Empower staff to improve staff engagement – NHS Employers

An article on how the George Eliot trust greatly improved its staff engagement scores by letting staff create the vision and values of the organisation.

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An NHS leadership team for the future – REFORM

This paper sets out ambitions for a systemic approach to clinical leadership development to ensure a highly skilled leadership team is in position and ready to help the NHS meet the healthcare demands of the future.

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Change Management Meets Social Media – Harvard Business Review

While change is often in the best long-term interest of a company, it can wreak havoc on an organization’s people in the near term. Periods of change on a grand scale can especially erode employee engagement, loyalty, and trust.  This articles discusses companies have an opportunity to leverage social media as a change management tool.

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How Upworthy Gets Its Staff to Bond – Harvard Business Review

What keeps most corporate leaders up at night? Not disruption. Not speed to market. Not customer data. The number one issue on their minds is employee engagement and culture, according to a global survey of 3,300 business and HR leaders by Deloitte Consulting.

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Improving outcomes while reducing costs – The King’s Fund

Chris Ham speaks to Dr Mark Smith, Founder and Former President and CEO of California HealthCare Foundation, about improving outcomes for patients while reducing costs.

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The essentials of innovation – McKinsey Insights & Publications

Why are some big companies simply better innovators? The leaders of McKinsey’s Innovation practice, Erik Roth and Nathan Marston, explain the critical factors in this podcast.

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Assessment: Is Your Company Actually Ready to Innovate? – Harvard Business Review

Effective innovation requires constant energy, creative friction, flexible structures, and purposeful discovery. Take this assessment to roughly gauge how well your organization does in each area.

At the end, you’ll see how you stack up against other test takers on HBR.org and receive feedback on what you can do to help your company become more innovative.

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When Treating Workers Well Leads to More Innovation – Harvard Business Review

There’s a reason companies like Google and Facebook offer their employees so many perks, according to new research: firms that treat workers better are more innovative.

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What Separates High-Performing Leaders from Average Ones – Harvard Business Review

Research shows that employees dislike their jobs, don’t trust their leaders, and aren’t engaged. If you’re a leader — or aspiring to be one — you should be frightened. Are organizations in the modern world built for leaders to fail? Or can you overcome these leadership challenges, and if so, how? How can you become a better leader, if not a great one, in this environment?

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Rebuilding Morale: Creating a Happy, Committed Workforce – MindTools

There are many different factors that can affect team morale. When morale suffers, it’s important that you take steps to rebuild it quickly. But what can you do, as a leader, to rebuild the morale of your team? And what exactly is morale?

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The Easiest Thing You Can Do to Be a Great Boss – Harvard Business Review

Most leaders receive surprisingly little development before assuming their first supervisory roles. In fact, many get no leadership training at all until they’ve been in the executive ranks for nearly a decade—reaching, on average, age 42.  But whether you’ve had formal training or not, there’s one simple action that can dramatically increase any manager’s success in gaining the support and engagement of subordinates: recognize great work. That means calling out excellent accomplishments by your employees right away—and doing so in consistent and regular increments from the start.

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Theory X and Theory Y – Mind Tools

Explore how your perception of what motivates your team members can impact your management style and behaviour.

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Herzberg’s Motivators and Hygiene Factors – Mind Tools

Find out how, and why, this famous theory still forms the basis for so much of modern motivational practice.

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Healthy workplaces campaign – NHS Confederation

Employers and trade unions meet to share experience on managing work-related stress.  Then article provides links to relevant literature from the event.

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Is Your Company Encouraging Employees to Share What They Know? – Harvard Business Review

Many of the things we need to know to be successful – to innovate, collaborate, solve problems, and identify new opportunities – aren’t learned simply through schooling, training, or personal experience. Especially for today’s knowledge-based work, much of what we need to know we learn from others’ experiences, through what’s called vicarious learning.

