Your ESR News

2017 Roundup

Update from Paul Spooner, NHS ESR Programme Director 

During the course of busy day-to-day activity, it is easy to lose sight of the scale of progress that organisations  make over a given period. When I reflect on the progress made by the ESR Programme, in partnership with NHS colleagues in England and Wales, I am both delighted and proud of the many achievements and successes during 2017.

As we embarked upon 2017, we entered into a significant and exciting time for ESR.  Consistent with previous years, service availability and performance of the ESR solution has remained the single most important objective – against which, I am pleased to note the service has been robust and reliable.  

Additionally, 2017 has seen the introduction of the new ESR Portal capability and other key strategic developments. In January, the pilot phase for the new ESR Portal began and by March, full roll out commenced to all NHS Organisations across England and Wales.  The challenge to provision every VPD by the end of September was successfully completed; and it is important at this juncture to express our appreciation from myself and the wider ESR Programme Team for the support and cooperation from Organisations to provision the Portal. It was, for some, a leap of faith, but since we began to make the Portal available to users we have consistently received positive feedback from both employers and employees - to date over 326,000 NHS employees have accessed their ESR via the Portal. Indeed, receiving regular feedback that the Portal is a ‘game changer’ to staff engagement and productivity is nothing short of fantastic to hear.

The Game Changer

During the last year we have successfully delivered a significant amount of change into the ESR solution. The Development Road Map actually began back in June 2016 with the introduction of online pdf payslip followed by internet access to ESR. During 2017 we have incrementally built upon that first key enhancement to deliver significant improvements to both the technology and the user experience with ESR. The timeline below provides a snap shot of the journey that ESR and the NHS has taken during the year:

 

As you will be aware, the next major release for ESR is taking place in December (release 37), and includes both Roadmap and Technical improvements to the ESR solution.  You can read more about release 37 in the Roadmap update within this edition of ESR News.

The portal technology has been commended as a ‘game-changer’ to workforce engagement and management; and it is also recognised as supporting local retention strategies - by providing modern technology and personal data access to NHS staff. Of note - further enabled by the introduction of the Portal, we have seen over 314,000 NHS staff choose to view electronic pay-slips only, by opting out of receiving paper pay-slips via their ESR. Over recent months, we have published case studies from organisations that have taken the step to switch off printed pay slips for all staff (these are available on our website).

With an increasing demand for use of NHS budgets, a need to maximise productivity and efficiency along with an increasing demand for services, ESR can and should be used as a business critical system for the NHS; helping Organisations to make cash savings and increase productivity and efficiency by removing outdated processes and utilising real time data and reporting. ESR is increasingly being recognised as the ‘enabler’ to delivering local objectives regarding Workforce management.

ESR as the ‘Enabler’

During the course of 2017, and particularly during the portal provisioning work, we have worked with many organisations who have embraced the new technology and the respective opportunities introduced.  Examples of such opportunities include how ESR enables streamlined processes – so as to make a positive impact on the way ESR is used and how staff and managers interact with the solution. 

ESR Development Roadmap is scheduled to conclude in March 2018. Whilst this is a significant milestone – reflecting completion of the user defined developments, this will not be the end for ESR development.  One of the things that we are committed to is the NHS ownership of ESR - continuing to be developed by the NHS for the NHS, and going forward it remains important that users share your ideas and suggestions through the Special Interest Groups and/or other strategic forums so that we can ensure ESR continues to meet your needs and those of your organisations. Ultimately – at an employing authority level, ESR is ‘Your ESR’, and we hope through use of employee self-service NHS staff will refer to ESR as ‘My ESR’.

Finally, I hope that you find this December edition of ESR News interesting and on behalf of the ESR Programme, may I express our thanks for all of your support throughout 2017, and wish you a Merry Christmas and offer Best Wishes for 2018.

 

Release 37 - What's coming to Your ESR

As part of Release 37 a number of portal changes will be made to further improve the look, feel and usability of the features already on offer via the portal.  These include:

• Renaming of Portlet Buttons on MyESR Dashboard for consistency.
• Re-size of Announcement Portlet to ensure the image uses the available space.
• Updates to Calendars In MyESR And MSS.
• Updates to the e-Learning Portlet Functionality.

The Oracle 12.2 upgrade, which will be undertaken as part of Release 37, also includes some new features which will be enabled as part of the release.  More details will be included in the supporting User Education but in summary the new features include:

• Universal Global Header & Simple Home Page.
• Redesign of the Proxy User Set Up pages.
• Use of Pictures for OLM Catalogue Items.
• New preview Questionnaire Administration feature.
• Transactions Where Future Dated Changes Exist.
• OLM Test Overview Panel.
• Mark Classes as Certification only.
• Subscribe to Certification and Enrol in Classes.

