Impact of staff-engagement campaigns in large healthcare organisations: a focus group study

Healthcare organisations work better with an engaged workforce, and engagement campaigns offer a way to create this. Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT), one of the UK's largest Trusts, provides an example of a staff-engagement campaign, having employed participative methods to gather staff ideas and engage with the workforce directly. Research into how participative methods directly impact staff engagement is poorly understood. Accordingly, this study aims to use the example from LTHT to understand how staff engagement campaigns employing participative methods can directly impact staff engagement in large healthcare organisations.

Scenario-based focus groups were carried out across five different organisational units, purposively selected to encourage a diverse range of opinions and experiences. The data from these was transcribed, coded and analysed using constructivist reflective thematic analysis.

Three themes were developed around: (1) the impact of the concept; (2) the impact of participation and (3) the impact of outputs. The latter was divided into two further subthemes: (a) closing the loop and (b) demonstrating cause and effect.

Healthcare leaders are operating in an increasingly challenging environment, with growing demands being placed on an increasingly stretched and potentially disengaged workforce. Staff engagement campaigns offer a means of engaging this workforce and as a consequence, improving organisational performance. Participative methods such as crowdsourcing are well suited to positively impacting staff engagement. However, this impact may not be realised unless work is done before the campaign to encourage participation, and work is done after the campaign to acknowledge contributions, put forward a plan of action and provide targeted updates on progress. If organisations are able to conduct a single campaign successfully, subsequent campaigns may increase engagement still further, across the whole organisation, and crucially, among those staff groups that are least engaged.