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Allen’s Input Processing Technique: Managing Your Workflow Effectively – MindTools

Many of us sort through a huge amount of incoming information every day. For example, you probably receive dozens of emails, telephone calls, voicemails, meeting requests, invoices, and other documents.  This is in addition to work that you need to do to achieve your goals and objectives. So, how can you process this incoming information effectively, while still staying productive?  Allen’s Input Processing Technique is a common-sense approach that helps you do this. In this article, we look at this tool, and we explore how you can use it to manage incoming information.

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Four fundamentals of workplace automation – McKinsey Quarterly

As the automation of physical and knowledge work advances, many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminated—at least in the short term.

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‘Speaking up’ climate: a new domain of culture to measure and explore – BMJ Quality and Safety Communication failure constitutes a key contributor to healthcare errors.  In addition to poor communication and poor hand-offs, failure to speak up when one recognises a potential safety problem—unsafe acts or unprofessional behaviour—represents an important example of communication failure.  This article discusses the issues of creating a climate of ‘speaking up‘. View article

Integrating empowerment evaluation and quality improvement to achieve healthcare improvement outcomes – BMJ Quality and safety

While the body of evidence-based healthcare interventions grows, the ability of health systems to deliver these interventions effectively and efficiently lags behind. Quality improvement approaches, such as the model for improvement, have demonstrated some success in healthcare but their impact has been lessened by implementation challenges. This article describes the empowerment evaluation approach that has been developed by programme evaluators and a method for its application (Getting To Outcomes (GTO)).

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How an Accounting Firm Convinced Its Employees They Could Change the World – Harvard Business Review

It’s a fabled story about a janitor’s exchange with President Kennedy during the early days of NASA: “What do you do?” the president supposedly asked the man with a broom during a visit to Cape Canaveral. “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”
This meeting may not have actually taken place. But there’s a good reason it’s one of the most commonly-repeated management anecdotes: it illustrates the idea that a workforce motivated by a strong sense of higher purpose is essential to engagement. This articles discusses surveys that show how employees will forego other benefits to work for an organization with an inspiring purpose.

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4 ways to get over the loss of a star employee – Chartered Management Institute
As the BBC’s Robert Peston heads over to ITV, this article takes a look at how companies can best deal with teh loss of leading staff and fill the void that is left behind.

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How I became a raising concerns champion – NHS Employers
This podcast details one person’s personal experience of what it was like to raise a concern in the NHS.

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How To Set Up A Staff Support Network – NHS Employers
This guidance is designed to help in setting up a staff support network group in your organisation. It provides ideas based on established good practice, and can be adapted to suit your organisation’s needs for non-commercial purposes. It can be adapted for any type of staff support network, and it has been developed as an example for black and minority ethnic staff networks.

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Quash Your Bad Habits by Knowing What Triggers Them – Harvard Business Review
Here’s the thing: It doesn’t take long to change a habit. But it’s hard. Really hard.  This article discusses a three step process that can help you quash bad habits.

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A Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals in 4 Steps – Harvard Business Review
Creating goals that you will actually accomplish isn’t just a matter of defining what needs doing—you also have to spell out the specifics of getting it done. By using what motivational scientists call if-then planning to express your intentions you can significantly improve your odds.
This tool will help you take advantage of how the brain works. To begin, break down your goals into concrete subgoals and detailed actions for reaching them.

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The Science of Sounding Smart – Harvard Business Review
When you’re trying to convey the quality of your mind to your boss, or to a company that’s considering you for a job, your best ally may be your own voice.
Although some people may assume that their ideas and intellect would come across much better in written form, it turns out that using your voice can make you sound smarter.

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3 Ways Managers Start Off On the Wrong Foot – Harvard Business Review
When you take your first leadership role, or find yourself at the helm of a new team, first impressions are essential to get right.  Come across the wrong way in those early days of working together, and the odds are good that you will be dealing with the negative consequences of that for a long time to come.

