Implementing agile working in the NHS
Key points
The research identifies the mindsets and resources that act as enablers and blockers to adopting good, flexible agile working practices in the NHS.
Enabling mindsets include considering how agile working can benefit both employees and services; ensuring that no harm results from inactivity or change; starting small, learning as you go, and designing customised solutions.
Enabling resources include building relationships, knowledge around best practice and policies and how digital tools and skills can be applied.
Mindset blockers include having a fixed idea about who can be an agile worker, concerns about fairness, and being overly concerned about external perceptions.
Resource blockers include staff capacity, a lack of humanity in relational connections, challenges to autonomy caused by ‘solutions’, and the disempowerment of marginalised workers.
Evidence of enabling mindsets and resources: initial learnings and recommendations.
This report draws on four years' of evidence gathering and collaboration through the agiLab knowledge-exchange to identify key enablers and blockers to implementing good, flexible, agile working. It challenges misconceptions about who benefits from flexible working to illustrate how more agile mindsets and approaches can mutually serve organisational and individual needs.
The recommendations in the report aim to help workforce leaders harness the benefits of agile working across the NHS. The report's findings will enable and inform the development of actionable resources for stakeholders.
agiLab is the co-creation of academics, led by Dr Emma Russell at the University of Sussex, and the NHS. agiLab aims to promote and facilitate an evidence-based approach to best practice and research in agile working through academic and practitioner collaboration and knowledge exchange.
What is flexible, agile working?
Agile working is a form of flexible working that involves adapting work patterns as individual and service needs change. It offers genuinely customised and responsive options to liberate workers and organisations from rigid, traditional constraints about when, where and how work can be done. It encompasses both formal and informal arrangements, often enabled by digital tools and innovative practices, to mutually benefit the organisation and the worker.
There are stark differences between occupational groups in accessing genuinely flexible, inclusive, and ‘good’ work arrangements. The agile working approach offers an inclusive and compassionate approach to delivering the NHS People Promise ‘we work flexibly’.
The study had two central research questions:
- How can uptake and implementation of good, flexible agile working be facilitated across the NHS?
- How can uptake and implementation of good, flexible agile working be consistently applied to promote inclusive access to the NHS workforce?
Key findings
The research identifies the mindsets and resources that act as enablers and blockers to adopting good, flexible agile working practices in the NHS. Data was taken from agiLab conferences (with academic thought leaders, NHS Best Practice Exemplars, future-focused discussions, research reviews, and insights from agiLab delegates) and co-designed agiLab applied research studies.
Mindsets are the cognitive attitudes, beliefs and thought processes that are used to rationalise action and outlook. Resources are the assets that help an individual or organisation to achieve its goals.
Recommendations and implications for NHS leaders
The research identifies four key priorities to support the implementation of agile working that can succeed in supporting NHS reforms, policy and practice:
- Adopt a ‘mutual needs, mutual gains, no harm’ mindset.
- Challenge ‘the ideal agile worker’ mindset.
- Be research led (experimental and evidence based).
- Develop digital resources around access, skills and capabilities.
The findings show that clear definitions around good, flexible, agile working need to be incorporated into NHS resources and materials and communicated across the service.
By reframing flexible, agile work as involving more than static or rigid flexible-working (and predominantly remote) options, key mindset blockers can be challenged.
Engagement with stakeholders to collaborate and co-design a range of materials and guidance is ongoing.
Acknowledgements
Emma Russell is a co-Investigator at the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit) and is supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/S012532/1], which is gratefully acknowledged.
