Karen Phillips, Deputy Director of Workforce and OD

Steve McGowan, Director of Workforce & OD

karen.phillips40@nhs.net

Judges’ view

Outstanding, demonstrating that significant financial investment isn’t needed to have great analytics that can make an impact and give robust board assurance. The Team created an innovative and insightful people metrics scorecard for use in accountability reviews,  for celebration as well as challenge, to see evidence-based improvements to patient care and people processes

The introduction of a people metrics scorecard and insight report to have ‘one source of the truth’ helped the Trust and departments celebrate successes, make evidence-based decisions to improve performance and patient safety, and encourage a culture of accountability. The Workforce Scorecard is a simple tool to stimulate debate and action around workforce data, to make it accessible and understandable and to nurture a culture of accountability and of accomplishment. The Workforce Insight displays workforce data while drawing attention to anomalies and areas of challenge or risk. They have reduced  sickness and  vacancies, and improved turnover and  staff survey scores.

Key points:

• Scorecard and Insight combined have helped to drive forward workforce performance
• Made the data easy to read and understand
• Used to celebrate success as well as highlighting problem areas
• Helped with a shift to departments owning their data and performance: scorecard provides foundation of HR conversations, enabled a competitive spirit and ambition to progress.

During the pandemic, Trusts needed to understand the unprecedented numbers of staff absent from work. This innovative programme supported local teams, staff and Trusts across Greater Manchester through detailed insights, analytics and forcasting. The Trust used real time, high quality absence information to plan, manage and forecast the impact of the pandemic on staff levels and availability. To manage rising absence levels, the system was reconfigured to report on all the COVID absence types including Symptomatic, A-Symptomatic, Self-Isolating and Shielding. This provided a rich source of data and multi-layered workforce modelling forecasts to anticipate future staffing issues.

Judges’ view

An impressive entry with passion from all those involved. The group uniquely used absence management data for intelligence and forecasting. Clear that stakeholder engagement and collaboration was strong and keen to share their work with other Trusts.

They faced a challenge triangulating Trust datasets to easily obtain meaningful workforce information, so implemented an advanced HR/workforce analytics programme.Now data is no longer overwhelmingly ‘everywhere’ and the analytics programme has cut through noise to focus attention, resulting in positive impacts for the workforce and patients. Understanding Trust culture helped ensure the correct data sources were used to guarantee success and reduce users’ anxiety around the change  – a focused approach to overcome cultural and technological barriers to collecting and analysing data.

Judges’ view

The panel loved this because showed a holistic approach to data and its usage for leadership. They particularly liked the 5 areas of focus – culture, collaboration, system thinking and delivery, enhanced agility, and optimising information.