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Building a design-driven culture – McKinsey Insights & Publications

It’s not enough to just sell a product or service—companies must truly engage with their customers. Here’s how to embed experience design in your organization.

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Understanding power and communication relationships in health settings – British Journal of Healthcare Management

Understanding power and communication is key to any healthcare system. Political, organisational and administrative theories that ignore these two concepts are in danger of organisational failure.
The great divide between policymakers and those in the frontline of healthcare provision is well recognised in healthcare. The aim of this article is to explore and theorise the concepts of power relations and communication within the healthcare setting.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Trust Library Services on 01942 822508.

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The Triumphant Return of the Email Newsletter – Harvard Business Review
“No one cares about traffic anymore,” says Stacey Ferguson, founder of the social media community and conference Blogalicious. “Everything is so divided up — you’ve got your blog, then Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest.”
What matters instead is influence, and one way to build it is by guiding audiences through the chaos of so much content. Today’s there’s no better way to do that – and demonstrate influence — than producing an email people will actually open.

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Strong Patient-Provider Relationships Drive Healthier Outcomes – Harvard Business Review

“The proper goal for any health care delivery system is to improve the value delivered to patients … To properly manage value, both outcomes and cost must be measured at the patient level,” Harvard’s Robert Kaplan and Michael Porter tell us. But, why do we only define patient value by outcomes and cost?

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Integrating empowerment evaluation and quality improvement to achieve healthcare improvement outcomes – BMJ Quality & Safety
While the body of evidence-based healthcare interventions grows, the ability of health systems to deliver these interventions effectively and efficiently lags behind. Quality improvement approaches, such as the model for improvement, have demonstrated some success in healthcare but their impact has been lessened by implementation challenges. To help address these challenges, we describe the empowerment evaluation approach that has been developed by programme evaluators and a method for its application (Getting To Outcomes (GTO)). We then describe how GTO can be used to implement healthcare interventions. An illustrative healthcare quality improvement example that compares the model for improvement and the GTO method for reducing hospital admissions through improved diabetes care is described. We conclude with suggestions for integrating GTO and the model for improvement.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Trust Library Services on 01942 822508.

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Losing the stiff upper lip: resilience for practitioners – British Journal of Healthcare Management

This article explores resilience in the context of busy healthcare environments, and raises the question as to whether there is another way of looking at it.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Trust Library Services on 01942 822508.

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The science of organizational transformations – McKinsey Insights & Publications

New survey results find that the most effective transformation initiatives draw upon four key actions to change mind-sets and behaviours.

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The habits of an improver: Thinking about learning for improvement in health care – The Health Foundation
Improving the quality of care services is an imperative for the NHS.  This paper offers a way of viewing the field of improvement from the perspective of the men and women who deliver and co-produce care on the ground – the improvers on whom the NHS depends. The paper describes 15 habits which such individuals regularly deploy, grouped under five broad headings:

• Learning
• Influencing
• Resilience
• Creativity
• Systems thinking

It goes on to suggest that there are certain teaching and learning methods which best develop skills and knowledge for understanding and implementing improvement.

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Major drive to support staff health and wellbeing – NHS Empolyers

How do you support staff in the health service who have some of the most demanding jobs in the country? Simon Stevens set to announce a major drive to improve the health and wellbeing of NHS staff.

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How Emotionally Intelligent are You?: Boosting Your People Skills – MindTools

People with high emotional intelligence (EI) have strong relationships and they manage difficult situations calmly and effectively. They’re also likely to be resilient in the face of adversity. This article looks at how emotionally intelligent are you, and how can you develop further.

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What You Should (and Shouldn’t) Focus on Before a Job Interview – Harvard Business Review

Stress about job interviews feels like a given for most of us and we often don’t make it easy on ourselves since we head into these critical moments with only a scant amount of preparation.  This article discusses how to manage the inevitable stress of a job interview and prepare correctly.