OLM Developments

One of the remaining Roadmap deliverables focuses on improvements to the design and usability of OLM for Learning Administrators.  These improvements have been developed in partnership with the national OLM SIG, and Release 37 will bring a number of changes to the forms and processes within OLM. In summary the changes cover:

• Catalogue Search.
• Creating Catalogue Items.
• Manage Classes.
• Enrolments and Subscriptions.
• Learning Objects.
• Learner Access.
• Learner Groups.
• Resources.
• Announcements.
• Customers and Suppliers.
• Learning Administrator Report.
• Certification Due Date.
• Learning History.
• Notify Button.

Gender Pay Gap reporting

New legislation introduced this year means Employers need to publish gender pay gap data annually. From April 2017 employers have up to 12 months to publish this information. The deadline to report is 30 March 2018 for public sector employers.  In order to enable Organisations to meet these requirements we plan to release a number of reports to ESRBI as part of Release 37. This is a complex requirement which is still under development; therefore release will be subject to the successful completion of the development and associated testing.

Gender Pay Gap analyses will be added to the Workforce Profile Dashboard to provide the data required for the Gender Pay Gap reporting requirement. The analyses provide an overall summary, a ‘by person’ summary and the full person and element detail for both ‘regular’ pay and ‘bonus’ pay requirements.

The Regular Pay Summary provides the mean and median pay gap differences as well as the differences between pay at each quartile as per the government requirement. The Bonus Pay Summary provides the average and median bonus value, as well as the percentage of female employees that received a bonus payment over 12 months when compared to those of male employees.

 

 

The analyses filter pay elements to a nationally set list by default to include and exclude pay as per the reporting   requirement. However, since Organisations may use local elements and use national elements differently, prompts are provided for each analysis to allow local inclusion or exclusion of elements as needed.

 

 

Downtime

The size and scope of Release 37, including the Oracle 12.2 upgrade will require an extended period of downtime and will impact all ESR users – Professional and Self Service.

The plan is to withdraw ESR from Production at 12pm on Wednesday 27th December 2017 until 8am on 2nd January 2018 (subject to successful testing).

User readiness and education

The ESR Education Team has developed HTML captivate lessons, which are now available to users on ESR Infopoint. 

These lessons will provide an overview of the look and feel changes in Release 37 and demonstrate new functionality where applicable.

Updates to the User Manual and e-Learning lessons for the areas impacted by Release 37 will be available from the beginning of January 2018.

For more information

For more information about the developments going in to ESR or wider functionality and capability contact your NHS ESR Account Manager or Functional Advisor.

Are you using Employee Relations in ESR?

Employee Relations in ESR

ESR Employee Relations (ER) functionality enables Organisations to record the outcomes of all ER types for employees and ex-employees such as, grievances, disciplinary, harassment, capability, flexible working and further ER stages. ESR has full reporting capability, providing you with the ability to report on all of the employee relations types, including an analysis on Equality and Diversity in relation to ER cases. Using ESR Organisations can produce local management reports and respond quickly to any Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

Equality & Diversity

The need to analyse ER data in relation to Equality & Diversity became more prominent in 2015 following the introduction of the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES).

One of the metrics included in the WRES requires NHS organisations to report on Disciplinary cases in relation to Ethnic Origin. For Organisations using the ESR ER module this is a simple task as a standard dashboard already exists within ESR Business Intelligence (BI) allowing Organisations to view a summary of all cases over a specific time period by the following protected characteristics:

• Gender
• Ethnic Origin
• Religious Belief
• Sexual Orientation
• Age
• Disability

Employee Relations Dashboard example:

 

Following on from WRES, the Workforce Disability Equality Standard is due to be implemented in the near future which will also require Organisations to supply ER data in relation to specific metrics.

As well as assisting with national reporting requirements this dashboard can also help you to identify trends or areas of concern for your Organisation.

Paul Deemer, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at NHS Employers, endorses the utilisation of ER functionality across the NHS:

“The NHS is currently trying to address and tackle some of the most intransigent staffing issues – and is increasingly using the data from ESR to help understand and get underneath those issues. One of these issues relates to increasing the employment rates and employee experience of staff with a disability. To this end, we will be introducing a new Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES) in 2018 which will require Trusts to analyse their ESR data in a similar way to the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES). The key difference with the WDES is that one of the metrics will require Trusts to scrutinise their sickness and capability procedures and compare the differences between disabled and non-disabled staff. Trusts who are using the employee relations functions within ESR will find this much easier to do. We would also encourage Trusts to promote the Self Service functionality within ESR as we know this improves data accuracy and encourages staff with a disability to disclose their disability.”

One Organisation that has been using ESR ER for a number of years is West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust (WMAS) which serves a population of 5.6 million people covering an area of more than 5,000 square miles made up of Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Coventry, Birmingham and Black Country conurbation. The Trust employs approximately 4,800 staff and operates from 15 new fleet preparation hubs across the region and a network of over 40 Community Ambulance Stations.

