and reviewing individual consultant productivity.
- How productive are your surgeons? We found that one surgeon brought in £ 3/4 million less a year than his colleagues and had another 10 years in post.
- How efficient is your A&E? We have found A&Es that were over-staffed at 3 a.m., yet at 4 p.m. staff were run off their feet.
- How good are the continuity of care and the cost effectiveness of Mental Health community teams? We found many overlapping teams negatively affecting the continuity of care and pushing up costs.
- How much time is spent travelling, rather than on patient care, if staff were multi-skilled and route planning was used in community teams?
Most of these issues fall between cracks between different functions and there is insufficient information linking staff to activity. The traditional approach of simply cutting budgets in the hope of making savings, just will not work due to the step change required.
HR could have a crucial role to play as productivity improvement is all about getting the most from people. We will give you the tools and techniques to step up to the challenge.
Role of HR in Leading Change
On London’s first snowy morning this winter, HPMA members battled in to Bevan Brittan’s offices in the City to participate in a workshop on the ‘Role of HR in Leading Change’ led by Simon Constance and Lindsay Hanson of Orion Partners. As participants commented, it was ‘very relevant’, ‘thought provoking with great models to apply’ not to mention, ‘fun, enjoyable and energising’.
All participants were leaders and participants in major change processes in their organisations. They described change programmes that differed from those they had experienced in the past in terms of the pace and scale of change and that it effected all levels of their organisation, including those at the very top of the organisation. Current change is also not confined to particular organisations but is shifting the boundaries between organisations. Some participants characterised the current change processes as involving a lack of clarity and a high level of personal uncertainty.
The purpose of the workshop was to give participants tools they could take back to use in their organisation.
The first tool was a model of the ‘architecture of change’ looking in particular at:
- Relevance: what is the business case, why are we doing this?
- Readiness: how ready is our culture for this change? If we’re not ready, what do we need to do?
- Robustness: do we have the right processes in place?
- Responsiveness: how ready are we emotionally? How can you support people through this process, including through the ambiguity?
Moving through a quadrant of this model on the floor, participants physically stood in the quadrant where they felt they put most of their energy and then the quadrant they felt needed more attention. Many HR people in the group found their energy is usually in the ‘Robustness’ quadrant of processes but on reflection they needed to put more work into the Readiness quadrant.
Orion pointed out that leaders are often immersed in the Relevance quadrant and don’t understand why others don’t get it and therefore need to be supported to spend more time communicating the Relevance and attending to the Readiness. This will in time have consequences on the Responsiveness quadrant (hope you are following this….)
Participants were also introduced to recent research from neuroscience on change. We looked at the SCARF model which originated from David Rock from Coaching for Results. This points to why individuals find change difficult from a neuroscience perspective and how we can support people through change.
Individual circumstance, actions, events etc impact on the following factors and lead to us feeling ‘threatened’ or ‘rewarded’:
- Status
- Certainty
- Autonomy
- Relational
- Fairness
We are motivated by wanting to maximise reward and minimise threats. For example, the more our status is positively affected, the more clarity and certainty we have, the more autonomy, the more we feel related to other people in the situation, the more fairness we feel, then the more likely we are to experience ‘reward’.
On the other hand, if our status is threatened, if we are facing high uncertainty, have low levels of autonomy, are not feeling connected to others involved in the process and perceive unfairness, then we are more likely to experience ‘threat’.
In leading change, we need to find ways of triggering a reward response in each aspect of SCARF e.g. clear timetables of events, ensure people understand the rationale and see it is ‘fair’.
Participants were given a pack of Change Cards relating to the stages/areas of Relevance, Readiness, Robustness and Responsiveness which will allow them to use in their organisations when planning change process and ensure that all angles are being covered.
Thank you very much to Simon and Lindsay. If you are interested in following up with Orion Partners, please contact SimonConstance@orion-partners.com
Personal Resilience During Change
Drawing many parallels from the world of sport and using the examples of our sporting heroes, Dr Liz Campbell from Lane4 (www.lane4performance.com) delivered a packed workshop to the London branch on 17th September. She provided useful tools for participants to take back to the workplace to support them in delivering organisational change and creating both organisational resilience and personal resilience.