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Overcoming obstacles to digital customer care – McKinsey Insights & Publications

Providing superior digital customer care, or e-care, can lower costs and increase customer satisfaction. Yet it’s easier said than done.

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5 Strategy Questions Every Leader Should Make Time For – Harvard Business Review

Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone in your company, “How are you?” they are more likely to answer “Busy!” than “Very well, thank you”? That is because the norm in most companies is that you are supposed to be very busy – or otherwise at least pretend to be – because otherwise you can’t be all that important.
This article discusses how if you are assessing and developing a strategy, need to stop being busy and devote time to thinking  and reflecting .

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To Become a Leader, Think Beyond Your Role – Harvard Business Review

The world is full of people with opinions.  In our jobs, we may give our opinion on an issue from a functional or departmental point of view — in other words, a limited perspective.   This article discusses how leadership starts with taking on a broader perspective in figuring out what you truly believe should be done.

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Strengths-Based Leadership: Understanding Strengths and Weaknesses – MindTools

Explores what strengths-based leadership is, and how you can use it to develop yourself and your team members. It also examines the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, and look at how you can identify your own strengths, so you can become a more effective leader.

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Improving NHS culture  – The King’s Fund

It is now accepted that healthy cultures in NHS organisations are crucial to ensuring the delivery of high-quality patient care. A new tool from The King’s Fund helps organisations to assess their culture, identifying the ways in which it is working well, as well as the areas that need to change.

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Design Thinking: Putting the Customer at the Heart of Development – MindTools

What do you think of when you consider a product’s design?  One of the first things that may come to mind is how attractive the product is. You might think about how it looks, and its features and functions. But did you ever consider the process used to develop it? Over the years, the term “design” has evolved. Now, instead of just describing the physical attributes of goods and services, it also refers to their development, based on consumers’ wants and needs.

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You Don’t Need to Adopt Holacracy to Get Some of Its Benefits – Harvard Business Review

Holacracy eschews the standard “org chart” for a system of interlocking “circles.”  This article gives an insight into the model via an interview with Brian Robertson, author of the new book Holacracy.

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The Company Cultures That Help (or Hinder) Digital Transformation – Harvard Business Review

Many companies struggle with digital transformation. It goes against the grain of established ways of working and is a threat to management practices that have existed for decades. Digital tools free people throughout the organization to share information easily. Communication managers no longer have total control over message, target, and timing of news and announcements. Horizontal and bottom-up information flows become stronger at the expense of the traditional top-down.

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Getting the most out of your sustainability program – McKinsey Insights & Publications

Sustainability initiatives won’t create lasting value if they’re poorly managed. Here are four lessons from companies that are doing it right.

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Creating sustainable change; the journey that doesn’t end – An Obsession With Transformation

The ultimate goal of any change effort is long term, sustainable performance. No leader can achieve this alone. While transformation begins with the most senior leaders, it sustains when these leaders create a virtuous cycle of accountability that cascades through the entire organization.
This article presents a model where sustainability to “the commitment, momentum and capability required to sustain continuity towards the goals”.  It is prefaced on an assumption that change cannot be managed, it must be led.

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Communications In Health Care Improvement – A Toolkit – The Health Foundation

Toolkit from the Health Foundation for health care professionals working in improvement who want to understand and use communications to better plan, implement and spread their work. Evidence indicates that considering communications from the beginning to the end of a project could be an important factor in the spread of successful health care improvement. This toolkit  takes you, step by step, through the practical actions necessary to harness the power of communications to your cause.

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Virtual Team-Building Exercises: Building Connections in Virtual Spaces – MindTools

Article that details what virtual team-building exercises are and how they can benefit your people. We’ll then look at three activities that you can use with your own remote team members.

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How GCHQ uses internal crowdfunding to become more innovative -CPID

The government’s intelligence-gathering arm has turned to Silicon Valley in an attempt to overhaul its workplace culture and become more innovative, launching an internal crowdfunding platform to give away £1 million to employees with good ideas.

