Pursuing enjoyment at work within the ELFT Quality Improvement team

In this blog, Deeksha Mehta, QI Principle Information Analyst and Project Lead, shares her experience with the Enjoying Work project.

Deeksha Mehta

We began thinking about improving our enjoyment at work when we kicked of a whole team project in June 2017. Initially we undertook an appreciative inquiry and began to gather some baseline data about whether or not people were having a good day. At first people were keen to share what was holding them back and we were able to quickly build a driver diagram and develop some change ideas.

However, over time we found that interest in the work from the wider team was mixed and people were less forthcoming about providing feedback and contributing to measuring our enjoyment at work. On reflection this made sense; people had provided feedback but as a project team we had struggled to be responsive to this, get to testing ideas and being transparent.

As part of the wider trust learning set on enjoying work we had an opportunity to learn from the other 6 pilot teams around the trust doing this work. One great idea we learnt about was the Kanban board that Luton IAPT had developed as part of this work.

The team used a board to communicate with staff.

A Kanban board is a visual management tool that lets people know what tests of change are planned in progress and completed. We’ve recently introduced one of these to help develop team engagement more and develop transparency around the work.

An important part of the work we have done recently was developing our anonymous We Care survey. This was an opportunity for the wider team to give some more feedback about things that were still affecting them and provide some ideas about how to change it. In addition to this, it also provided an opportunity to see if our original driver diagram still reflected what was going on within our system.

We would like wrap up my story with a quote “If you focus on results nothing changes , if you focus on change you will see the result”.

If you are part of ELFT and are interested in taking part in an Enjoying Work project please click here to know more.

Learn more about this project on Life QI – Project Code #105547 .

East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT) has been using the Life QI platform since June 2015 to manage our Quality Improvement (QI) portfolio. Projects are proposed, approved and worked on through the platform. Learn more about how important this platform is in this blog by our Data Manager Forid Alom.