Using ESR to support our Talent Management Strategy
A Case Study by South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Background
Our Trust provides mental health, learning disability and specialist children’s services across South Staffordshire, Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin. We also provide services on a wider regional or national basis, including perinatal, eating disorder and forensic services. The Trust’s Inclusions service provides psychological, drug and alcohol services and has contracts across the country. We also provide genitourinary medicine services in South Staffordshire, Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin.
Back in 2014 the Trust engaged with staff, service users and partners to develop a Behaviour Framework which focussed on how we live our Trust values. During recent years we have been working to integrate this Behaviour Framework into all aspects of our Trust activities, including recruitment and induction. A key element of this work focused on revisiting our appraisal process so that value is also acknowledged in how we display these behaviours as well as our performance in roles. To this effect we now use a Performance Development Conversation where each individual employee is rated on a Performance and Behaviour matrix. The matrix is colour coded, and employees who are displayed as Purple are recognised as being individuals who excel in both behaviour and performance and who are ready for their next role/challenge or step in their career. This approach is akin to that adopted by Health Education England’s Talent Conversation Toolkit and their Maximising potential Matrix.
The Challenge
The Trust had been using the new appraisal approach for over 2 years and whilst the feedback from staff was excellent - regarding the shift in focus to having really great conversations, we identified that there was a strategic gap; in that we were not able to easily identify -either at team, directorate or organisational level, where our high potential staff were located. The Workforce and Development Team were asked to explore how we could use these ratings to better inform our approach to Talent Management within the organisation, and our proposed solution would need to achieve the following:
- Be cost effective – there were no additional funds to develop or buy a system;
- Involve minimal data entry – the organisation did not want to place onerous data entry requirements onto managers;
- Be secure – there was a need to maintain confidentiality on individual employee ratings;
- Facilitate centralised reporting – in order to look strategically at talent we needed to be able to look at key themes and ratings summaries across the organisation.
The Solution
Around the same time that this work was being implemented we undertook our ESR Assessment. The NHS ESR Central Team met with us, and using the Assessment tool examined how we utilised the ESR system. Whilst the Trust is a progressive user of ESR functionality the Assessment was a really valuable process for us. We already used the ESR appraisal functionality to record the date that appraisals took place but the Assessment highlighted that there were ways of recording the detail of the appraisal that we hadn’t considered.
By undertaking the ESR Assessment we were presented with a report that outlined against our organisation’s objectives the quick wins, medium and longer term objectives or projects making better use of ESR that would further support our strategic aspirations. We established an ESR working group to review the way appraisals were recorded to identify how we could incorporate our local ratings. Initially we looked at creating a questionnaire using HTML which those inputting would have to link to as they worked through the appraisal screens. Whilst investigating this option and creating local templates we realised there was an option to link to a rating scale. This seemed perfect for us as the rating scale does not require you to link out to a separate questionnaire – it appears on the inputting screens as a user goes through normal appraisal entry. Our solution was therefore to create a local template which contained a locally created rating scale which replicated the colour coding on our rating matrix. Once we had created this we tested it internally within our team in Workforce and Development.
We then created an easy guide which took users through the steps to enter both the appraisal date and rating using our new template. This was cascaded around the organisation with supporting communications to help ensure that users were aware of the change. A big advantage to this approach was that we were not asking our users to do anything different from their normal appraisal entry process other than choose a new template name. There was also an additional benefit in that by using a local template it actually made the appraisal entry process simpler, as staff did not have to skip through multiple screens on the standard templates that they did not need to use.
Once we had the solution in place to record the rating in ESR we were then faced with the additional challenge of how to get the information out of ESR in a format which would assist our Talent Management approach.
We liaised with (and used the expertise of) our regional NHS ESR Account Manager and the NHS ESR Business Intelligence team to work together to have the overall rating incorporated into the Appraisals report on the Appraisals and PMP dashboard. It’s fair to say that within the Workforce and Development team we were excited to be able to run a report which enabled us to see the spread of ratings across the organisation! Our appraisal template went live at the end of April and as at the 31st July we were reporting over 1,000 staff appraisals recorded using this method.
The Benefits
This has been an integral part of our developing approach to Talent Management.
We are now able to present a strategic view of emerging key themes to our Trust Board and we are also able to use the reports in our talent discussions with heads of service. This has been beneficial not only within Talent Management discussions but also to ‘sense check’ the outcomes across the organisation to ensure that the ratings are being interpreted consistently in our Performance Development Conversations.
Theresa Shaw, Head of Learning and Leadership Development said: “This is a really useful tool and an important step forward for us in being able to have meaningful talent and succession planning conversations with operational service managers, and to enable us to identify individuals at all levels that have high potential to succeed. Our aim is to be able to develop a talent pool that will help us to plan more strategically to develop individuals for our future business critical and leadership roles.”
Further Information
If you have any questions about this case study please contact Sharon Dennison, Learning and Development Manager Sharon.dennison@sssft.nhs.uk