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Clinical leadership should be everyone’s business – Health Service Journal

Clinical leadership is not the prerogative of a few recognised ones – each healthcare staff member is a leader in his own way. Sir David Fish on how aligning people and organisations is essential for a true leader.  Every healthcare professional has a leadership role. Every individual models behaviours daily that impact on colleagues, patients and communities. This is no less valuable in the setting of the million one to one daily clinical interactions, as it is through every ward, board or system level challenge.

Clinical leadership should be everyone’s business – (HSJ Article request full text from the Trust Library Service or call 01942 822508)

If you worship the fire-fighter, you’ll have arsonist fire-fighters everywhere: the symbols of heroes and villains – An Obsession With Transformation

In every organization, there are heroes and villains who symbolically represent what leaders want and don’t want; what they are likely to reward and punish. These archetypes are communicated through story and carried in the organization’s culture. The key challenge for leaders is to work out whether the organization’s heroes and villains are enabling or inhibiting their aspirations.

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Leading Change In Supervision: Lessons From Practice – Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services

This report describes the rationale, process and learning from a project led by IRISS which explored the topic of supervision with a group of six partners from across the social services sector. The purpose of this report is to share the learning gathered through the project to provide some evidence, inspiration, and pointers for those interested in improving supervision. Key points from the report can be used to prompt reflection and discussion with teams, to review current supervision practice and to help plan improvements.

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 A regulatory approach can thwart improvement ambitions – Health Service Journal

 Sue Rubenstein, Adrienne Fresko and John Coutts offer their perspective  on what really stimulates organisational and quality improvement. The messages from leading thinkers from Deming to Darzi to Berwick are remarkably consistent. They cite the critical role played by capable, stable leadership, by robust measurement, and by processes of engagement that harness the inherent motivation and commitment of staff.

A regulatory approach can thwart improvement ambitions – (HSJ Article request full text from Trust Library Services or call 01942 822508)

Helping Your People Develop Emotional Intelligence: Creating a Positive, Balanced Team – Mind Tools

By focusing on increasing your people’s emotional intelligence, you can reap many benefits from improved teamwork. This article looks at at what you can do to help your team members develop this important quality.

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A Way to Assess and Prioritize Your Change Efforts – Harvard Business Review

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Productivity, Engagement And Managers – The Good Daily (RobertsonCooper)

If you constantly question your ability, or worry that your last promotion was someone else’s mistake, chances are you could be suffering from imposter syndrome

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Figure Out Your Manager’s Communication Style – Harvard Business Review

Effective communication takes a deft touch when you’re managing up. If your attempts to persuade are too obvious, they may not succeed. Yet you need to be deliberate in your approach.  This article give tips on how you can learn to understand your manager’s communication style.

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Virtual Ice Breakers: Help Remote Teams Break the Ice – Mind Tools

This article explores how you can use virtual ice breakers to help remote teams break down communication barriers. It looks at when they can benefit your team, as well as the situations where they might not be appropriate. It also includes four virtual ice breakers to get your virtual meetings off to a great start.

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Celebrating Achievement: How to Help Your Team Feel Good – Mind Tools

This article explores the importance of acknowledging and applauding success. It examine some of the psychology behind reward and recognition, and outlines a range of ways you can celebrate achievement.

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Digital Tools to Make Your Next Meeting More Productive – Harvard Business Review

 This article looks at how the right digital tools can help you work more efficiently during a meeting to better lead the conversation.

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How to Overcome the Midday Slump – Harvard Business Review

Doing your best work requires focus and energy. But it’s hard to stay focused for an 8-hour stretch. So how can you find the necessary energy to get your work done? How do you choose those precious moments when you think you’ll be feeling your best to do the most challenging work? And what’s the best way to ride out any lulls?

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 Learning from Google’s digital culture – McKinsey Insights & Publications

What can traditional organizations learn from digital natives? In this interview, Google’s VP of US sales and operations explains how the company’s culture developed and continues to be nurtured.

