Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 8 March

March 8, 2024

As I mentioned last week, my message today will focus on the results of the national staff survey and the pulse survey and what we will be doing with you, in response to the feedback, to make things better for all of our people.

As you will know, the annual staff survey runs in October every year and is an in depth look at how you feel about working at SWB, and then we have three pulse surveys (in January, April, and July) every year, which are shorter in length, and are designed to act as a ‘check in’ in between the annual survey.

In the annual survey, we had our lowest ever response rate of 29 per cent – this is 9 per cent less than 2022 and 15.5 per cent lower than the national average. You will all know how disappointed I was with this response rate, and a lot of the feedback I had was that you don’t feel the Trust does anything with the results.

I took this on board, and in the promotion of our January quarterly survey, we made our SWB Promise to you, that we would ACT (action changes things) on your feedback and the rest of my message will set out exactly what that means. The January survey had over a 40 per cent response rate, so we went from our worst to our best, within a matter of months – thank you to those you took the time to complete it.

As I have said multiple times in these messages and when I have spoken to you as groups or individuals, we don’t push for a higher response rate because it makes us look better, it’s because the staff survey gives us a great opportunity to better understand the experiences of our people; to hear about how you are all feeling, what works well, and most importantly what needs to improve. A higher response rate gives us more accurate information and therefore a stronger view of where to focus our efforts to make improvements.

So on with the results..

Starting with some positives:

• 70 per cent of colleagues agreed that care of patients and service users is our top priority – which is absolutely where it should be – I know each and every one of us comes to work to provide the very best care to those who need it.
• 55 per cent of colleagues would recommend SWB as a place to work – this has increased five per cent on last year’s results – many of you would have heard me say that this is one of the friendliest organisations I have ever worked in, so I was pleased to see this increase.
• We have increased both our staff engagement (6.6 in 2002 to 6.7 in 2023) and morale scores (5.6 in 2022 to 5.79 in 2023) whilst only slight increases, they are still moving in the right direction.

We have actually seen a small increase in most of our scores, in fact, amongst all of the questions, only 4 per cent have seen a slight decline.

This shows that some of the work we have done, since we introduced our People Plan last year, is working. However, when we compare against the national average, in 55 per cent of the results, we are significantly worse than other similar organisations – which tells me that we have a lot more work to do.

The table shows our scores against the seven people promises. The two areas which we scored lowest (when compared to the average) were ‘we are always learning’ and ‘we are compassionate and inclusive.’

Some of the themes that came through from the ‘free text’ comments were that you find it hard to access training. Within the Trust, we do have a protected training budget that is available for colleagues at all levels. I have asked our HR and comms team to see how they can make the process of accessing this easier and more widely known – but if you are struggling to undertake training, please discuss this with your line manager or our learning and development team, you don’t need to wait for your annual appraisal to have that discussion. We want SWB to be a place where everyone can flourish, and access to learning opportunities to essential to that.

Other areas in which our scores were lower than I would like were in the domains of ‘your managers’ and ‘your team’ meaning that in some (certainly not all) areas of the organisation, people have a poor experience with their managers and feel that their team don’t work well together, this is an area we need to improve, because, as we know, happy, engaged and professionally developed staff deliver better care.

As a direct result of your feedback in the staff survey, we have developed some people engagement objectives for 24/25. These are:

Improve teamwork
We will roll out our compassionate ARC leadership and team effectiveness programme across the organisation.

Improve our wellbeing programme
We will strengthen and enhance our health and wellbeing offer

Implement our EDI delivery priorities
Empower, equip, and enable our staff inclusion networks

Optimise the role and function of the EDI Team within the Trust

Deliver and embed a robust framework for inclusive recruitment

Launch a SWB inclusive Talent Management programme

Trust wide approach to improvement
We will implement the SWB Quality Improvement System, working with colleagues at all levels of the organisation

Support our line managers
All line managers will have a clear PDR objective for strengthening staff engagement, through roll-modelling compassionate, restorative and inclusive leadership behaviours

Establish our People Engagement Teams
Each group will have a People Engagement Team which will be made up of colleagues from a diverse range of roles, backgrounds, and levels. They will be responsible for supporting and championing the actions that are required to improve the experience for staff in their group.

Lead from the top
We will appoint an executive and non-executive inclusion champion for staff engagement and experience

For the first time, our clinical groups will be setting their own local objectives, the start of this will be when we launch our People Engagement Teams in a couple of weeks – if you are interested in being part of this work, please speak to your directorate leads.

Once agreed, these local objectives will be communicated with colleagues across the groups, and we will keep you regularly informed of progress – this is our SWB Promise to you.

Over the next couple of weeks, members of the executive team and I will be holding drop-in sessions and visits to areas to talk more about the results – please do keep an eye open for more details on this.

If you are interested in finding out more, you can read the full results here.

As always, thank you for your hard work, commitment, and dedication to SWB. I hope that the above message highlights that we are an organisation that does listen and does act upon your feedback.

Kind regards,

Richard