ESR Lead and HR Trust Project Manager, Rachael Belleini says that the organisation has been using the data from the ESR ER module for the last 6 years to extract the monitoring data for disciplinary, grievance, harassment and flexible working.  Whilst this is done primarily using the current Discoverer reporting functionality, Rachael is now looking at how ESR BI can be used for next year’s reporting requirements, as this offers wider capability with KPI’s, charts and the ability to drill down to specific departments more easily.

In addition to the above, the HR team use the Employee Relations module for recording capability both with and without an underlying health reason, and have been doing this for a number of years.

“For WRES reporting the ESR BI report introduced last year has made the completion of the mandated reporting far easier for the data indicators, and I would expect WDES to follow a similar pattern/format.”

ESR BI Reporting

As well as being able to report on ER data by Equality & Diversity characteristics, a series of other national analyses exists through BI to enable Organisations to analyse specific cases in greater detail, and also assist Organisations with monitoring KPI’s in relation to case management.

The ‘Cases’ analysis within the ER Dashboard allows Organisations to view all cases which have been open for  a defined number of days, determined by the Trust. Each BI report has a number of prompts/parameters to define and target the areas you wish to report on.  In addition, all analyses have an export button to enable the user to export to their format of choice and also provide the ability to add reports to a ‘Briefing Book’, to allow the user to group national analyses together into a board-report type document.

Full details of the nationally maintained ER Dashboard are available via ESR KBase: https://www.electronicstaffrecord.nhs.uk/kbase/entry/505/ (log-in required).

Key Benefits of using ESR to manage Employee Relations

• Using the ESR Employee Relations functionality reduce the demand on resources when answering FOI. requests and internal requests.
• It can be used to support the detailed file on the relevant case.
• The ER record is linked to the person data, thus providing robust and accurate data.
• It enables Organisations to produce regular board reports on Employee Relations statistics which can identify any issues or points of action.
• HR can track caseloads across the team.
• The expiry notifications ensure that cases are reviewed correctly and on time.

Want to know more?

If you are considering implementing ESR Employee Relations within your organisation, or want to find out how it could be used more effectively, then contact your regional NHS ESR Account Manager to arrange a visit.

General Data Protection Regulation 2018

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission intend to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). This change is effective from 25th May 2018.

As a Programme team we have established a project to assess the impact of GDPR on the ESR service.  Whilst we are already compliant in many areas, we have a small number of items that we are looking to address and are expecting to be compliant by 25^th May 2018. We will share an update with all ESR User Organisations in early 2018, ahead of the May 2018 deadline.

For information about the changes to Data Protection and the new GDPR Regulation visit the Information Commissioners website

HPMA Awards 2018

Award best use of Your ESR   

The ESR Programme is once again sponsoring the HPMA Awards, with a refreshed category for 2018.  We will be looking for projects that demonstrate how an organisation’s effective use of ESR is supporting delivery of Workforce policy including the productivity and efficiency agenda.

 

The Award Criteria

The organisation should be able to clearly demonstrate how their use of ESR, in particular the new portal and improved functionality, is helping to optimise  business process and streamline working practice within their organisation, ultimately supporting the need for improved productivity, efficiency and staff wellbeing.

In particular, applicants should explain how they have:

• Clearly identified the business need or objective;
• Reviewed their use of ESR and identified how they could use it more effectively, and/or use new functionality to improve productivity and efficiency;
• Ensured they were clear about their starting point – i.e. benchmarked their existing status, for the business area and/or ESR usage;
• Identified areas for improvements to staff wellbeing, using ESR as the enabler to such change;
• Ensured successful project delivery, including stakeholder engagement;
• Critically reviewed processes to reflect best practice use of ESR;
• Provided appropriate guidance on new functionality, processes etc for users;
• Measured improvements in the identified business area after implementation, including quantified benefits;
• Reviewed lessons learned and implementation tips for other trusts;
• Considered next steps for further optimising their use of ESR to support business objectives.

ESR has been on a significant journey over the last 15 months and that has led to many Organisations taking advantage of the new technology and improved user experience since we rolled out the new Portal.  As a result of these changes  we are seeing an increasing number of Organisations establishing ESR projects, or implementing functionality within ESR to support their strategic and business objectives.  If your Organisation has been doing interesting things with ESR that link back to our award criteria for 2018 why not submit an entry? Someone has to win the award !

The important dates for your diary are:

• Entry Deadline: 17:00 Wednesday 21 February 2018
• Judging Day, London: Tuesday 17 April 2018 (DACBeachcroft Fetter Lane, London)
• Awards Celebration & Ceremony: Thursday 7 June 2018, The Tower Guoman Hotel, Tower Bridge, London

Awards submissions should be made online at https://hpma.awardsplatform.com/

For more information the HPMA and the 2018 awards, including how to enter your ESR project, visit www.hpma.org.uk/award