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Prof. Sir Cary Cooper: How Technology Is Changing Employee Psychology – The Good Weekly (RobertsonCooper)

We talk a lot about the changing nature of the workplace. But how often do we talk about the way that’s changing employee psychology? Here’s how IT is changing the way we work and the way we think.

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Debriefing: A Simple Tool to Help Your Team Tackle Tough Problems – Harvard Business Review

This article explains how debriefing can be used to help a team  recalibrate and jump back into a project that is lagging in order to  to drive the growth of the team and company over the long term.

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What Apple, Lending Club, and AirBnB Know About Collaborating with Customers – Harvard Business Review

The idea of “co-creating” with customers has been circulating for years, but until recently few companies effectively exploited its power or understood its contribution to the bottom line. By exploiting new digital technologies, firms like Apple, Lending Club, and AirBnB have made customer co-creation of value central to their business models and in doing so now rank among the world’s most innovative and valuable firms. This research suggests that companies that make their customers partners, and share the value created, lead the pack on revenue growth, profit margins, capital efficiency, and enterprise value.

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Want to become agile? Learn from your IT team – McKinsey Insights & Publications

Agility, the ability to react quickly to threats and opportunities, is an increasingly critical capability as companies seek to become digital to the core.  This article discusses how the agile approaches of IT teams can be expanded throughout the organisation.

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Pizza Express gains by changing who chops its lemons – BBC News 

They say the best ideas are the simplest ones. At Pizza Express, the restaurant chain, it was all about the lemons. Who should chop them?

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An Experiment in Enlivening Stagnant Teams – Harvard Business Review

People make big, difficult changes for two key reasons — to reap rewards and to avoid pain. But what about entire teams that are deeply entrenched? How do you shake them up? This article gives and example of how data-driven experiments can offer valuable solutions.

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Free Coaching Workbook – Mind Tools

Our new How to Coach workbook helps you learn how to coach individuals, whole teams, and yourself. And you get a free copy of it when you join the Mind Tools Club before midnight, June 25.

Find out more

Managers in the Digital Age Need to Stay Human – Harvard Business Review

The first step in claiming our humanity is creating workplaces that optimize human engagement. Creating these workplaces starts with leading people differently. Here are four observations about managing engagement in the digital age.

1. Managing engagement requires new leadership skills.
2. Managing engagement starts on the front lines.
3. Managing engagement is personal.
4. Managing engagement is about everyone.

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Evaluating the evidence on employee engagement and its potential benefits to NHS staff: a narrative synthesis – Health Services and Delivery Research

Evaluates evidence and theories of employee engagement within the NHS and the general workforce to inform policy and practice. Four research questions focused on definitions and models of engagement; the evidence of links between engagement and staff morale and performance; approaches and interventions that have the greatest potential to create and embed high levels of engagement within the NHS; and the most useful tools and resources for NHS managers in order to improve engagement. However the synthesis highlights the complex nature of the engagement evidence base. The quality of evidence was mixed. Most studies were cross-sectional, self-report surveys, although the minority of studies that used more complex methods such as longitudinal study designs or multiple respondents were able to lend more weight to inferences of causality. The evidence from the health-care sector was relatively sparse. Only a few studies used complex methods and just two had taken place in the UK. The evidence synthesis suggests that employers might consider several factors in efforts to raise levels of engagement including development and coaching to raise levels of employee resilience, the provision of adequate job resources, and fostering positive and supportive leadership styles.Additional Items

• Protocol
• Plain English Summary
• Scientific Summary

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Employing more people with learning disabilities – NHS Employers

Employing people with learning disabilities can help create a diverse NHS workforce which delivers a better service and improved patient care.

