Our foundations of success

Best Place to Work

HEE wants to become the Best Place to Work (BPW) to help deliver better outcomes for the NHS, learners and patients. Our ambition and activity are distilled into six strategic outcomes.

Goal

We will offer a working environment that is safe, well maintained and healthy allowing everyone to do their best work.

Strategic approach

Our Stay Well programme will have 3 key areas of focus:

• Financial Wellbeing
• Physical Wellbeing
• Mental Wellbeing

Our approach will include

• Partnering with external expertise
• Building colleague awareness of health issues
• Providing support tools and learning opportunities
• Having a supportive and collaborative infrastructure of support across HEE
• Establishing links with other BPW programmes that promote Stay Well aims.

What are the factors that will help us achieve our mission?

• We will have a culture that nurtures positivity, is inclusive, and offers visible, compassionate and inspiring leadership
• We will regularly recognise and reward staff for their contribution to HEE
• We will retain our talent, welcome our new staff, improve our diversity, and offer flexibility in how and where our work is done
• We will give every member of staff opportunities to learn, develop and achieve
• We will regularly ‘Ask, Listen, Act’ so that the voice of our staff has influence and adds value and direction to our work
• We will offer a working environment that is safe, well maintained, and healthy allowing everyone to do their best work

Our co-created values and behaviours of Responsible, Fair, Confident, and Inclusive run through BPW. Our actions were drawn directly from a crowd sourced engagement across HEE in early 2020, and are constantly reviewed, measured, and updated as we progress. Employee voice, through surveys and our commitment to engage and involve is vital. Our recent survey showed a 25-point improvement in colleagues recommending HEE as a place to work.

However, HEE cannot be the Best Place to Work for just some people so we will face up to survey results which shows BAME and disabled colleagues have a worse work experience than others. This will include inclusive recruitment, working with staff networks, and striving to become an anti-racist organisation.

As we prepare to build our new organisation, we will accelerate certain aspects of BPW and engage with partners on how we can embed the best of this in our collective future.

Measuring progress

Digital First

HEE will become a Digital First organisation to help meet raised customer expectations by delivering greater, more personalised benefits and services more quickly for learners, employers, educators, partners, and colleagues.

Digital First supports Best Place to Work and we are upskilling colleagues to deliver change and implement technology to redesign, streamline and rationalise services by understanding and respecting customer preference. We have 116 digital champions leading this work.

Measuring progress

Governance and Decision Making

Good governance ensures sound, transparent, and inclusive decision making, controls, and accountability drive our use of resources to meet our priorities.

Our new Board Assurance Framework (BAF) and Board committee structure allows us to make the most of opportunities to improve outcomes for the NHS, learners, and patients. It provides the Board with assurance around successfully controlling the uncertainties that may prevent delivery. It outlines five opportunities (updated to reflect transition to the new organisation).

Board Committees will regularly discuss and assure themselves around the BAF opportunities.

We are working with the Good Governance Institute to review and improve our overall governance and decision-making approach. We are also putting in place preparations for the forthcoming Public Inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic.

Measuring progress

Continuous Quality Improvement

Continuous improvement helps deliver our objectives. Our recent independent performance management maturity assessment showed significant progress in measuring, reporting, and managing performance. Processes are improving with performance data generating operational and strategic insights. We will implement the assessment’s recommendations to improve further. We will also continue our improvement workshops with senior HEE colleagues.

Measuring progress

Partnership, Cooperation and Collaboration

Partnership, cooperation, and collaboration are in HEE’s DNA. We can’t deliver our priorities alone. All our objectives rely on working with others. This includes COVID-19 and elective recovery and meeting shared commitments. Partnership also underpins how we agree our budget with DHSC and NHSE.

The Secretary of State has announced that HEE, NHS Digital, and NHSE will come together to create a new NHS national and regional leadership and support organisation. The new organisation will better align workforce, finance, service and education and training so the NHS can develop integrated planning. A joint Transition Group is taking this work forward, supported by a HEE Programme Management Office. Ensuring delivery of our priorities whilst supporting our colleagues safely through this transition will be a major focus.

Measuring progress

Value for Money

We must extract real value for every taxpayer’s pound in meeting our objectives. Educating and training future healthcare professionals so we ensure learners get high quality teaching and experience a variety of quality clinical placements with excellent supervision. We also spend our money to run HEE efficiently and effectively and invest in education and training reform.

Our work will meet UK Government’s Functional Standards2 which set expectations for the management of functional work and guide improved and consistent ways of working.

An internal Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Improvement programme is delivering a pipeline prioritisation process, between Finance and the Corporate Portfolio Office, to improve value for money decision making. The commissioning of the investment portfolio is linked to the implementation of the Benefits Management Framework which will provide a mechanism for evidencing delivery outcomes and to inform future investment prioritisation and decision making.

Measuring progress

Sustainability

The NHS is committed to reaching net zero in its carbon footprint by 2040, and HEE is playing its part alongside colleagues and partners by increasing our sustainability activities and supporting learners to do so. We will publish our Sustainable Development Management Plan, outlining how HEE will reduce our environmental impact and carbon footprint, use our

resources wisely and educate future clinicians about their role in a sustainable NHS. By aligning HEE’s activities to the UK Government 2030 and United Nations 2030 agendas to meet the internationally recognised seventeen global goals for sustainable development we will ensure the work we do contributes to national and global ambitions and efforts.

Measuring progress

Each of these foundations of success are key enablers to delivering a better education and training system, and therefore a better workforce, for the NHS and the people we serve.

Measuring progress

All foundations of success support BAF opportunity 5, which supports the rest of the BAF.