The NHS Employers Agenda For Change Implementation Team have distilled learnings about change management garnered from their four years of introducing AFC into the English NHS, and provide some straightforward tips for Chief Executives and HR Directors of reconfiguring organisations.
Top Ten Tips for Reconfiguration of Services and Agenda for Change
Reconfiguration and AFC have a common purpose in modernising the service, modernising careers and training, working in partnership, developing new roles and new ways of delivering services, the use of workforce planning to create a vision of what structure and skill mix will be needed to meet the challenge of ever increasing demands on the quantity and quality of service to patients, clients and service users. Making a success of this is important to the future of the provision of services to patients and to the legitimate ambitions of our workforce.
The NHS Employers AFC Implementation Team have distilled the learning about change management garnered from their four years of introducing AFC to the English NHS into some straightforward tips for Chief Executives and HR Directors of reconfiguring organisations.
1) Establish an Executive Director to take a single lead responsibility on workforce issues across the whole new organisation to lead it in a single, coherent approach to its AFC work; using reconfiguration as a unique opportunity to reinforce the modernising purpose of AFC and to ensure consistency in its application.
2) Make a clear 'Day 1' position statement on workforce change issues about keeping a steady state and not being rushed into harmonising activity, but instead making it clear that workforce issues will be dealt with systematically and in partnership over a period of time, with an early assertion that workforce issues will be dealt with on the basis of a mutual 'no surprises' agenda on what will happen, when it will happen and how change will occur
3) Take the opportunity to build partnership working and establish it as the methodology on workforce change issues; encouraging behaviours and cultures needed to sustain partnership working rather than reverting to adversarial bargaining; setting high mutual expectations of trade union activists and managers.
4) Establish organisational workforce and service objectives to enable proposed service development and personal development to be tested against those objectives.
5) Review how AFC is being harnessed to service improvement and productive time initiatives across the reconfiguring organisations. Share and build on good practice from the predecessor organisations in order to maximise the potential benefits that can be gained from aligning workforce development with increased efficiency, ensure consistency and export good ideas in one area to the others.
6) See it as an opportunity to ensure compliance with the agreement, through auditing what is being inherited and check that it is all compliant with the AFC agreement and terms and conditions of service.
7) Where anything is identified as outside the requirements of the Agreement and the Terms and Conditions Handbook, agree a plan and timescale to achieve compliance.
8) Have a clear plan to embed the NHS Job Evaluation Scheme into the mainstream of the organisation's work by ensuring that enough practitioners are available, that training needs are catered for and that future application of the scheme is carried out in partnership consistent with the requirements of the JE Handbook.
9) Have a clear plan to complete the implementation of the NHS Knowledge and Skills Framework and embed it in the mainstream of the organisation's work. This to include the identification of a KSF lead and e-KSF administrator within the organisation, and active participation in the local KSF Network.
10) Conduct a stock take of managerial and staff side capacity in relation to AFC expertise and institute any remedial action to tackle any gaps in capacity or expertise.
