Kings Fund, 19 February 2015
- The paper suggests there are six building blocks for ensuring a highly engaged workforce.
- Develop a compelling, shared strategic direction – inspire your staff with a persuasive narrative about what your organisation is seeking to achieve and how staff can contribute.
- Build collective and distributed leadership – move away from top-down leadership and share authority, responsibility and accountability with staff.
- Adopt supportive and inclusive leadership styles – encourage leaders throughout your organisation to develop a broader range of styles, with less reliance on directive leadership and a greater focus on consensus-building, coaching and supporting staff.
- Give staff the tools to lead service transformation – give staff the training and support to improve their services for themselves, creating learning organisations, rather than parachuting in external experts.
- Establish a culture based on integrity and trust – develop a clear sense of your organisation’s values and live by them, including maintaining the highest standards of integrity and fairness, even when things go wrong.
- Place staff engagement firmly on the board agenda – start making time for regular board discussions of how to improve levels of engagement, using the NHS Staff Survey as a source of insight into what is going well and what needs to improve.
