Enjoying Work: Learn from C&H and Business Development Unit teams

 19th September 2018

Find out why the City and Hackney Rehabilitation team and the Business Development team have made the decision to focus on improving enjoyment at work and what their experiences have been so far.

 

Business Development Unit

Hear from Lilu Wheeler, Business Development Projects Officer and Enjoying Work Project Lead:

Other change ideas being tested

Also as part of the QI project, the team are doing something they call ‘Networking with BDU’. One of the change ideas was how to make work meaningful and improve psychological well-being. “In order to have good working relationships with others and build recognition, we need to be more ‘out there’”, Lulu says. “Each month we will pop dept names in a hat, starting with Corporate services and invite teams to join us for a social. No requests for work, no talking business, just get to know each other. We have already invited Finance and we are doing a Doodle poll to select best dates for lunch”.

 

City and Hackney Rehabilitation and Recovery Service

What inspired you to join the Enjoying Work Learning Set? What does this work mean to you and what will it help the team improve?

The team came together at our Away Day in April 2018 and we talked about the opportunity of possibly getting involved in the project. Staff readily identified many positive aspects of working in the Rehab team, however we are always seeking to improve. We acknowledge that the work we do with service-users can be both rewarding and yet frequently challenging. The team has taken on many new roles and is required to tolerate changes and to constantly adapt. We know this can be also quite difficult at times and wanted to ensure we were giving enough thought to the well-being of staff and the health of the team.

Who is taking part of the project and how are you involving the broader team as part of the changes?

In the core quality improvement project group we have a number of different staff members, including Social Workers, Occupational therapists(OT), Doctors, support worker, senior practitioner. A support worker and OT are leading on the project. We have so far had two team lunches, where we have worked as a group to develop our driver diagram and also identify change ideas of things we could do differently

      

What change ideas have you tested?

We had a team session recently where many ideas were generated. Many of these were around staff wellbeing, such as from having a yoga class here at Primrose Square, or having plants in the office to create a healthier environment and a picnic table for the garden so that staff can have an outdoor space for lunch breaks. Other ideas were around organisational issues, such as changing times of meetings, who should be attending and looking at how we use our OT resources in the community. Others were more around generating a positive social environment, possibly introducing a team bake-off, or having more social gatherings after work.

Have you found anything challenging and how are you working together to overcome them?

To see if the changes we are making are making things better, we are using Improvewell (a phone app) to ask whether or not people have had a good day. Response rates on ImproveWell are reasonable but could be better. Finding time to get together as a core group is also at times challenging, due to different schedules. Keeping the momentum going, and motivation is also a challenge, however the team lunches do seem to be helpful in having time for all to put our heads together and work on improvement. Understanding how to input data has been a bit of a challenge too, however the QI team have been very supportive.

In the long term, how do you see this evolve? Where do you want to be as a team?

We would like to use the project as a means to think creatively about some of the difficulties we face and how to find ways around them. We are all so busy day-to-day, we hope the project will give us the headspace and the structure to reflect on how we are individually and as a team, and how we can prioritise our health and well-being, so that we can continue to work effectively with service users.

The Enjoying Work team is formed by Rosalind King and Patricia Simoes (project leads), Hester Morgan, Irene Kulubya and Elaine Athanas.