Q Could you please share your experiences delivering successful D&I strategies at NHS Employers?
Our role at NHS Employers is to support and guide organisations working in the health and social care field to develop effective diversity and inclusion strategies. One of the main ways that we do this is through our Partners and Partners Alumni programme. This programme is designed to increase the confidence, competence and capability of those organisations in terms of not just meeting their legal requirements and duties in respect of equality and diversity – but also going beyond that towards creating truly inclusive, great places to work.
Q Which strategies have you found more and less effective?
The best evidence that we have seen for most effective strategies in this area has been produced by the Care Quality Commission in a 2018 report entitled “Equally Outstanding”. This report identified 9 key success factors – which have been integrated now into a range of improvement tools adopted by the NHS and which will underpin the new NHS People Plan currently being developed. The 9 factors are:
- Committed leadership: The key role of leaders who are enthusiastic and committed to equality and human rights. Moving away from “heroes and heroines” to making this the business of all leaders.
- Equality and human rights principles into action: Making these principles run through like a thread from organisational values, through leadership behaviours and actions to frontline staff and their work.
- Culture of staff equality: Developing a culture of equality and human rights for staff as a basis for quality improvement. This is likely to include both broad works to develop an open and inclusive culture and, particularly in larger organisations, work to tackle specific workforce inequalities.
- Apply equality and human rights thinking to improvement issues: Starting with the quality improvement issue, creating some space to innovate and then applying “equality and human rights thinking” to the issue – rather than thinking “we must do something about equality and/ or human rights”.
- Staff as improvement partners: ensuring all staff are involved as partners in the thinking about, planning and delivery of the equality and human rights interventions to improve the quality of care. This can be done within a “no blame” culture of learning and is aligned to collective leadership approaches.
- People who use services at the centre: Beginning from the question “how do we serve this person?” The best organisations listened carefully to people who used the service and viewed them as people with a life beyond their immediate need for a service – including their future aspirations.
- Use external help: Linking to the outside – reaching out to others for help and being prepared to have a mirror shone on their work.
- Courage: Being courageous and bold in their approaches – including positive risk-taking, being honest about issues and tackling difficult problems.
- Continuous learning and curiosity: Being curious and humble – starting somewhere, learning from mistakes and always looking for the next thing that could be improved – whether for a small service or for larger services.
Q Do diversity and inclusion help organizations retain people longer?
Our partners and alumni programmes support participating trusts to progress and develop their equality performance and to build capacity in this area.
I haven’t seen hard and fast evidence that demonstrates a correlation between effective diversity and inclusion strategies and reduced turnover or improved retention. However, I have seen evidence in the past which shows that those health and social care organisations who have a specific and ongoing focus on diversity and inclusion also have better staff engagement ratings. We are also now beginning to see evidence – through the NHS’s Workforce Race Equality Standard in particular – that those organisations who do well against this standard have fairer and more equitable disciplinary and career development procedures – two things which are often cited by staff as the reason for leaving an organisation.
Q What do those organizations lose, which don’t promote inclusion and diversity?
Following on from the previous question, the flip side of not promoting equality, diversity and inclusion is that staff become disengaged (and ultimately leave), demoralised (and are less productive) and disempowered (so that they do not fulfil their full potential).
Q What is the future of work diversity and inclusion in the workplace?
The future is bright! In a world that is becoming increasingly digitised and data-driven, we are finally (in the world of diversity and inclusion) beginning to realise that we have a wealth of information and intelligence that is painting a very clear picture. The picture is one where there is a strong connection and emerging correlation (and “golden thread”) between values-based and compassionate leadership, increased staff engagement and better health outcomes for patients. I can only see this pattern strengthening over time – and I look forward to continuing to helping and supporting our health and social care organisations find their way along this path.
Meet Paul Deemer, Head of Diversity and Inclusion, NHS Employers among other senior HR practitioners, talent acquisition experts, global executives, from large complex organizations with their valuable insights on HR trends and the future of work to learn how to manage human resources, at the TOP HR event of the year – Attend our upcoming HR Vision event – register now!
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