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The 3 Ways People React to Career Disasters – Harvard Business Review

It’s not how hard you fall, but how you pick yourself up that really matters. That is what we learned from 9000+ responses to our HBR survey on bouncing back from career setbacks. Resilience alone won’t cut it—you need to do some serious self-reflection.

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Strategies for Working Smoothly with Your Peers – Harvard Business Review

 Your boss supports you and wants the best for you – she hired you after all. Your employees support you, and your clients value you. But what about your peers? Time after time, I’ve encountered successful professionals whose one confidence barrier seems to be their relationship with peers.

Why is it that we can feel less sure of ourselves in front of our peers? And what can we do about it?

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A Guide to Winning Support for Your New Idea or Project – Harvard Business Review

You’ve got an idea for something that will improve your company’s bottom line or make it a better place to work. Nice going. Now for the hard part: How do you get people on board? How do you get funding? And what should you do if your idea doesn’t catch on?

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Putting digital to work for patients – Tim Kelsey – NHS England

NHS England’s National Director for Patients and Information looks at how unleashing the power of technology and data can improve patient care.

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Leading People When They Know More than You Do – Harvard Business Review

as your career advances, at some point you will be promoted into a job which includes responsibility for areas outside your specialty. Your subordinates will ask questions that you cannot answer and may not even understand. How can you lead them when they know a lot more about their work than you do?

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Every Complaint Matters: A Seven-Point Plan For The NHS And Social Care – Healthwatch

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Why have a total reward strategy? Duncan Brown shares his views in a new blog – NHS Employers

Read what Duncan Brown head of HR consultancy at the Institute for Employment Studies has to say about total reward strategies.

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How One Company Reduced Email by 64% – Harvard Business Review

If you’re going to achieve growth in the knowledge economy, your employees need to be able to quickly find people inside and outside the company whose expertise can help them solve critical business problems. That takes a highly effective communication tool.
Oh, we already have that, you might say: email.

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Review of Operational Productivity in NHS providers – Department of Health

This interim report outlines the work that has been carried out by Lord Carter of Coles to review the productivity of NHS hospitals, working with a group of 22 NHS providers.   The size of the NHS means that by doing several small things better, huge savings are possible to help achieve that aim. These include:

• better management of staff, rotas and shifts
• improving the management of annual leave and sickness absence
• optimising the medicines used in hospitals
• cutting the number of product lines of every day consumables that the NHS uses from more than 500,000 to less than 10,000 and being better at procurement – this could save up to £1 billion by 2020.

Additonal ItemHospital productivity report shows how NHS can make large savings – Department of Health

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Dear Boss: Your Team Wants You to Go on Vacation – Harvard Business Review

Over the past decade, a staggering number of studies have demonstrated that our work performance plummets when we work prolonged periods without a break. We know that overworked employees are prone to mood swings, impulsive decision-making, and poor concentration. They’re more likely to lash out at perceived slights and struggle to empathize with colleagues. Worse still, they are prone to negativity — and that negativity is contagious.

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Are We More Productive When We Have More Time Off? – Harvard Business Review

Finds that  employees in countries that take more vacation do have a strong desire to get a lot done as well as a tendency to move faster. , This study shows that it’s not that taking a break will refresh your brain and let you get more done; it’s that simply spending less time at your desk forces you to waste less time.

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Public Service Markets: Putting Things Right When They Go Wrong – National Audit Office

Over 10 million people who used public services (approximately 1 in 5) in the UK last year faced problems when using those services, according to this report.  It finds that system-wide improvements are inhibited by poor central leadership and that public service organizations do not make enough use of complaints to improve services and there are serious impediments to doing so.

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Giving whistleblowers greater protection: Improving quality of care – British Journal of Health Care Management

An independent review of whisleblowing in the NHS made recommendations as to how whistleblowers could be given greater protection. This article makes the case for regulation of professionals whose work poses potential risks to patients and can place healthcare managers in an invidious position.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Trust Library Services on 01942 822508.

