Creating the Right Conditions for Good Health and Wellbeing
There is a wide range of evidence that creating the right conditions in an organisation for good health and wellbeing is as important as supporting staff to achieve and maintain them.
Various publications describe the key factors for an effective and healthy working environment with good working relationships and staff engagement, including:
- Impoving Joy in Work Framework: Institute for Healthcare Improvement
- NHS Staff and Learners’ Mental Wellbeing Commission Report: NHS Health Education England
- Caring for Doctors, Caring for Patients: General medical Council
- Moving the Employee Wellbeing Agenda Forward: Chartered Institute for Professional Development
Our People Strategy describes the key priorites for supporting and developing our workforce which align to the key factors for creating and maintaining an effective and healthy working environment. This includes:
- Values Based Leadership
- Personal Development
- Promoting Diversity
- 'Fair Work' Practices
Values Based Leadership
Leadership with the right values, behaviours and skills are key to creating a culture that supports good health and wellbeing.
We will continue to deliver and develop our leadership framework by:
- Integrating the Health and Social Care Leadership Capabilities and behaviours into the framework to support our values.
- Embedding a coaching approach that supports all staff to have coaching conversations, as well as providing formal individual and team coaching.
- Developing mentoring support and skills across the organisation.
- Supporting targeted development work with key leadership groups.
- Developing an understanding of how our leadership behaviours are demonstrated.
- Identifying the pathways available to support leadership development.
Personal Development
Supporting individuals through effective appraisal and personal development planning
enables overall development of the workforce and a positive learning environment.
We will:
- Support effective appraisal and personal development planning.
- Provide a range of high quality training and education that matches workforce development needs.
- Support a culture of lifelong learning and career development.
Promoting Diversity
We will continue our equalities outcomes work to attract people from a diverse range of backgrounds to work for us and to maintain a culture which encourages and nurtures diversity and inclusion.
This will include:
- Developing inclusive leadership to actively promote and support diversity and inclusion.
- Embedding diversity and inclusion best practice in our approach to recruitment.
- Providing education, learning and development to support staff to
- understand and value diversity.
- Strengthen our diversity and inclusion staff networks.
Fair Work
The Scottish Government’s Fair Work Convention promotes work that offers effective voice, opportunity, security, fulfilment and respect and leads to benefits for organisations and individuals, including increased productivity and staff health and wellbeing.
Effective Voice
Effective Voice requires a safe environment where dialogue and challenge are dealt with constructively and where employee views are sought out, listened to, and can make a difference.
It is about having both the mechanisms to ensure effective voice and the organisational culture
that values and embeds this voice in its approach.
We will:
- Develop mechanisms to regularly gather and reflect on staff experience feedback, including supporting teams to develop safe environments to enable constructive dialogue and challenge.
- Build upon current mechanisms including Caring Conversations, Human Factors and the Caring Behaviours Assurance System.
It is about developing and maintaining a culture that reflects the attitudes, behaviours, policies and practices that promote and value fair opportunity for all.
This links to our priorities for promoting diversity outlined above.
Security
Security of employment, work, and income are important foundations of a successful life.
It is where staff feel they have a secure job which has predictable working patterns and income that contributes to a stable and sustainble work and home life.
We will:
- Ensure workforce planning focuses on sustainable employment, minimising the use of bank agency and fixed term employment as far possible.
Fulfilment
Fulfilling work can be an important source of job satisfaction and the basis for employee commitment.
Fulfilling work is also associated with better health and wellbeing.
Fulfilment can be supported in a variety of ways: through forms of job design and work organisation that focus on effective skills use, autonomy, opportunities to problem solve and to make a difference, investment in training and development and cross learning.
We will:
- Support teams to identify opportunities to improve their working environment and experience using a range of information including staff experience and care experience, and make changes that will contribute to better staff experience and engagement.
- Support continuous improvement and service development through our quality strategy to create and maintain good working environments and processes that staff enjoy working in.
- Ensure workload is managed effectively through effective workforce planning and job design.
- Support adoption of flexible working practices and promote use of flexible working policies through ongoing workforce planning service design.
- Develop and deliver our workplace for the future programme which will support agile working practices including working from home where appropriate and feasible.
Respect
Fair work includes a culture where people are respected and treated respectfully, whatever their role and status.
It goes beyond the concept of dignity at work and managing poor behaviours to actively promoting respect within the values of an organisation.
We will:
- Refresh our approach to values and diversity through inclusive leadership and supporting improved staff engagement and dialogue on how to ‘live our values’ (see effective voice).
- Provide organisational development support to teams to develop effective team dynamics which support our values.
- Support staff to ‘speak up’ and identify areas where we need to improve our approach nto values.