Organisational Change
Liz looked at the question of what makes what makes organisational change effective and what makes it a failure. An important question as up to 85% of organisational change initiatives don’t succeed.
Organisations who go through successful organisational change:
- Have clarity of vision so messages clear and consistent
- Help people make sense of it through ‘story telling’
- See people as human beings
- Have leaders who are prepared to have difficult conversations
Communication is not about what is communicated but about how people make sense of it. Leaders need to spend time with people as they make sense of the messages. Message from the top can be clear but underneath, how it is heard is messy.
‘People don’t resist change – they resist changes to the continuity of their narrative’ (Piers Ibbotson)
Liz took us through a model of organisational change - are all 3 elements all in your organisational change plan?
- Co-creating and communication the story
- Shaping the process
- Inspiring and empowering people
Organisational Resilience
Organisational resilience is about developing an organisation that’s agile, flexible, accepts change and responds positively. We need balance e.g. between what needs to be delivered now and in the future.
Liz presented Lane4’s ‘Organisational Resilience Framework’ which people used to assess the balance and organisational resilience of their organisations. This stimulated a lot of discussion about where energy is currently focused in their organisations and where they thought energy should be directed to. For many people, the focus is on ‘operational resilience’ and ‘performance resilience’ and they were interested in moving it more in the direction of ‘strategic resilience’ (e.g. innovation, anticipating environmental change etc) and ‘collective resilience’.(e.g. developing mentally tough individuals, organisational learning etc), People were encouraged to use this Performance Framework with individuals and teams.
In business the higher your position, the less support you get, fewer people who you can confide in and fewer who understand your situation. In sport it is the other way around: the more successful you become, the greater support and help you have to achieve more. E.g. Andy Murray has 4 coaches for different aspects of his game eg fitness, technical etc.
Personal Resilience
The key components of mental toughness are:
- Self belief i.e. unshakeable belief in your ability to achieve goals, this is the top characteristic
- Focus
- Handling pressure, need stress/pressure to perform but do not want it to lean into distress
- Motivation
To support this, we were all encouraged to complete our own ‘Belief Wall’ where we write up the things we are proud of in our lifes, that give us ‘self belief’.
Thank you to Liz and the team at Lane4. To discuss Lane4’s work, contact Fran.Nash@lane4.co.uk
HR and the Bottom Line
Launch of London Healthcare People Management Academy
The London branch of the HPMA, working with NHS London, launched the London Healthcare People Management Academy at the London HR Directors’ event on 16thJune 2010. The Academy aims to:
- develop people management capacity and capability
- develop new and emerging HR leaders in order to deliver the future NHS workforce in London.
It will initially incorporate a range of activities including workshops and seminars, mentoring, experience exchanges, talent management and action learning.
Activities are primarily aimed at Assistant and Deputy Directors in HR, Organisation Development and Workforce as well as senior managers and advisers at band 7 and above.
In London, as in other parts of the country, trusts have struggled to appoint to HR director and sub director posts. At the same time, a challenging agenda needs to be delivered by HR leaders. They need to ensure their organisations have the right people in place at the right time, develop a people mission or vision for their organisations and to ensure services are transformed to meet patient needs using the full potential of all staff.
A recent survey of 409 HPMA members revealed that 70% of respondents felt their potential was not or only to some degree being maximised and 81% said they would or might consider looking for career opportunities outside the NHS.
Activities provided by the Academy will build on the experience of NHS London’s Leading for Health programmes and use the facilities provided by the new HPMA website.
At the launch, HR Directors heard from the Stephan Bevan (Managing Director of the Work Foundation), Lee Sears (Joint Lead CIPD Next Generation programme), Matthew Pettigrew (McKinsey and Co), and Jan Hills (Partner in Orion Consulting) on their latest thinking and research on the future of HR.