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Understanding care quality: confronting complexity – King’s Fund

Blog post from the King’s Fund that poses the questions how will we know whether the quality of care in the NHS is improving or deteriorating under the new government? Or whether and how the financial pressures on the service are affecting the quality of patient care?

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Local systems of care: one of the solutions to the challenges facing the NHS – The King’s Fund

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Getting organizational redesign right – McKinsey Quarterly

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Managers in the Digital Age Need to Stay Human – Harvard Business Review

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Quiz: Do You Know When Coaching Works and When It Doesn’t? – Harvard Business Review

Through coaching, you can lead people effectively without telling them exactly what to do and without knowing all the answers yourself. If you don’t coach, you’ll waste time hand-holding, and you won’t learn what your team members are capable of. But not every situation calls for coaching. Take this brief quiz to see if you know when to put on your coach’s hat and when to try a different approach.

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Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely – Harvard Business Review

Leaders are relying more on coaching as a leadership tool, as organizations become flatter and more dependent on knowledge work. This article looks at how managers can do  some of their coaching virtually.

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Positive Teams Are More Productive – Harvard Business Review

A workplace characterized by positive and virtuous practices excels in a number of domains.  Positive and virtuous practices include:

• Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
• Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
• Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.
• Inspiring one another at work.
• Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.

Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust & integrity.

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Why Group Brainstorming Is a Waste of Time – Harvard Business Review

The most widely used method to spark group creativity is brainstorming.  This article discusses how after six decades of independant scientific research there is very little evidence to suppport the idea that brainstorming produces more or better ideas than the same number of individuals working independantly.  The article also discusses how hte evidence actually indicates that brainstorming actually harms creative performance and results in a collective performance loss. 

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Innovate Without Diluting Your Core Idea – Harvard Business Review

This article looks at the distortion that can occur to innovative ideas as a result of ‘cummulative error’.  When implementing new customer offerings and experiences, an original idea is often inadvertently manipulated as it moves through development in a similar way to which a message becomes distorted when playing Chinese Whispers.

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Empathy Is Key to a Great Meeting – Harvard Business Review

We all hate meetings. They are usually a waste of time and they’re here to stay. This article discusses how it’s your responsibility as a leader to make them better. This doesn’t mean just make them shorter, more efficient, more organized. People need to enjoy them and possibly have fun.

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How to Run a Great Virtual Meeting – HBR Blog

The author of this blog has put together a comprehensive list of some simple do’s and don’ts to help get the most out of virtual meetings.

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How to Know If There Are Too Many People in Your Meeting – Harvard Business Review

This article discusses how for a meeting to be useful, you have to have the right people — and only the right people — in the room. With too many attendees, you may have trouble focusing everyone’s time and attention and accomplishing anything; with too few, you might not have the right decision makers or information providers in the room.

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You Can Have Constructive Conflict Over Email – Harvard Business Review

When email was novel 20 years ago, managers began asking us if it should be used for sensitive conversations, such as performance problems or salary negotiations. For years we said “no way.” But as work became more and more virtual, the question changed. People no longer asked, “Should I?” Instead, they demanded, “How can I?”

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The Future Of Commissioning – Reform

This conference brochure features essays and articles from a variety of contributors on the future of commissioning. Following the NHS Five Year Forward View, it discusses new models of care and also commissioning across health and social care.

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Do your training efforts drive performance?

Building organizational capabilities is a top strategic priority, but an inability to measure the impact is a growing concern among executives we surveyed.

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Skills are an under-utilised lever for enabling transformation – An Obsession With Transformation

This article considers approaching skills as a critical lever in the transformation agenda. This offers a new paradigm which would start with senior leaders answering the question what skills does the organization need to achieve our aspirations? The identified skills would be those that underpin performance, and any capability gaps that need to be bridged in order to accelerate to the aspiration.

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Making a Great First Impression – Mind Tools

Whether in your career or social life, it’s important to know how to create a good first impression. This article provides some useful tips to help you do this.

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