City Health Care Partnership – Our EO Story: Leaders supporting employees to feel like owners
City Health Care Partnership (CHCP) CIC provides a wide range of high quality, safe health and care services in Hull, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Knowsley and St Helens.
We are a co-owned ‘for better profit’ organisation, investing profits into our services, colleagues and the communities we work in. Most of our community-based services are aimed at keeping people out of hospital and giving them the treatment and support they need at home. We have been employee owned since the business was formed 12 years ago and we are 100% employee owned.
How leadership has developed in our EO business
As we provide such a wide range of services it is critical for us an organisation to not only have good leaders in post supporting colleagues, but also to be able to recognise and nurture colleagues who have the capabilities to be great leaders in the future.
This is one of the reasons why we created the CHCP People Plan. This ambitious plan outlines how our aims and objectives fit with the innovative and dynamic culture we have created at CHCP.
The plan outlines five workstreams:
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
- Leadership and Organisational Development
- Learning and Development
- Recruitment and Retention
- Health and Wellbeing
The Leadership and Organisational Development workstream has created a coaching-style management model throughout CHCP. This style of leadership allows managers to get the best from their teams whilst supporting and encouraging growth, development and innovation.
The senior leaders who are trained coaches are now able to offer this support to colleagues across the organisation, building resilience and confidence amongst our colleagues. In addition to this, we offer mediation training to all staff and mentoring for those who would benefit from support from senior colleagues.
As well as implementing longer-term methods to support development across the organisation, our senior leaders are also keen to show colleagues how to lead from the front.
For example, during the pandemic our senior clinical leaders worked on the ‘shop floor’ giving Covid-19 vaccinations. Examples like this really highlight how our senior leaders are willing to go above and beyond to ensure our service users remain our top priority. It sits in harmony with the culture we have created here of working collaboratively and ensuring we approach any issues with a ‘can-do’ attitude.
Roadshows increase engagement
A final example of how ‘good’ leadership is embedded at CHCP is our annual roadshows. We hold these in place of an annual general meeting (AGM).
At CHCP we pride ourselves on being responsive and innovative, and this is a great example of how good leadership has led to a change that has benefited the whole staff population.
Our roadshows provide an opportunity for colleagues to hear updates directly from the senior leadership team, as well as being able to have their voice heard, and give their feedback on things relevant to them. At the request of our CEO, we changed the format of our AGM to the roadshow format to try and increase attendance, engagement and representation.
‘Andrew’s Roadshows’ allow our CEO, Andrew Burnell, and some of the Senior Leadership Team to attend several events across our geographical area and talk about the latest developments across the organisation.
We ran these events in a way that ensured all colleagues who attended could participate anonymously using a system called Slido. This allowed colleagues to contribute in whichever way they felt most comfortable, be that by asking a question in person or by using Slido.
We found that innovating in this way enabled us to reach a much more diverse range of colleagues and increase engagement with the event.
What are the impacts on how empowered employees feel?
At CHCP we have embedded a “team of teams” culture across the organisation, which has had a huge impact on our employees, enabling them to offer high quality, compassionate care and feel valued as an employee.
And we can see from last year’s Colleague Survey results that this is the case, with 80% of colleagues saying that they would recommend CHCP to friends and family members as a place to work. In addition to this, 91% would recommend CHCP to friends and family members for care and treatment.
We are extremely proud of our Colleague Survey results and consistently score higher than average across the majority of the questions asked. However, we do not take this for granted and always encourage innovative ways of working and sharing of ideas with colleagues and senior leaders.
By creating and fostering this approach and culture we have been able to implement amazing innovations that improve our service users’ experience.
The increase in attendance at Andrew’s Roadshows illustrates the commitment from our employees to contribute to the organisation in a tangible and effective way. The first roadshows held in 2019 saw over 200 colleagues, clinical and non-clinical, attend over three roadshows. Due to Covid we ran our Roadshows virtually in 2020 and 2021. For the 2020 event we held the roadshow twice over Microsoft Teams and over 160 clinical and non-clinical staff attended. In 2021 we had over 250 clinical and non-clinical colleagues in attendance.
Changing the format in this way has increased colleague engagement and therefore empowered colleagues to contribute to the organisation in a way that works for them.
These sentiments are echoed by our colleagues:
- “Just want to say thank you to all of the presenters today. It was very informative, and I would definitely recommend this event to other colleagues.”
- “Thank you, Andrew, for sharing the FREDIE video. It’s a great reminder to all colleagues to follow and promote the EDI Vision.”
- “Thank you to you all involved today, a really informative session and great to ascertain updates, stay safe and take care.”
Pictured: Chief Executive Andrew Burnell vaccinating at our mass vaccination centre at Hull City Hall