‘The majority of HR functions are sitting on 60/70% unrealised insight… partly because they are too busy delivering today’s activity.’ Lee Sears, CIPD. He also said the best HR leaders ‘deliver today, build tomorrow’ and advised us to ‘focus on the 4/5 big questions that are worrying us’.
Matthew Pettigrew from McKinsey’s encouraged HR to cost all of it’s outputs and ‘focus on what makes real difference’. Jan Hills from Orion said the most successful HR leaders see themselves as business people first with a very clear sense of purpose. They combine quantitative measures with intuition or insight.
Stephan Bevan from the Work Foundation said HR was in a great position to spot patterns in the organisation, to be the critical friend or the ‘provocateur’.
HR Directors and Assistant Directors discussed what this means for themselves, their functions, developing future talent and the support/activities needed to deliver the future HR agenda. They said the Academy needs to build the presence, credibility and confidence of future HR leaders, allowing them to inspire and tell a compelling narrative about organisation change. Specifically there were calls for more secondments across organisations and exposure to the masterclasses and best practice that HR Directors often have had access to.
Access to Academy activities will be through HPMA membership. Organisations signed up to the Academy and to HPMA membership and offered themselves as mentors.
To find out more about the Academy contact:
Diana Cliff Diana.cliff@nwlcp.nhs.uk or Tel. 020 7009 4057
Career Planning in the NHS
The London branch of the HPMA (19th May 2010) were challenged by Michael Moran, Chief Executive of Fairplace, to increase the productivity of 80%[1] of their workforce by 30% by introducing career conversations across their organisations. On a more personal level, participants were challenged to draw up their career plan after the workshop, email it to Michael and receive a 30 minute telephone career consultation.
Career management helps people make career transitions and move into roles in which they will do best and most benefit their organisations. ‘Management should discuss with staff what they want, their aspirations, where they want to be in 3, 5 or 10 years time’ (Fairplace).
Career planning leads to increased engagement resulting in higher levels of patient care and organisational performance. Specifically career conversations can:
- increase motivation by setting stretching goals and targets
- set a positive example to ‘be the change you want to see in the organisation’
- encourage innovation and risk, using mistakes as an opportunity to learn
- support and challenge when performance is slipping, holding people to account
Few NHS organisations help managers to have career conversations with staff perhaps because of lack of trust, it is not seen to be in their best interests (if staff look for other roles as a result) or it’s regarded as too difficult.
Michael and Julie Blunt asked participants to join in a piece of ‘forum theatre’ where they role played an effective career conversation between an employee and her line manager. Participants joined in, feeding questions to the line manager. The employee was enabled to identify and describe her ideal next move, identity what further experience she required to meet any gaps and identify how should could gain this experience through developing her current remit, exceeding her current objectives.
Participants looked at leadership skills required by HR leaders, assessed how well their NHS organisations were doing, how they collect evidence for this and what needs to improve. Participants identified the key leadership skills and attributes required in the current climate to be:
- leading, initiating change, developing strategy, developing and managing relationships, motivating, innovating and business acumen.
Participants were encouraged to write up their career plan using the following format:
- visualise your future job in 3 or 5 years time
- write down the qualifications, skills and experiences of the best candidate for that job
- establish an action plan to fill the gap
We were reminded that plans are most likely to be implemented if they are written down!
Many thanks to Micahel Moran and Julie Blunt of Fairplace for an inspiring and practical afternoon. Fairplace delivers bespoke career transition solutions that unlock the power of an organisation’s people, helping them achieve their full potential and your organisation achieve its goals and aspirations. www.fairplace.com
[1] Attention in organisations is already targeted to the top 10% who it is assumed will be more productive and the bottom 10% who may be less productive, so we are encouraged to concentrate on getting 30% more from the remaining 80%
January London HPMA branch event with The Garnett Foundation:
40% of attendees stated their Trust did not currently deliver training around dignity and respect, and 90% thought the training could benefit their organisations!
Date:
Thu, 14/01/2010 (All day)
Groups: