About the project

The health and care system is facing multiple severe challenges, from record waits to chronic staff shortages, growing inequalities to low patient satisfaction. Addressing these challenges will require ‘major change’: system and service changes that are broad in scope and scale, with collaborative improvement across teams, systems and silos.

A new how-to guide is now available, helping you to understand the 10 principles that underpin how you engage staff well in change and providing flexible tools that you can use to measure engagement in the major change projects you’re delivering.

Our insight report gives greater detail on the project, its methodology and our findings.

What we did

Developed by Q, working with Thiscovery – an online platform for collaboration, innovation and improvement – the guide has been co-created with more than 300 people working across the health and care sector; a wide range of people who saw the importance of sharing their experiences to support us to collectively improve our approaches to major change.

Participants shared their personal experiences of engagement, good and bad, and ranked their most important features of engagement. All of this has informed a prototype measurement tool, that participants also fed back on, before being finalised and tested.

Together, we’ve reached a consensus on what good looks like in today’s world. Our collaborative, task-based research with participants showed that:

• There is a need for a fresh understanding of what is required to engage staff well in major change.
• A good approach to engagement of staff should prioritise the ‘foundations of change’, including sharing a clear rationale for change, allowing shared ownership, and investing in the capacity and capabilities of staff.
• Good engagement also needs a supportive culture and environment around it: there needs to be psychological safety for staff; the change, and those leading it, to be seen as honest and transparent.
• To improve engagement you should be measuring it. Measurement should be proportionate, targeted and actionable, which a ‘Measurement for Improvement’ approach can enable.
• There is strong potential for collaborative online methods and platforms, including Thiscovery, to connect researchers with expert audiences and achieve high quality engagement.

Our guide, including a survey tool and a planning tool that you can use in your day-to-day work, will support you to apply these findings. Download and use the guide to help you understand, measure and improve engagement to support more sustainable and successful delivery of major change.

Should you require our resources in another format please get in touch: q@health.org.uk