London ESR Action Learning Set

As a team of ESR Account Managers and Functional Advisors we are used to individual organisations in London asking us to come and deliver an overview of various aspects of ESR to their staff. However, we received a novel proposal from one London trust in July 2016, which quickly snowballed into something much bigger. What started out as a request to explain IATs and ESRBI in more detail turned into an Action Learning Set hosted and facilitated by the trust, to which all other London trusts were invited.

It became evident that some users were having more difficulties with the processes around ESR, than with the functionality itself, so rather than giving traditional presentations it was agreed that we would give a very brief overview of each topic, and participants would then focus on discussing how they use the functionality across different departments, and how one team’s actions can affect another team.

As well as IAT and BI, the hiring process and the new external learner functionality were also added as subject areas covered during the day. Having organised the date, and secured their largest training room the trust began to publicise the event to other London NHS organisations. We then waited to see whether anyone else would be interested…

...they certainly were! 62 people attended, from 19 different NHS organisations in London. Teams of HR, Recruitment and L&D all came together so they could discuss their working processes as professional groups. The ESR Account  Manager or Functional Advisor gave a brief overview of the individual ESR topic area and delegates spent around 45 minutes discussing processes with their colleagues. There was a high level of energy and animation in the room as people began to understand how their processes fitted together across departmental and team boundaries. Barriers to effective working were identified, and agreements made to go away and investigate in more detail how these could be removed.

Any questions that could not be answered were picked up by the Account Managers and Functional Advisors, who addressed them either straight away, or followed up after the meeting. A helpful FAQ document has also been developed and shared with all attendees.

Future action learning sets

The event was so successful in stimulating discussion and helping to identify how to improve processes that we are looking at running similar action learning sets on different ESR subject areas in the future. In the meantime we are enormously grateful to Olga Gorbaciova and her colleagues from East London NHS FT, who conceived, organised and facilitated the event.

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