“We appreciate the positives of better staff interaction, but we now need to know what succeeds.” Karl Milner describes the NHS' journey to change employee management

How professionals within organisations talk to each other remains as important today as it ever was. The challenge for leaders is to make sure a workforce feels empowered, but this is no easy feat.

While we appreciate the positives of better staff interaction, we now need to know what succeeds. Take for example the world of healthcare management: all management teams come in promising to do more with less through winning the undying support of the clinical staff to go the extra mile without a penny more in their pocket. The task now is to prove that can be done.

“Meet the new boss same as the old boss” – this mantra, sung by Roger Daltrey in 1971, has been heard by every staff member in every hospital across the country. Being able to prove to people that what you do is different is what is truly clever about being a senior leader today.

In my organisation, we use the Clever Together process and collection system, a leading crowdsourcing platform. This has helped me to achieve workforce empowerment, and on top of that, has contributed to a 15% rise in staff satisfaction in a single calendar year. The new platform is simple to use – it looks authentically NHS and old-school but it has enough fancy reporting tools to make hardened operational managers feel warm inside. Archaic and complicated NHS kit is now surplus to requirements, the platform allows large numbers of busy people to contribute, debate, and comment – and to date, we have collected over 27,000 comments and interactions from 8% of a large workforce. You can imagine how many away day flip pads that would eat up.

One appeal for professionals using this platform is that they can use their iPhones to contribute; that freedom alone confirms this is different. With the IT straitjacket removed they are free to contribute without waiting 10 minutes for their computer to fire up. Most of the interaction we had occurred outside schoolhours, giving life to the myth that staff aren’t interested in their organisation and its future.

The platform needed a degree of moderation but hardly any compared to the post-it note approach; the crowd tends to moderate itself. You will not have to intervene to admonish the self-serving, there will be a queue of unknown punters doing that for you.   The final part of this jigsaw is being sure to do as the crowd asks. In our experience the crowd will ask you to guide them to their chosen goals. But this shouldn’t worry you because, guess what, that goal will be doing things more efficiently and will benefit staff and patients. If my experience is anything to go by, 80% of their ideas will be similar to those you have already in mind.

As for the other 20%, they come up with, you can either deal with it up front and explain why it is not a priority right now, why it never will be, or perhaps you’ll add this in to your future ambitions – it’s a small price to pay for a fully engaged workforce.

When I was starting out I used to sit on a board with a guy who became a good friend, an ex-finance officer of a regional monopoly. His view on staff engagement was refreshingly Victorian, “We engage the staff by paying them a shed load of tax-payers money to do their jobs.” I must admit I have a soft spot for that kind of thinking – but the NHS just doesn’t work like that. You need the process and the tools to make things happen in management. Hospital managers don’t control the same levers as others do (they don’t set wages, for example) so you need to be smart to get things done. Communicators and managers actually need to be Clever Together.

Karl Milner is director of external affairs and communication, Leeds Teaching Hospitals.