NHS Performance Management: How to Build Your Strategy.

With proper performance management, the NHS can unlock skills to develop careers and retain talent.

We know that the NHS is full of highly skilled individuals. But, without proper performance management, you’re going to struggle to develop future leaders.

98% of organisations believe performance management is important. And the NHS shouldn’t be an exception to that.

With staff shortages an issue, and mounting pressures built over years, it’s clear that more needs to be done to support the NHS, and its staff.

In this blog, we’ll share:

• What NHS performance management is
• Why performance management is so important to the NHS
• How to set up good performance management for your staff

Let’s get started.

💡 Pro Tip

We looked at the current state of healthcare and how you can tackle some of the key challenges faced by NHS Trusts across the country

State of Healthcare 2023

What is performance management

Performance management is a HR process that allows management to check in with their teams to see how they’re tracking towards personal and organisational goals.

Ideally, performance management helps create a growth-led environment where employees are supported to grow and develop in their roles and careers.

🚀 Pro Tip

Creating a strong performance management process requires the right tools. Learn more about Totara Perform, which we use as a base to build a dynamic and user-centric performance and talent solution.

How Think can support performance management

Why is performance management important in the NHS?

Creating a solid performance management strategy for your NHS Trust will have a far-reaching impact.

By establishing:

• Job roles and goals
• Succession planning
• Appraisal processes
• Regular feedback opportunities

⚡️Pro Tip

Remember, performance management is best done with a tool to centralise all your people data. See how we can collate all of your people data and give your managers and employees the tools they need to effectively progress in their roles.

Learn more about performance management

You can stand to benefit in a number of ways:

Open the conversation

With set processes for performance management, you can give your employees the power to set their own appraisals and 1:1s, and you can ensure that these chats are more formally regimented into your current processes.

This allows a deeper channel of communication between team member and manager, as they can share how they’re finding work. Not only does this promote better working relationships, but it also helps managers identify potential issues earlier, giving them a stronger route to solving it.

Identify future leaders

Without regular chats between colleagues, you’re likely going to miss out on opportunities to find and develop future leaders.

These people in your teams may currently be junior but perhaps show great promise or are extremely committed to development. Identifying these people early is essential to ensuring they get on a good route to develop their career and role.

Investing in your employees is always a good thing, and so showing you’re interested in their development is key to promoting greater loyalty and affinity.

Better trained staff

Having well-defined goals and investing in your staff means that your staff will be better trained.

Making time for learning and promoting this as part of NHS performance management is key to ensuring your employees feel encouraged.

🚀 Pro Tip

Is your LMS automating your learning content? With a Think LMS, you can serve targeted content based on employee demographics.

Learn more about our learning management system

Longer retention

Employees who feel that they’re being invested in, generally stick around for longer. In fact, 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development

And it’s no surprise. Investing in your employees gives them new skills as well as a new lease of life in their role.

Higher employee engagement

Good feedback and open communication achieved through performance management can result in increased engagement from employees. When employees are taking a more active role in their own development, they’re more likely to get deeper involved in learning and their job tasks.

Better work, for longer

All of the points mentioned above impact job productivity as a whole. Your employees are actively engaged, learning new skills and highly invested in their roles.  

How to create a good NHS performance management strategy

Building a strong performance management strategy relies on a cornerstone piece of tech. We are of course talking about a learning management system.

Creating a learning and performance solution from scratch might sound like a lot of work, but building a bespoke platform ensures that you’re getting what you need from it.

Related: 10 features of an LMS you need to integrate

From this base, you can then add on key features and elements to build a seamless solution that addresses all of your key needs.

To help, we’ve rounded up the key components of a good performance management strategy for NHS leaders:

Set goals

Using the performance goals in the Perform arm of Totara, you can track your employees against predefined skills.

This gives your team a solid base off of which to track and grade their performance.

With the appraisal and performance tracker tools you can record meeting notes, set agendas for future meetings and share feedback on current performance.

This gives clear, visual feedback to employees of where they’re at, and what they need to do to progress.

Encourage feedback

Speaking of feedback, it’s worth investing in a feedback tool like ThinkLoop to gather and share feedback on your employees as part of their appraisal process.

ThinkLoop allows colleagues and managers to share constructive feedback in one centralised location that can then be shared with the receiver.

With this in play, you can create conversations across teams and colleagues to open transparency, increase employee development and drive company success.

Learning and training

Of course, learning is an important part of any performance conversation. Training is an essential component to development.

But encouraging users to engage in learning material can be tricky, especially when they’re dealing with patients and other priorities.

As such, it’s worth creating a learning hub that inspires and engages users so that they want to come back and invest in their development.

Our Think LMS allows you to automate learning subscription based on demographics like job title and department. This means you can serve the right content to the right people at the right time.

Simplify processes  

Chances are, you’re dealing with a lot of processes that require a large amount of manpower to keep up to date.

Things like updating profiles of users when they complete training in ESR to managing study leave requests.

We have a range of tools and features to help simplify that:

1. Workflows

The ThinkFlow tool allows you to automate any linear process. Simple, if you can write it down, we can help you put it online.

There are many different use cases for workflows such as study leave requests. And even better, this feature ties tightly to Totara features. For example, you can update a course completion or certification based on progress through a particular process.

It’s a much more cost effective approach to business process management and it means you don’t need to integrate another tool into your stack.

2. Revalidation

Nurses and midwives are required to revalidate every three years to continue practising in the UK.

This process involves a lot of training hours as well as self-reflections and feedback gathering.

When these teams are already busy in their day-to-day tasks, compiling this profile of data can be time-consuming.

We built the nurse revalidation interface to allow a simple hub for CPD hours, feedback and more which your confirmer can also easily access and review.

💡 Pro Tip

We created SkillFund to support better management of CPD requests. Book a demo to see it in action.

3. CSTF

Over 35% of NHS workers in England use a Think LMS. And we, with the help of NHS England, are getting our NHS customers over onto the Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF).

These are 11 core competencies that healthcare organisations can use to remain compliant with CQC but also to synchronise competencies across the NHS infrastructure.

What’s the benefit of this? Well, it’s simple. We built a CSTF interface that shares data with ESR. That means when a new employee comes to you from a different Trust, their compliance and training data will automatically transfer over. And when users complete learning in your LMS, that will automatically update ESR.

This data sorting is vital as it means less wasted time for your employees on repeating compliance training, and better compliance rates for your organisation.

Build a better performance-led strategy for your people

If you can better harness the potential of your people, there’s no limitation to the impact on your organisation.

From better productivity to improved processes and better patient care, creating an NHS performance management strategy from the bottom up is essential.

We understand how difficult it can be to start from scratch, which is where we can help. We’ve implemented performance solutions for countless NHS providers across the UK.

Book a demo to speak to our team and see how our tool can help your people progress.