Helping Healthcare Homes Group to thrive post Covid

Solution:

In depth stakeholder discussions, followed by launch of 'Your Voice Matters' employee survey.

Result:

Big jump on key employee engagement markers, and improved KPIs.

Challenge

Getting this thriving business back on track

Healthcare Homes Group (HHG) was a thriving business, but Covid hit them hard, leading to a 40% employee turnover rate, unsustainably high use of temporary staff and a dip in occupancy rates across their homes.

The challenge when they came to ETS was to steady the ship and then repair and rebuild.

Step one was to measure a baseline of how this landscape was impacting colleagues. An engagement survey provided a vehicle for employee voices to be heard, providing deeper insight into issues like retention as well as clarity on where to focus efforts to reset and move forward as a business.

Solution

Listen to employees with new employee survey

We began by holding a series of interviews with HHG leaders, gathering rich context to feed into design of their new ‘Your Voice Matters’ survey.

After supporting them with the design and delivery of the survey, analysis of results revealed two key signals in the data, which were: ‘better communication and two-way dialogue with employees’. From here, ETS recommended breaking this down to focus on four areas:

1) Future direction

2) Employee voice

3) Wellbeing

4) Reward & recognition

Armed with this knowledge, between surveys 1 and 2, HHG was proactive and busy taking action with a series of initiatives introduced.

This included:

- Creation of ‘Your Voice Matters’ employee voice groups

- Having Board members sponsoring a section of the HHG estate and spending more time on-site

- New “Stop the floor” meetings and a staff magazine

- Launching ‘Our Time to Thrive’ Awards and thank you cards

- Introducing new manager toolkit and local employee recognition schemes

- Relaunching an employee assistance programme giving access to a wealth of wellbeing support tools.

“Seeing the improvements in engagement, enablement and empowerment scores can only help us attract new employees and retain people. From an operations perspective, it also speaks volumes that colleagues who have previously left the organisation have since returned and we have more who wish to”

Helen Gidlow, COO at Healthcare Homes

Result

Measuring progress made

To measure progress, ETS reviewed 13 questions that mapped against those four key focus areas, finding that all 13 questions improved year-on-year, and 12 of them significantly so.

Furthermore, HHG scored significantly above the ETS benchmark on 9 of 11 comparable questions. But it was the improvements to KPIs which proved truly game-changing - with quality of care improving, as 85% of HHG’s services are now rated as Good or Outstanding and a 9.6/10 score on carehome.co.uk.

Excitingly, major industry award recognition then followed with this transformation story winning a coveted Business Culture Award in 2024.